Nick Swan of Lightning Tools ran a survey of SharePoint usage. It’s quite an interesting read, but he was surprised by the prevalence of workflow. I’ve gotta be honest – I’m not surprised…
So, a typical organisation has lots of documents. Finding them is important (and hard if you have lots of documents). Documents are usually related to some sort of process (otherwise, why did you create the document?)
That description seems pretty obvious, and it matches up exactly with the top 3 uses:
- Document Collaboration
- Search
- Workflow
Now, I would point out that a process and Business Process Management isn’t really the same thing as Workflow, but often processes can use workflow (and customers really like workflows – even when they don’t really suit their needs).
In my experience, our customers seem pretty representative of the results of this survey – our projects are almost entirely about documents and processes. I guess for me the surprise is actually that more customers aren’t making use of third-party workflow systems, like K2. SharePoint’s workflow is, for this version at least, pretty basic.
- No central administration of workflows.
- The out-of-box reports are rubbish.
- Bottleneck analysis means being proper workflow tracking into your workflow.
- InfoPath forms in workflows are a real pain (and, interestingly, are much more straight forward in K2) while ASP.NET forms have very poor documentation. (The good news on that front is it sounds like there will be more emphasis on ASP.NET forms in workflows for the next version of SharePoint)
- Workflows are based around items – having a workflow involving multiple documents requires a certain creativity.
Well, I could go on, and in the past I have. So I guess my surprise has been how some of our customers are really keen that we stick to using the workflow functionality built into SharePoint. I can see that in a few versions time SharePoint might have kick-ass workflow functionality – and I’m curious to see what “Dublin” adds to the workflow foundation (is it a workflow host?) – but for now, I’d still look elsewhere for serious workflows.
