Workflow is the movement of tasks and documents through a business process. Each process can be broken down into individual activities or events, all of which must take place to ensure a successful outcome. Analyzing each business process will determine the activities that must take place either sequentially or concurrently and also highlight milestones to be reached along the way.
Workflow measurement and analysis allows an organization to continuously improve business processes, work quality, efficiency and productivity. The system must be flexible to allow for ongoing analysis and re-engineering. Nothing will be gained by simply automating bad practices.
SharePoint 2013 is a powerful platform for integrating information and documents from various departments within an organization. With SharePoint, workflow systems can be designed to integrate with other company systems, including e-mail, document management, databases and production applications.
Using SharePoint Designer enables a company to develop workflow systems that will benefit from:
Prime candidates for workflow management are those processes within an organization that are document intensive and require high integrity.
SharePoint 2013 incorporates a number of new workflow actions that give it significant advantages:-
Pauses the process to await a specified event.
SharePoint 2013 workflows are powered by Windows Workflow Foundation 4. A prominent feature of SharePoint 2013 is the introduction of the new workflow execution engine, Microsoft Azure. This enables workflows to be hosted outside of the main SharePoint server, which raised scalability issues in previous versions.
In SharePoint 2013, a new concept of stages has been introduced to allow the movement of workflow from one defined stage to the next. This also allows users to switch from one stage to the other and back if necessary, which is exactly how business processes work in real terms.
SharePoint consultants can assist in designing and developing your business workflows. They can also provide valuable input about human factors. It has been reported that worker resistance has been the greatest obstacle to implementation of workflows. A consultant will help design workflows that are user friendly, empowering for workers and empowering for the entire company.
Discover today how SharePoint 2013 is incredibly powerful and so much more than just a document storage application.
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