06 June 2007

10 Things I Despise about SharePoint Workflows

Okay, I'm fed up with the lack of documentation and examples for sharepoint workflows. Here are the top ten things that are bugging me about this: 1) Incomplete documentation 2) Sparse or overly complex examples 3) Few experts and community support 4) Weakly integrated tools (both SharePoint designer and VS 2005) 5) Disconnected assumptions about workflow forms (association, initialization and modification) 6) Extremely poorly documented examples of state machine workflows 7) Poor information on creating deployment solutions 8) Continually recursive looping of some workflows with no blocking mechanizm 9) Single instance workflows removing previous historical information 10) Examples are primarily in C# and are difficult to translate to my VB programmers. There... I've said it. I'm ready to learn more and begin building solutions, but until these top ten items are resolved, it will be difficult treading. The problem -- I have 3 weeks to complete a complex workflow problem! Grr...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I completley agree with you about the lack of examples and documentation, not only in workflows but with development of webparts and list customisation in general. As a newbie to MOSS I want to achieve certain things but don't even know where to start (or where to look) as the documentation is poor

Chris said...

Unfortunately, I know that there are several books. I'm finding the same lack of documentation there as well.

So, time to get out the tools of the trade and be prepared to break your installation at least once a day to try new tricks.