Business organizations usually find it challenging to get their hands on an effective document workflow management system. A system that validates complete transparency and collaboration. To overcome this problem, businesses are looking for business process automation solutions. The rise in demand for business process automation solutions results in the development and frequent use of Microsoft’s leading product i.e. SharePoint. In this blog post, we will share how SharePoint provides agility in content and document management while ensuring a highly collaborative and secure experience for its users.
Business Workflow Automation Using Microsoft SharePoint
You can create new tasks in Microsoft SharePoint and give them to the right team member at the right time. SharePoint Workflows can cut down on the time and money needed to communicate business processes. Common workflows include document review and project approval by keeping track of and managing the people involved in the process.
SharePoint workflow automation helps project teams to work with greater collaboration and efficiency on different documents. It supports in managing project tasks through process automation on the document on the SharePoint site.
SharePoint Workflows
1. Boosted Efficiency & Productivity
SharePoint business process automation solutions enable project teams with intra and inter-business communication and connectivity. This results in faster, more transparent, and more efficient processes. SharePoint workflows can help you with;
- Assigning parallel and serial tasks.
- Sending reminders through emails.
- Moving outdated documents to the archive library.
- The user receives an email alerting them to the assignment of a new task.
- Deleting old documents that haven’t been used in a certain amount of time.
These are just a few examples, and you can define countless functions like these through SharePoint process automation. This saves your time and improves your productivity.
2. Pausing
The pausing feature enables users to pause the workflow execution for a specified time. This duration could be a minute, a day, an hour, or up to any specific date. Users can select a predefined field value to decide the pause duration.
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3. Web Services
In SharePoint 2013 workflow, Microsoft introduced a great functionality known as Web-Services. This enables to centralization of managed data and integration of disparate data sources. With SharePoint Workflow Web-Services, one can easily pull data from third-party external websites with complete security.
4. Stages
In a business process workflow, there can be multiple stages or a single stage, depending on the complexity of the task. Every single stage upholds a different type of action required and decides where the workflow should go next. Stages provide a structure and logical area of the workflow that reduces complexities from its execution.
Built-In Workflows In SharePoint
1. Approval Workflow
SharePoint approval workflow enables automation of business processes and ensures optimal efficiency and consistency in business operations. For document reviews, SharePoint allows its users to share documents with as many users as they want.
2. Collect Feedback
SharePoint Collect Feedback Workflow allows its users to collect feedback from all the participants within the workflow. You can collect feedback and store all the documents within the review process. It only takes one user to assign the task to a project team or workgroup. The workflow uses predefined criteria to assign tasks to the users. SharePoint gives freedom to its users to choose between proceeding or ending the workflow. All alterations to the document require your approval.
3. Collect Signatures
The ‘Collect Signature’ workflow enables users to compile signatures from all of the workflow’s participants. The ‘Collect Signature workflow only works with Microsoft Excel, Word, and InfoPath Forms.
4. Approval for Disposition
SharePoint disposition workflow allows users to retain necessary documents and manage them by expiry dates. You can easily choose between deleting or retaining outdated documents.
5. Three-State
The administration of business processes uses the workflow feature of SharePoint, which consists of three stages. This feature is ideal for organizations with a high data volume and document issues.
These are the most used workflows that come with SharePoint. For workflow manager services for Office 365 SharePoint Online, Microsoft takes the charge itself.
If you connect to the SharePoint Online site by using the SharePoint designer’s desktop version; you will only see workflow from SharePoint 2010. To get workflows from SharePoint 2013, 2016, or 2019, download the relevant version of the SharePoint designer.
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