Check out my latest Sharepoint video diary entry concerning the beginning of the Business Processes section:

Hi, this is David Wier.  Welcome back to my SetFocus SharePoint video diary. 

This last week has been really interesting since we’ve been learning about workflows.  In my past,  I pretty much knew what the word meant but I certainly didn’t know what it meant as a term within SharePoint.  The section we started last week is called business processes and once again, we have two full books on the subject.  Workflow seems to be an integral part of this section.  And I know that earlier, I thought a SharePoint designer as just a kind of a free version of expression web.  Now I’m learning exactly why it’s called SharePoint designer.

When working with a SharePoint site, you can connect directly to that site and change or create things like CSS files and master pages and just regular pages for that matter.  Now we’re finding out that we can also do workflows on lists and libraries in certain sites.  You can do many things with SharePoint designer workflows as simple as sending an e-mail to certain people when an item is added to the library, to digital signature retrieval, collecting feedback, approval and multi-step conditional workflows or even moving files from one list to another after approval.  These workflows kind of scratch the surface of the built-in SPD workflows, but it can get fairly intricate within each workflow created.  And when we leave SPD workflows, we’re going to get into creating visual studio workflows, giving its even more control over the process itself.

Well, that’s all for now.  I’ll see you next week at pretty much the same time, pretty much the same place with my next entry in SetFocus SharePoint video diary.