Businesses depend on business processes. While those processes often involve software, the most important processes in many organisations depend on people.

Many kinds of processes in many different kinds of organisations can benefit from automated support for human workflow. Examples include:

• Approval: A common aspect of human-oriented business processes is the need to get approval from multiple participants. What’s being approved can vary widely, ranging from a Word document containing next year’s marketing plan to an expense report from a trip to a conference. In every case, some number of people must review the information, perhaps appending comments, then indicate approval or rejection.
• Coordinating group efforts: Whether it’s preparing a response to an RFP, managing the translation of a document into one or more languages, or something else, many processes require people to work together in an organised way. By defining the steps of the process in an automated workflow, the group’s work can be made more efficient and the process itself more predictable.
• Issue tracking: Many business processes generate a list of outstanding issues. An automated workflow can be used to maintain that list, assign issues to the people capable of resolving them, and track the status of that resolution.

To support these kinds of automated business processes, Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services version 3 can use workflow. Based on Windows Workflow Foundation (WF), these applications interact with people through a Web browser and, if necessary, with other software as well. To create workflow applications, developers use WF’s Workflow Designer and Visual Studio 2005, while information workers use the new Office SharePoint Designer.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, part of the 2007 Microsoft Office system, adds more capability to workflow applications built on Windows SharePoint Services. Using this product, workflows can use custom forms created with Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007 to interact with users through Office applications such as Word 2007 and Outlook 2007. Office SharePoint Server also includes several pre-defined workflows, letting information workers create automated business processes for approval and other common situations.

Both Windows Workflow Foundation and Windows SharePoint Services version 3 will be standard parts of Windows, one they are launched. These technologies, together with the tools for creating workflows that use them, are scheduled to be released around the end of 2006.

Workflow Foundation provides two types of built-in workflows:

1. Sequential workflows, which execute activities in a defined order. A sequential workflow can contain IfElse, While, and any other activities.
2. State machine workflows, which implement a traditional finite state machine. This type of workflow can also contain IfElse, While, and other activities, but it depends on other activities such as State to represent states and transitions.
   

It’s important to understand that Workflow Foundation isn’t itself a complete workflow application. Instead, it provides a foundation for developers to create workflow-based software. Because it can be hosted in any Windows process, WF can be combined with other technologies to provide workflow services.