Workflow For Forms

Question

My company is currently planning to setup Sharepoint 2010 and I have been tasked with converting old forms (e.g. Vacation Request Form) into workflows in Sharepoint.

Historically, the forms have been printed out, filled out, and manually walked to a supervisor's office. We would like to use Sharepoint workflows to automate this task.

I am VERY new to Sharepoint and am wondering:

Does it make sense to convert the whole process into workflow steps? It seems to me that creating a workflow for data in something like an Expense Report doesn't make much sense. Instead, the data should be in an Excel Spreadsheet hooked to a content type with a workflow built around it. Am I thinking about it right? There may be other benefits to having it all in a workflow that I am not seeing. Does anyone have any recommended tutorials?

Thanks!

Answer 1

There are many types of things you can do with workflows. In your example given above, the mundane business process like vacation requests can easily be automated with a workflow process. User submits a request that goes to their supervisor they either approve or reject and the user is notified of the outcome.

For things like Expense Reports, those too can be utilize approval workflows. Even though the content type is a document, the link to the submitted file can be included in email notifications so approvers can refer to the item in question.

In either case, building them off content types and document templates (where applicable) is always a good practice, whether or not workflows are going to be used. Any paper based approval process is a good candidate for an automated workflow process but that doesn't mean that everything should be. They're the most obvious processes to migrate to workflow based solutions for faster turn around and efficiency.