I’ve just had my first opportunity to dive into the recently released by Microsoft Project 2010 Solution Starters (see Jan’s blog post), what first caught my eye was the Demand Management Dynamic Workflow solution which aims to allow you to: “Dynamically create a linear workflow based on stages”.
My first impression is WOW!
This is a very simple way to create basic workflows using a simple Infopath form in PWA, the amazing thing is it handles the approvals so well with options that should cover most requirements, here’s a screenshot:
Using the tool is dead easy, just the following simple steps are required to create a new workflow in no time at all:
There are some limitations of course, this really only does cover linear approval / rejection scenarios, if you need anything more complex like a return to previous stage on rejection from my testing it looks like you’ll still be needing your Visual Studio skills. But still I can see the majority of workflow requirements being met by this little gem!
Works well but the selection of Approval Groups does not work at all. Always defaults to selecting ONLY the Portfolio Manager group. Anywone redo this so it works ?
Philip Rundle on March 16, 2011 at 10:16 am Also, did anyone get the email notification to the approver working ? Martin Laukkanen on March 18, 2011 at 8:48 amI’ve used both of them without issue previously.. I have seen some problems with the approvals when either the solution starter was not fully deployed to all servers in the SharePoint farm and when the groups were not populated, but otherwise no problems?
Have you installed the latest version of the solution starter, it has been updated a number of times in the past year.. Martin
Hi, I deployed EPM 2010 with SP1 and the latest CU (28 Jun) and deployed the last DM Dynamic Workflow from the Solution Starter I deployed the solution with sucess and I configured everything with success…the problem is in the approval settings…that I selected to an approver and he receives the task in order to approve it… This user can approve this workflow and the status appears always as: Approved…but, in the Stage…I can see that it has not finished…:-) any idea about this problem? The other features from this utility DM Dynamic…works OK (in case I do not use the “approval settings” only force submit on stage” it works…because it changes the stage…but when I use the approval settings,…the user can approval this but in the stage setting notthing happens…. I have no errors neither ULS errors in the EVT or LOG folders… Any idea?? Regards, Pedrof.-
Martin Laukkanen on September 1, 2011 at 8:49 amHi there,
I’ve not had issues similar to those myself, and it sounds like you have everything installed correctly. I would check everything involved, e.g. are all approvers affected in the same way? If not maybe some user settings in either PWA or SharePoint? One possibly similar issue I had was when I had installed all of the solution starters on the one server, it caused all sorts of weird and unexpected issues in DM Dynamic Workflow. After uninstalling the other packages then things started working. I can’t recall exactly which one it was in that case but I have had similar issues with the PDP Customization’s solutions. Hope that helps, Martin
