Disadvantages of sharepoint designer and VisualStudio.net
SharePoint Designer 2007 is a rebuild of MS FrontPage made specifically to work with SharePoint. Some disadvantages of building workflow in SharePoint Designer 2007 are:
• Meant for business users as a code free workflow solution for managing items within SharePoint only.
• When using SharePoint Designer 2007 your site can become customized (unghosted). Allowing business users to have elevated privileges to use SharePoint Designer 2007 is not good either.
• Workflows are not reusable and are bound to the list (there are some known ways of doing it but it is not natural; the official answer is it is "NOT supported" - Porting SharePoint Designer Workflows to Visual Studio). Note this makes it difficult to move them between development, QA and production environments.
• Limited conditional logic.
• Cannot add custom code to workflow from designer (read whitepaper in called "Adding Activities to SharePoint Designer 2007" in the EMC Starter Kit).
• Form integration not robust (ASP.net or InfoPath).
• Centers around workflows to manage documents, sending emails and creating tasks only.
• Supports sequential flows only.
• No ability to debug.
The second option is to create custom WFs using the architecture discussed in the first section using Visual Studio. From information I have gathered from other colleagues whom have done pure MOSS WF solutions they we difficult. Some disadvantages of doing MOSS workflow in Visual Studio is:
• Provide basic activities and events for MOSS only.
• Difficult to deploy.
• Robust audit and metric data must be built up.
• Creating large multi-step processes difficult.
• Integration with other platforms must be built from scratch.
SharePoint Designer 2007 is a rebuild of MS FrontPage made specifically to work with SharePoint. Some disadvantages of building workflow in SharePoint Designer 2007 are:
• Meant for business users as a code free workflow solution for managing items within SharePoint only.
• When using SharePoint Designer 2007 your site can become customized (unghosted). Allowing business users to have elevated privileges to use SharePoint Designer 2007 is not good either.
• Workflows are not reusable and are bound to the list (there are some known ways of doing it but it is not natural; the official answer is it is "NOT supported" - Porting SharePoint Designer Workflows to Visual Studio). Note this makes it difficult to move them between development, QA and production environments.
• Limited conditional logic.
• Cannot add custom code to workflow from designer (read whitepaper in called "Adding Activities to SharePoint Designer 2007" in the EMC Starter Kit).
• Form integration not robust (ASP.net or InfoPath).
• Centers around workflows to manage documents, sending emails and creating tasks only.
• Supports sequential flows only.
• No ability to debug.
The second option is to create custom WFs using the architecture discussed in the first section using Visual Studio. From information I have gathered from other colleagues whom have done pure MOSS WF solutions they we difficult. Some disadvantages of doing MOSS workflow in Visual Studio is:
• Provide basic activities and events for MOSS only.
• Difficult to deploy.
• Robust audit and metric data must be built up.
• Creating large multi-step processes difficult.
• Integration with other platforms must be built from scratch.
