TechNet Flash, Volume 12, Issue 15 - July 28, 2010
TechNet Flash Editor's Note from Mitch Irsfeld

Go with the Flow in SharePoint 2010

SharePoint 2010 offers several ways to create workflows, including ways for your users to build workflows without writing code. TechNet has launched a new Resource Center, Workflows in SharePoint Server 2010, that does a great job of explaining the various workflow authoring tools, including the use of InfoPath forms services, SharePoint Designer 2010, and Visual Studio 2010 to create code-based custom workflows.

You'll also find a number of how-to videos that walk you through the creation of workflows using these tools. Using the right tool for the job will make your life easier, so check out Matt Hester's SharePoint 2010: Quick Look at Workflows video as a great starting point. You may find the workflow templates included with SharePoint 2010 will suffice to begin with, but SharePoint Designer 2010 is a free tool that works with SharePoint 2010 and not only allows you to create three kinds of workflows but also to work with the general design of a site. For a look at the predefined workflows and sample workflow scenarios, be sure to check out Workflows Overview (SharePoint Server 2010).

You also can use Visio Premium 2010 as a starting point to create SharePoint workflows, since flowcharts are great way to model workflows. As Brien Posey points out in his TechNet Magazine article SharePoint 2010: Going with the Flow, Visio 2010 can be used to create a workflow template that you can then import into SharePoint Designer to complete the build, without having to write any code. Posey takes you through the steps in this process, including the use of SharePoint Designer.

While SharePoint workflows are designed to improve the performance of business processes, you’ll also be monitoring the performance of your SharePoint site. There is one key element that can contribute to sluggish performance: the database.

As more users and more documents are added to a SharePoint site and need to go back and forth between the SharePoint web farm and the SQL Server database, the database can quickly overload and slow down SharePoint 2010. In this edition of TechNet ON, Iqbal Khan provides a solution to this problem in his TechNet Magazine article Improve SharePoint 2010 Performance with RBS.

Khan’s article is a must-read for SharePoint administrators looking to elevate the performance of SharePoint 2010. While SharePoint 2010 supports binary large objects (BLOBs), it’s not the best place to store BLOB data, so with SQL Server 2008, Microsoft added the Remote BLOB Storage (RBS) feature which lets SQL Server store all the BLOB data outside the database.

Thanks for reading,

Mitch Irsfeld
Editor, TechNet Flash

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