The document details a session on developing maintainable custom workflows in Office 365/SharePoint Online, led by Prashant G. Bhoyar. It covers key topics such as differences between SharePoint 2010 and 2013 workflows, tips for writing maintainable workflows, architecture updates, and the importance of respecting throttling limits. Additionally, it provides contact information for further engagement and learning opportunities.

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How to develop maintainable custom
workflows in Office 365/SharePoint Online?
Prashant G Bhoyar (PGB)
New Jersey SharePoint User Group
28 June 2016

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• Senior Consultant at Portal Solutions
• Born and raised in India
• Came to United States of America in 2007 for
studies
• University of Maryland College Park Alumni
• Technical Reviewer of the book “Pro : SharePoint
2013 Administration”
• Organizer of SharePoint Saturday Baltimore
(SPSBMORE)
• Founder and Organizer of DC-Metro Office 365
User Group
 Monthly in person & online event
 http://www.meetup.com/DC-Metro-Office-365-
User-Group/
• Recipient of Antarctic Service Medal
Who AM I ?
Prashant G Bhoyar (PGB)

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Amazing Antarctica Adventure – November/December 2008

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Amazing Antarctica Adventure – November/December 2008
• McMurdo Station, Antarctica (US Government Station)
• 1000-1100 people stays during Antarctic Summer (November to February)

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About Portal Solutions
We deliver Digital
Workplace Products
and Solutions that help
organizations share
what they know and
find what they need by
connecting people,
data, and content.
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OneWindow Workplace
• OneWindow Is Built On Office 365 and Microsoft Azure
• Available for Office 365 and SharePoint Hybrid environment
OneWindow
Yammer
SharePoint
Online
Skype For Business Office Groups Office Graph/Delve
Videos
OneDrive for
Business
OneWindow APIs
Planner
Analytics

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What Do You Get With OneWindow Workplace?
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Amazing Experiences
• News
• Workspaces
• Knowledge Discovery
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• Tools and Apps
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Platform
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• Office Groups
• SharePoint
• Videos
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Personalization
Access Anywhere
• Responsive
• Native applications
(Mobile, Windows 10)

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Next Steps
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Interested in assessing if OneWindow Workplace
is right for you?
Let’s talk. Click here or go to http://www.onewindowapp.com to learn more.

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• Sharing is Caring
• Ask Questions
 Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The
important thing is not to stop questioning. –Albert Einstein
• Let the learning begins…
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About Today’s Session
Image Source : http://onlyfreewallpaper.com/view/smiley-kitty-1280x1024.html

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• Intro of Office 365 / SharePoint
Online Workflows
• Future
• Key Differences between SharePoint
2013 and SharePoint 2010 style
workflows
• Tips for writing maintainable
workflows
• Throttling Limits in Office 365
• Limitations
• Q&A
Agenda

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Audience Poll
• How many of you are IT pros?
• How many of you are Developers?
• How many of you are Power Users?
• How many of you are End Users?
• How many of you develop/manages/maintains the
workflows?
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How to get Personal Office 365
Development Tenant?
 Sign up for Office 365 Developer
Program at http://dev.office.com/
 Get 1 year of Office 365 subscription
for free
 Excellent for personal development
use
 1 seat only

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How to get Office 365 Demo Tenants
Tenant?
 Login at
https://www.microsoftofficedemos.com/Login
using your partner account
 Get 3 months of Office 365 subscription for free
 Excellent for rapid client demos
 More than 20 Seats
 Customer Immersion Experience (CIE) is also an
option 
 Formerly called as MEC
 1 Month Trial
 E3, E5
 https://products.office.com/en-
us/business/compare-office-365-for-business-plans

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 Helps to Automate Business Processes
 Helps to meet the Industry Standards
 Helps Organizations to function Effectively
 Important for success of SharePoint/Office 365
sites Implementations
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What are Workflows?

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Types of Workflows
Sequential State Machine
• Activities occur in sequence
• On rejection , begin from start
• Simple Business Processes example,
Leave Request
• Activities are not sequential
• Can by pass activities based on
business logic
• Complex business processes
example, Financial Aid

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Typical SharePoint Workflow Life Cycle
Initiation
• When the workflow is started on list/library item
Running
• User Interaction via tasks
• Status page reflects the status of the workflows
Termination • End of the workflow instance
Association
• When the workflow is associated with List/Library

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• Browser
• SharePoint 2013 Designer
• Visio 2013
• Visual Studio 2012/2013/2015
• Third Party Tools
Office 365 /SharePoint
Online 2013 Workflow
Tools

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Architecture of SharePoint 2013/2016 Workflows
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 SP2013 workflows are fully declarative
 SP2013 workflows are no longer compiled into .NET
assemblies instead XAML files defines workflow and
their execution
 No more custom code
 Build WebServices for custom business logic
 SP2013 workflows are available in Office 365/
SharePoint Online
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New SharePoint 2013 Workflows Architecture

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How does the workflow run in SP2013/2016?
Workflow
Instance
Starts
SP2010
Style
Workflow?
Use SP2010
Workflow Engine
Use New
Workflow
Manager
Workflow
Instance Executes
Workflow Instance Ends
Workflow
Instance Executes
Yes
No

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How to identify SP2010 style and SP2013
style workflows?
 List Settings -> Workflow Settings
 Site Workflows -> Site Administration
->Workflow Settings

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Key Differences between SP2013 & SP2010 Style Workflows
SharePoint 2010 Style Workflows SharePoint 2013 Style Workflows
• Uses SharePoint 2010 Workflow Host
• Impersonation Step
• OOTB Visualization of Workflows
• No loops, stages in Designer WFs
• Custom task forms are InfoPath forms
• Can capture Approval comments
OOTB
• Uses Workflow Manager
• App Step
• Need to create custom solution
• Looping, stages are present
• Custom task forms are .aspx pages
• Need to implement custom
solution

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• The development/testing experience is
slow
 Because of platform’s architecture
 In general Workflow development is slow
process
 Analogy : Public Transportation System
• Difficult to gather all the requirements
before start of the development
 Be ready for multiple revisions
Lessons Learned

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Recent Announcements
• There will NOT be SharePoint Designer 2016
 http://sharepoint-community.net/forum/topics/what-s-happening-to-sharepoint-designer-in-
sharepoint-2016-is-it
• Microsoft Flow
 https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/introducing-microsoft-flow-and-announcing-the-
public-preview-of-powerapps/
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What does this mean?
• SharePoint Workflows most probably will have same fate as
InfoPath forms services
 Microsoft will continue to support
 No future enhancements
• Time to explore other options
 Microsoft Flow
 Under Preview https://flow.microsoft.com
 Visual Studio Workflows
 Can deploy them only as “App”
 Other Third Party Products
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User Experience
Task Process Custom SharePoint Forms
• User Interaction via Tasks
• Not a good user experience
• Provides the ability to send reminders
• Lot of OOTB webparts/options are available
to aggregate the tasks
• User Interaction via Custom Forms
• Can provide good user experience
• All the data is at the same place
• Need to implement the custom logic to
send reminders

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Tips for developing maintainable custom workflows
• Naming Convention for Custom Workflows
 Use the naming convention that works best for you and your
organization
 For example, List or Library + ListName + Purpose
• Use activity “Add a comment” to write informative comments in
the workflow
 End users will not see these comments unlike workflow history list
logs

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Tips for developing maintainable custom workflows
• Do not modify the OOTB global workflows
 Create copy and then modify
• Log information in the History List
 Log variables, important info that will be helpful during
debugging/troubleshooting
 End users can see the logs 
• Create custom task content types for tasks with only one
logical outcome

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Tips for developing maintainable custom workflows
• Use new Task List and History list for each workflow
 To create the new tasks list and history list, we can use
 Workflow Settings page
 SharePoint Designer
 SharePoint UI
 OOTB “Workflow Tasks” List has additional notifications
 To turn off -> List Settings – Advanced Settings -> Uncheck “Send e-mail
when ownership is assigned?”

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Tips for developing maintainable custom workflows
• Don’t create the variable if you don’t have to
 50 is the limit
• Use SharePoint groups to assign the tasks/send emails instead of
individual users
• Keep workflow initiation activity to minimum

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Tips for developing maintainable custom workflows
• Capture the dates of various approval steps
 Good for generating audit logs
• Save the Workflow status in a separate field
 Avoid default workflow name
 Helps if you divide workflows into multiple workflows
• Create a separate Workflow status field as text
 Gives the ability of filtering and sorting
 Approvers love this option

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Tips for developing maintainable custom workflows
• Pay extra attention while modifying the Custom Task content
types
 Task outcome field must be the last field
• Review the workflow starting logic
 Limit how many times the workflow gets started
 Make sure they won’t start unnecessarily after the workflow is ended
successfully
• Restrict the access

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Tips for developing maintainable custom workflows?
• If possible Break down the workflows in multiple WFs
 Helps a lot in development and maintenance
 We can start SharePoint 2010 workflows from SharePoint 2013 only
 We can not start SharePoint 2013 workflows from SharePoint 2013
workflows
 You can use “Wait for field change in current item” to trigger the workflows
• For large lists, don’t remove the workflow, but set to no new
instance
 Do it in non business hours

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Tips for developing maintainable custom workflows
• Have flow chart of the workflow handy
 Use Microsoft Visio
 Pen and Paper works too 
• Implement the logic to stop/start at a particular stage
 Super helpful in case the workflow instance gets terminated
 Super helpful during migration (For on premise customers)
 Helpful to update the business logic
• Using If condition and a custom variable, we can pick and choose the additional
logging
 Similar to #if debug directive in C#
 The workflow will be long, but it can save a lot of troubleshooting/development time
 End users will not see additional comments in Production 

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Throttling Limits in Office 365
• In Office 365 workflow manager has strict throttling limits for
SharePoint 2013 Style workflows
• The instance has exceeded the outbound http request quota for a
1.00:00:00 time period. The 5000 request limit was reached in <time>.
 Analogy credit score
• Workflow instances can get suspended and we need to wait 24
hours to resume the suspended workflow instance by
 clicking Resume for the workflow or
 by using the SharePoint Workflow Client Object Model
• Suspended workflow instances will be terminated after 10 days.

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Throttling Limits in Office 365
• The resource limitations are for per workflow in a site collection
in the span of 24 hours
• There is no OOTB email alert if the workflow get suspended
• We can find the suspended workflows on the page
/_layouts/15/WorkflowServiceHealth.aspx
• If we develop workflow as an “App” these throttling limitations
does not apply

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Throttling Limits in Office 365

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Throttling Limits in Office 365 – Design Consideration
• Avoid infinite loops
 We may use “Wait for field change in current item”
• Avoid using a workflow to execute complex algorithms
 Workflows are intended to manage document-driven, human
processes and not to dispatch significant computational tasks.
• Avoid the use of the “Wait for Event in List Item" activity

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Limitations
 We can not start workflows on delete
event
 50 variable limit
 No source control for SPD workflows
 String functions are limited
 For advance implementations you will
need to involve devs/architects
 You can not start the workflows on Task
lists whenever new tasks gets created by
SP2013 style workflows
 Workaround : Create SP2010 style workflow
in Task List

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Questions? Feedback? Contact me:
 Twitter: @PGBhoyar
 Blog: http://pgbhoyar.com (limited contents)
 Email: pgbhoyar@gmail.com
 Feedback : Please provide feedback
 Email or
 Anonymous Suggestions: https://www.suggestionox.com/r/pgb
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