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Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Limitation of SharePoint Designer(SPD) Workflow

SharePoint Designer is good tool to start initial or basic level workflow, I am not expert and good person to point out any limitation into any software, but as per me below are some of the limitation which I felt for SharePoint Designer Workflow, I’ll also write you more description about some of the limitation in coming posts …

  1. We don’t have facility to send BCC email to any person from “Send an Email” actions.

  2. We can’t bind and attach more then one list into designer workflow, though there are some manual steps from where we can fulfill our requirements, but there won’t be any easy steps from interface or GUI

  3. We can’t deploy/copy our designer workflow from one server to another server like there won’t be any easy way to deploy SPD workflow from development machine to TEST and Production Server; I’ll write how to do manual steps to achieve this functionality. here is my post regarding how to deploy designer workflow ...

  4. Designer Workflow don’t give us full customized editor from where we can customized our email body text, to do this, we need to write static HTML tags into email body part.

  5. We don’t write any calculation fields or formulas into Designer Workflow actions items, like I can’t extract only date from date-time column into designer workflow interface, for this I need to take one extra column into my SharePoint list and need to manipulate into designer workflow.

  6. While working in “Send an Email” action, if we add any list column from adding “Add Lookup to Body” button and if that column don’t have any values into SharePoint list, then it’s shows as ?????? instead of blank values into email body while sending emails …


I’ll update above lists as per my experience with designer workflow.

4 comments:

  1. I, too, have been discouraged by these limitations. #3 is most frustrating. I am very interested in your "manual steps to achieve this functionality". Thanks.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I have also been hindered by some of these limitations and would be very interested in your manual workaround for #3. Thanks.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hey,

    I have updated my blog and added post regarding how to deploy SharePoint Designer Workflow to another server with manual steps.

    Here is link :

    http://sanketinfo.wordpress.com/2009/05/10/sharepoint-designer-spd-workflow-deployment/

    Thanks,
    Sanket

    ReplyDelete
  4. I have tried to explore various limitaion while building sharepoint workflow sequnetial
    :)
    able to associate coloumn in task
    :(
    Task cannnot have attachements
    adding dataview to this task edit workflow

    when rejected worflow status ends :(

    ReplyDelete