SharePoint Designer (SPD) Workflow deployment

One day I have very tough requirement, my requirement was to deploy my SharePoint designer workflow from development server to TEST server, I tried to find solutions from the internet but didn’t get any easy way for my requirements, at the last I have found one very good link which fulfill my requirements, though it requires some manual steps as describes in below link.

But now I can replicate same designer workflow to target server with some or more manual changes, I know that it’s very painful at some level to do manual steps, but we can say that it’s possible to deploy SPD workflow to other machine with manual effort ….

There is no direct way to copy designer workflow from one server to another server. Only thing which we can do is through “site template” also.

We need to save our SharePoint site as template in which we have created the workflow from SharePoint designer and using that template we can create a new site on another server which will have same workflow attached with it.

Here is link which describes manual steps to deploy designer workflow.

http://www.sharepointblogs.com/andynoon/archive/2007/09/18/reparenting-a-workflow-to-a-different-list.aspx

Enjoy working!!