Workflow support for Office 2007, SharePoint 2007

Business processes optimization is among the #1 strategic goals of most major companies. Thus workflow support of computer software is becoming more and more important.
As you may know there was some workflow functionality implemented in the Microsoft EPM 2003 solution. These workflows however were almost impossible to customize. Let's have a look at what the workflow support for the upcoming Microsoft Office 2007 products looks like!

The Office 2007 workflow support is based on Windows Workflow Foundation which is a part of the .NET 3.0 framework (WinFX). Workflows can be created or customized using Microsoft VisualStudio or Microsoft SharePoint Designer (formerly known as Microsoft Frontpage). Hence the entire workflow functionality is not intended to be designed by the end-users such as project managers or team members using Project Server. The developers will not have to write much code themselves since the workflows can be edited/created using a GUI. The biggest advantage is that changes in business processes which affect document workflows can be updated a lot quicker.

In SharePoint v2 meta data of documents could only be changed in SharePoint itself. Now all that data is being displayed when a user actually works with a document, for example in the new Microsoft Word 2007. All the data on the document can be viewed and edited there. That of course makes the use of meta data much easier and more appealing to users.

So with all that being said, the new workflow support is definitely a big improvement compared to the workflows in SharePoint v2 that you can look forward to!