Planning for Your Environment

Before continuing, we recommend that you do some advance planning as follows:

• If you are responsible for creating a SharePoint site hierarchy, think about how your SharePoint sites are structured. For example, you can organize them by department or by project team.
• Consider the different processes you will need for your environment, and determine the steps required for each of them. You may want to write notes or draw a rough sketch of each process.
• Choose a standard convention for naming your processes. For example, you could begin all human resources-related processes with "HR" such as HRVacationRequest, HRTutionReimbursement, and HRSalaryAdjustment. Processes related to a project called Matrix could be named MatrixScheduleChange, MatrixQAChecklist, and MatrixDocReview.

If you find later that your initial decisions do not meet the needs of your environment, you can easily make changes later. Winshuttle Designer is flexible and allows for making frequent changes to suit the needs of your work environment.

Using a Development Server

To minimize the risk of disruption and data loss, we strongly recommend installing SharePoint and Winshuttle Designer on a development (non-production) server first. The development sever simulates a server in a real work environment, but it operates in isolation, so that it does not affect other users. You can then create, test, and refine your processes on the development server before moving them onto a production sever in your real work environment. When you are ready to move to the production server, specify the URL of the production server within Winshuttle Designer, and publish your workflows and forms to that server.