Designing, Creating, and Refining Your Process

Creating processes that will function seamlessly in your environment is an iterative process that includes the following steps:

1. Define functional roles for your workflow. Identify the jobs or tasks that need to be completed in your process. For example, one role might be to provide data in a form. Another role might be to verify and approve a document’s content.

   As it relates to Winshuttle Designer, a Workflow is a graphical representation of the flow of information (documents and/or forms) through an enterprise.

2. Add swimlanes in Winshuttle Designer. You need one swimlane for each functional role in your process. See Using Winshuttle Designer for more information about swimlanes.

   A swimlane is a functional role within a workflow. For example, a swimlane could represent a functional manager role, a QA role, or a team role.

3. Add nodes to swimlanes for appropriate workflow events.

   A Node is a single step in a workflow. For example, a node could represent a task assigned to a user, or an action, such as sending a notification or setting of a value. Think of Nodes as the 'building blocks' of a Workflow.

4. Create forms you need by using Microsoft InfoPath. Depending on your work requirements, you may need to create forms to either collect information from or distribute information to your users.
5. Publish your workflow and any forms. To start and complete your process, you must first publish your workflow to the SharePoint server. If you have created InfoPath forms as part of your process, you must also publish those forms to the SharePoint server.
6. Test your workflow. Since your processes may not work perfectly the first time, it is a good idea to create and test them on a staging server, as described earlier in this section. After you are sure that your process is working correctly, you can move it onto your production server.
7. Make changes to your workflow, forms as needed, and republish. If you find during testing that your process does not function as required, you can make changes and republish as often as needed.

Instructions for completing these steps are provided in the subsequent sections of this guide.