SharePoint Designer 2010: How to Show Toolbox

Description

In SharePoint Designer 2010, the Toolbox provides a way to work with SharePoint Controls, Data View Controls, Server Controls, and Page Fields.  However, in order to use the Toolbox, you must first make it visible.

Solution

Follow these steps to make the SharePoint Designer 2010 toolbox visible:

1.  Click "Insert"
2.  Click "SharePoint  to expand the "Add SharePoint Controls" menu
3.  Click "Show Toolbox"

SharePoint Designer Workflow: It's Just a Facilitator

SharePoint Designer workflow in general is best used as a facilitator of actions that make up a business process and it does not work well for automating or enforcing an entire, complex, human process. What I mean is that SharePoint Designer workflow is best used to automate certain actions that occur within a business process like assign a status of something, or email something, or copy something but its not going to replace human decision making and its not going to perform the entire business process for you.

Say, for example, that Company ABC's IT team is supporting 100 employees through email exchanges. When an employee has an issue, they email an IT distribution list then the IT staff responds to the issue. The IT team is finding that they are struggling to keep track of the support requests. They are considering using SharePoint to track support requests.

A solution to this business problem may be to use SharePoint to structure the metadata about support requests and use workflow to automate actions that occur during the process. Create a SharePoint custom list to track support requests with request id, requestor email, status, title, description, solution fields, and then use SharePoint Designer workflow to perform the following:

* Automatically generate request id for new support requests
* Automatically build and send email the requestor when status of items is changed

SharePoint Designer should not be used to implement rigid rules that contain deep branchings for how the support requests are resolved. You do not want to attempt to create a workflow that predicts and solves the support requests that you are tracking within SharePoint. Thining through and resolving support requests is a complex human process and it scales beyond practical limits of SharePoint Designer workflow.

Workflow can certainly improve processes, and it can simplify tasks that a person performs during a business process, such as the example above....just don't expect workflow to do somebody's job for them.

Resetting SharePoint Designer's Layout

As I was working with a SharePoint worfklow I accidentally closed a task pane and minimized another. SharePoint Designer suddenly looked foreign. Luckily there is a quick fix for this. If you ever want to reset SharePoint Designer back to the way it looked when you opened it for the first time, just click on Task Panes > Reset Workspace Layout.

Copying a SharePoint Designer workflow

I am working on a SharePoint site that has multiple custom lists. Each list will have a SharePoint Designer workflow attached to it. The workflows are very similar to eachother. Each workflow is several branches long so it takes quite a bit of clicking to set one up.

I figured after I was done with the first workflow I would copy it, paste it, rename it, and point it to the second list, then change workflow conditions and actions accordingly. However, when I opened the workflow copy I discovered that the custom list assignment had become greyed-out and I am unable to point it to a different list.

This has got me wondering why Designer locks down the list name and if there is a way to work around this manually.

Error occurred on custom list, referring to a SharePoint Designer workflow

SharePoint Designer workflow doesn't clean up after itself very well. Here is an example.

Create list and add it to a SharePoint V3 page. Open SharePoint Designer and add a workflow to the list. SharePoint will add the workflow status to the current list view. This tells you the current state of the workflow.

Now that the workflow is created and the status of the workflow is visible on the custom list current view, go ahead and delete the workflow from SharePoint Designer. Next, go back to the custom list and perform an action that would have kicked off that work flow. You will see "error occurred" on the custom list current view when you do this even though the workflow no longer exists.

To fix this you have to modify the list view, remove the workflow status from the list view, then on the page where you are displaying the web part, modify web part and update view, refresh the screen. Doing this will remove the orphaned workflow status from the list view and it will also remove this orphaned workflow status option from the edit view screen.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer (Contributor Mode)

Ever find your SharePoint Designer in Contributor Mode?
Here is how to turn it off: Site > Contributor Settings > Disable Contributor Settings