Workflow and Fika: SharePoint Observations from Sweden

Greetings from Sweden. It’s 4:00 P.M., so of course it’s already dark—the sun set an hour ago. It’s cold (but nowhere near as bone chilling as this timelast year). But the thing about Sweden is they know how to use light. Despite the darkness, the city shimmers in light. Candles, beautiful interiorand exterior lighting everywhere. So, to steal an album title, it’s "Shimmering, Warm and Bright."

In this week’s column, I want to share thoughts about the events of the week; a couple of observations and tips about SharePoint workflows; and a "softside" note about my favorite Swedish tradition: fika.

On the Road

Earlier this week, SEF 2011 took place at the beautiful Clarion Hotel. Several hundred Swedes and folks from around the world came together to discussSharePoint and Exchange in a first-class event produced by Göran Husman and his team at HumanData.

More than a dozen speakers traveled from all reachesto this northern capital. Many of the speakers had just presented at SharePoint Saturday UK in Nottingham a few days earlier—an event that by allaccounts was also a smashing success.

Personally, I really enjoyed spending time with attendees and with several experts, like Mirjam van Olst, Steve Smith, Todd Klindt, and CA Callahan,with whom I never get to spend enough time. Unfortunately, I did not get to spend enough time with Eric Shupps, Scott Scholl, Wictor Wilén, SpenceHarbar, Christian Ståhl, Marc Anderson, Niklas Goude, Penny Coventry, Staffan Söderholm, or the very elusive Paul Swider.

Because this is the lastconference of the 2011 season for many of us, I won’t get to see my colleagues again until the end of February, at the MVP Summit, and the kick-off ofthe 2012 conference season.

At SEF 2011, I delivered the latest and greatest versions of my Governance and Architecture session, and my SharePoint Demystified session. I have aterrible habit of constantly revising (and hopefully improving) my talks—I am never satisfied! So while it was a lot of work, I think the results weregood!

I also filled in for a speaker who cancelled, and brushed off my information worker session on integrating SharePoint with Excel and Access. Evenwith no time to revise the talk or practice the demos, it went fairly well, and I enjoyed elevating my talk up to the business value level!

Today I presented a full day workshop to more than a dozen delegates from enterprise and government organizations. Tomorrow, it’s the same thing—forhalf a day—with the SharePoint team of a major Swedish enterprise. Then it’s off to Amsterdam. On Monday, a workshop at the Microsoft offices (which Ihear are glorious and second to none).

Finally, then, it’s SharePoint Connections Amsterdam, where I will deliver a new keynoteaddress and three sessions. Flying back to the USA on Wednesday, for Thanksgiving with my family, I will indeed be thankful for these busy andrewarding weeks in northern Europe.

Workflows

At one of Todd Klindt’s sessions, Todd shared his insight into SQL Server administration and optimization. One of the things he pointed out was thatseveral tables tend to get very large and drive the total size of SharePoint content databases. One of those tables is the workflow history table. Ifyou have a lot of workflow activity, this table can get quite large, indeed.

An attendee asked about cleaning up this table. This is a question I haven’t explored for a long time!

A timer job runs daily to clean up workflows. It removes the association between an item and any workflow that is more than 60 days old. But,according to an authoritative blog entry on MSDN, the timer job still does not actually remove records from the workflow history table itself! So thetable can, theoretically, grow infinitely. What experience have you had with this? (email me at [email protected])

Tim Mayo posted a code sample to MSDN that can be used to actually delete workflowhistory.

Another note about workflows: be sure to check out what third-party tools do! K2 and Nintex are the big players in the space—and there are others aswell. By knowing what third parties do, it will help you understand the limitations of out-of-box features.

Typically, the third party ISVs don’treplicate what SharePoint does, they extend it. So you can identify the "boundaries" of out-of-box functionality by seeing what the ISVs do! They’reboth great companies with great products.

As an analyst, I have to say that Nintex is a fascinating company to watch—not just for workflows, but because I believe they are at the leading edgeof the space. They "get" the cloud and the relationships between SharePoint, Azure, mobile devices, and services like Office 365 perhaps better thananyone. I’m really impressed with their vision and direction, and I’ve been lucky enough to have Mike Fitzmaurice sit me down and show me some of thewickedly cool things they’re doing with both the cloud and mobile devices.

Finally, be very wary of build-your-own-workflow approaches. While you can build workflows with Visual Studio and Windows Workflow Foundation, beaware of total cost of ownership. As Adam—a consultant—so precisely described to me today, if a workflow is going to cost you $10,000 to developyourself, it will cost three times that over its lifetime with patches, modifications, and upgrades.

Third-party workflow tools like K2, Nintex, and others, are something that—in my opinion—become a “no brainer” as organizations scale their businessprocess automation with SharePoint. They allow you to automate business processes with workflows that you assemble rather than code yourself.

Fika

Finally, a call out to my favorite Swedish tradition: Fika.

Yes, I love a sauna on a cold winter day—but not so much the idea of following that up with a jump into an icy pond. But every day is fika day. Fikahas no direct translation to English, but it basically is a coffee break. But it’s more than that. It’s a lifestyle… a culture. It’s a time wheneveryone from an organization stops working and sips coffee, eats a little sandwich or pastry, and takes a break.

How incredibly productive I’ve found this very social activity to be. People release their minds from the task at hand and creative ideas flow. Peoplestop emailing and texting and actually talk to each other, and great things get done. And there’s always a morale boost just before, during, andleading out of fika.

People are happier. Nothing like caffeine, sugar, and some real social networking to bring a smile to the face. So as we alllook to SharePoint to improve productivity, speed up business processes, and build social networks… don’t forget that the real point is to share, anda few minutes together as human beings can be infinitely higher value than any technology solution.

So, as I sip my own delicious café latte and get ready to head off to take a beer with friends from SpecOps [thank god there’s not an evening ofkaraoke and beer at Howl at the Moon ahead!]… a hearty HEJ DÅ from the shimmering, warm and bright town of Stockholm!