Category Archives: Workflow

The Content Type Hub and Nintex Reusable Workflows

SharePoint 2010 has a great new feature, called the Content Type Hub. With the CT Hub you can manage your Content Types in one site collection and through the Managed Metadata Service you can subscribe to this Hub with other site collections. The Content Types of your choice will be synchronized to all site collections of all the web applications connected to your Managed Metadata Service instance. Wictor Wilén has a blog post explaining how to deploy the Content Type Hub: http://www.wictorwilen.se/Post/Plan-your-SharePoint-2010-Content-Type-Hub-carefully.aspx

What you need to know is that together with the Content Types, also the corresponding Information Management Policies and the Workflow associations are synchronized, but not the Workflows themselves. I had created some reusable site workflows with Nintex Workflow 2010 and associated these with my Content Types, but after updating the subscription on one of my target site collections, I received the following error:

The workflow association <workflow name> for content type <content type name> is not imported because the workflow with id <GUID> cannot be found.

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Using workflow and policies to view only certain list items

Recently, I received an intriguing question from a client of ours.

They have a document library with a lot of project documents, mainly meeting agendas and minutes, but some other important documents as well. Now what they would like is filtering out the older agendas and minutes, but not all the other document types. So just setting a Filter in a List View won’t do it.

Here’s what you should do:

I assume you already have some kind of Document Type Column in your document library, to differentiate the types of document you use. I have named this column DocumentType and I have four types of documents: Action Plan, Agenda, Business Case, and Minutes. Now I only want to see the Agendas and Minutes from the past two months, and the Action Plan and Business Case.

1. In the Document Library, create a new Column to store some kind of flag which we can use to filter documents on in our View. I created an Archive column of type Yes/No, default No.

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2. Next, create a new workflow with SharePoint Designer. I called it “Set Archive Status to Yes”. Make sure you enable the “Allow this workflow to be manually started from an item” option and disable the other two start options. Click Next.
Choose the Document Types you would like to set the Archive flag for in the Conditions part, and set the Archive flag in the Actions part.

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3. Finally, you have to create a policy on the document library, to call the workflow you just created.
Go to you Document Library settings, and click the “Information management policy settings” link. Choose “Define a policy…” and click OK.
Enable Expiration, choose the time period after which you would like to execute your workflow and select the workflow you created under step 2.

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Voilà, you’re done! Of course you would have to modify your list view to filter out the documents with Archive set to No.