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.

Even after I recreated the same Nintex Workflows at the target site collection (I love the export/import feature of Nintex!), I still got that error message. It seems the re-association is being done on an ID basis and not based on the workflow name.

So what do you need to do to make this work? Change the ID of the workflow in the target site collection. You can do this by editing the .xoml.wfconfig.xml file of your workflow.

Fire up SharePoint Designer 2010 and connect to your site collection. Click All Files in your navigation pane and go to the Workflows list. Click the workflow you’d like to change, click the .xoml.wfconfig.xml file and click Edit file under the Customization section of the page presented.

Now you can change the ID of the workflow by changing the BaseID property of the Template node. Save the file and close SharePoint Designer. Now click the Content type publishing link in your Site Collection Administration, enable Refresh all published content types on next update and click OK.

You can speed up the update by running the Content Type Subscriber job from the Central Administration site.

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