I just played around with Reusable Workflow functionality in Sharepoint Designer 2010. It’s very-very cool I have to say. I really can see the potential with this functionality if all of the bugs are fixed.

Basically what you can do with this is, you can create a Reusable Workflow on a particular site, export it as WSP, restore it into Visual Studio then deploy it to another Sharepoint site.

So in theory, you don’t have to re-create the workflow (unlike MOSS and SP Designer 2007).

However, I’ve found some limitations:

– If you create an IF condition and uses “Current Item” value for checking the value against, there is only a set of limited fields that you can check against: Content Type, Created, Created By, ID, Modified, Modified By and Title.

– It’s still buggy. Workflow that has “Collect Data from User” task doesn’t work properly. I personally uses this functionality heavily.

Collect Data from User Bugs

Below is the list of bugs I found:

– By default if you’re using the default Tasks list, the workflow will simply stop and crash. There was an error message in the workflow history. The workaround for this will be to create a new task list.

– You will not get the nice “collect data” page on the destination site. Somehow it redirects you to the “View Item” (DispForm.aspx) page.

General Bugs

– By default when you first load WSP into Visual Studio, if you open Elements.xml, VS/Sharepoint appends Instantiation URL which if you deploy it to the destination site will create an error when you try to start the workflow manually. The error was: “The workflow template has specified no FormURN for this page”.

Conclusion

For general simple workflow, this functionality has worked really great. It’s just when you start trying to do a bit more complicated stuff (eg. collect data from user, etc), it isn’t that functional. But I’m hopeful that this will be fixed and improved on the released version.

Cheers,

Tommy