Office 365 and SharePoint Designer Workflow. 


Long waited Office 365 is out since June 2011. Microsoft's cloud base office productivity suite for small and large businesses finally met with end-users. Office 365 gives you anywhere access to email, documents, contacts, and calendars. Cloud based offering consists of Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Lync Online and Office  Applications Online.


Very light version of SharePoint included in the previous version of the Office 365 (BPOS) has gone to a significant uplift and comes as a very decent version of the SharePoint 2010.


Of course one of the most important features of the SharePoint is the workflows. In this post I would like to demonstrate how we can use SharePoint Designer 2010 to create a workflow on Office 365.  In this demo we will have a receipt library with a custom metadata property of department. What we want is, to send a link to appropriate department manager once a new receipt is uploaded to the library. Let's say, if receipt belongs to marketing department marketing manager will receive an email with a link to a document. If it is support then support department manager will receive the email. For all other departments operations manager will receive the email with the link.


1. Lets create a new receipt library called receipts. Go to "Site Actions" ->  "New Document Library"



2. Create a custom metadata column called department as "Choice" with the values of "Marketing, Sales, Operations, Finance, and Support" by going to "Library" -> "Library Settings" -> "Create Column"







3. Now time to go to SharePoint Designer 2010 and create the workflow. Select "Workflows" -> " List Workflow" -> "Receipts" and call it "Receipt Notification"











4. It's time to add the conditions and actions as below.  







5. When you are composing the email message, add recipient to "To"  field and by selecting them from the address book. Type subject and the message body as you prefer. You can add the link by clicking the link button and select "Current Item" for the text and "Encoded Absolute URL" for the address.









6. Now we are going to make this workflow to run every time a new receipt is inserted into the receipts library. Let's click "Receipt Notification" on breadcrumb and select "Start this workflow automatically when a new item is created." under the "Start Options."









7. Let's save and publish the workflow.







8. Workflow is ready. Now let's run and see how it works by adding a new receipt document into the "Receipts" library at Office 365 Team Site.









9. We will select "Marketing" department to see if Marketing Manager receives the email. As you'll see Receipt Notification workflow is worked and completed.









10. Now lets check to see if marketing manager got the email with link. Once we go to office365.com, sign in with Marketing Manager credentials and go to "Inbox", yes there is an email with a link to the receipt as we are expecting. By clicking the link takes us directly into the document after security validation.









I hope you'll find this useful. Please drop me an email for any feedback.




Cheers!


Bruce