ThoughtFactory.CreateThought() A random collection of thoughts from an easily bored developer

The Many Faces of Workflow

As previously mentioned, I spoke at the Perth leg of this year's SharePoint Saturday. The slides I used during the presentation are below:

I had originally intended to present a light overview of what Business Process Management is, list some of the tools then do a deep dive into how BizTalk 2010 and SharePoint work together as an example of how you can still use SharePoint's workflow as part of a larger process management solution, but a few things happened that day that ended up making me rethink the content I was going to present on the fly:

1. I had been put on the developer track as there was no architecture track, making a discussion about integration scenarios and design patterns a hard one to have
2. Most of the presentations that day had been presented from a "tools first" point of view, which I generally find unhealthy
3. I had a LOT of business users and non-coding SharePoint folk in the audience, meaning my intention to deep dive into the BizTalk SharePoint Adapter was off the cards

I was pretty happy with the resulting presentation, and judging by the feedback so were the vast majority of the audience (There were a few haters in there that basically wanted me to do a tool rundown like most other presentations, but that's a topic for another day...), so I thought it would be a good idea to collate some of the thoughts in the following series of blog posts (links will be added as I complete each post):

• Which Type of Architect Are You?
• Issues With The Tool-First Approach to Technical Presentations
• The Fallacy of End to End Process Execution
• The BPMS Jigsaw Puzzle as it Relates to SharePoint

Hopefully I'll finish these posts soon. If not, I'll leave this post up as a testament to my slothful ways.