Huge MOSS Workflow Issue... What is Microsoft Thinking!!!! the original post
Ok, recently I came across a blog post called SPWorkflowAssociation.AutoCleanupDays from Robert Bogue, a SharePoint MVP, that tries to explain away my original complaint of this process as to be not that big of a deal. I believe that he missunderstood my original posting.
My overall intention of the original post was to get the word out to the SharePoint community to make sure they are informed of this process. My goal was to get people to make sure Microsoft was aware that they were not happy with this design and that it needs to be re-designed or at the least configurable. At the very least I am glad that Robert brought this to the SharePoint product group attention. What I am not happy with is what Robert explains as their reasoning behind this little hidden gem.
The main reason for cleaning out the associations is because of a performance issue. If this is a true reason, then the product team should of reconsidered their storage model for the workflow history and associations. If anyone knows the limitations of SharePoint it would be the product team and they purposely used a SharePoint list for storage knowing those limitations and performance issues. I can't see this being their only option for a storage model and if it was, then this must of been one of those last minute features added to meet a deadline of some sort.
The second reason for saying that this is not a big deal is auditing. Robert explains that the workflow history is meant to be more of a log file then an audit trail and that MOSS has its own audit logging outside of the workflow. I can see where Robert is going, but I still don't agree. Working with large enterprise customers who are audited on a regular basis will not take that the workflow history is a log not an audit trail as an explaination. These customers will need the workflow history, comments, and everything else associated with that workflow to be part of their existing retention policies for both auditing and legal situations. MOSS Auditing will show the editing of the tasks and such, but it is not as robust as the workflow association view. Meaning that there has to be a manual association made to determine which tasks ran for a particualr document or item. Plus MOSS Auditing needs to be configured to capture these events, where workflow history is automatically there. Also, auditing is captured at a site collection level meaning you will get all workflow tasks across the entire site collection making the manual assocation more difficult, where workflow associations are for a particular document or item. Again making it easier for auditing and legal situations. In business time is money, and SharePoint is fixing that for the most part opening communication and getting tasks completed on a more timely basis, but things come up (like they always will, murphy's law).
Now, I don't want people to missunderstand me. I am not saying all workflows required this. There might be some minor approvals that do not require this kind of attention. I am stateing this because I know there are organizations out there that have developed critical business processes using SharePoint workflow and will possibly need to rely on this information in the future.
Again, I just want to make sure people are aware of this. Once the community is aware of these issues, then those people and organizations can make an educated decision as to use SharePoint workflow, turn off the auto cleanup jobs, turn on auditing, etc. An informed community and community feedback to the product team (good and bad) makes for a better product in the future. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy working with SharePoint and believe that it is a product that can change a company, like email did years ago, but with the good comes the bad and I want people to be aware of the bad as well.
Posted
11-21-2007 9:34 AM
by
dwollerman