2. Testing Your Workflow
With the workflow association complete, we are ready
to test. To test the new workflow, upload a document into your document
library or create a new one from the New icon. If you selected a manual
start, your workflow will
not begin automatically. Instead, a user will have to initiate the
workflow. There are two ways to initiate a manual workflow: from the
items workflow page, or from within an Office 2007 or 2010 client
application such as Word or Excel.
3. Starting the Workflow from the Item Workflow Page
For workflows that can be started manually, you do so from the item’s workflow page (see Figure 4). This is accessed from the items context menu using the Workflows option or by clicking the Workflows icon in the ribbon.
The workflows page will display all the available
workflows that can be started, as well as any running and completed
workflows (see Figure 5).
Select the desired workflow, in this case the
Quarterly Newsletter Review. Because we are gathering information
described earlier (refer to Figure 3), we have the opportunity to modify the default values such as approvers, notification message, and so on. If the workflow did not require starting values, it would start immediately.
3. Starting the Workflow from Office 2010 Client
With
SharePoint’s tight integration with Office 2010, it is not necessary to
find the document in the browser to start its workflow. If you have the
document already opened, go to the document BackStage (the File tab)
and select Share, as you see in Figure 6.
From the Share page, you see the available workflows
listed at the bottom. Selecting the Quarterly Newsletter Review
workflow displays its description and a Start Workflow button. Figure 7 shows the dialog requesting the start properties for the workflow, similar to how it would appear if started from the browser.
With the workflow now started, the next task is to check its status to make sure it is running and to see what stage it is at.
