Extend SharePoint Designer with custom activities

At work we got a request to help someone out who was configuring a large workflow in SP Designer 2007 for a large BioTech company.

We quickly got stuck with the activities that are ootb, but my coworker pointed me to these 2 solutions with extra activities !!

1. SPDActivities on Codeplex by unclepaul84

This solutions (which you install as a feature on your server) has following really usefull items (most of which are ootb in 2010):

 

2. User Profile Activities

This solution (.wsp) has following items on user profiles:

  • Get user title – use it to get the user job title, when you need to route the workflow to different people depending on the originating user, for example.
  • Find manager of the user – it retrieves the Manager property of the specified user profile. The most frequent use of this action would be to set an approval task for the manager of the user.
  • Find display name of the user – it resolves the user display name instead of DOMAIN\username, useful if you combine text in task descriptions or in emails.
  • Find department of the user – use it to route workflows depending on the originating user deparment or to check that the workflow can only be initiated by a specific department, for instance.

About: Marijn

Marijn Somers (MVP) has over 14 years experience in the SharePoint world, starting out with SP2007. Over the years the focus has grown to Office 365, with a focus on collaboration and document management. He is a business consultant at Balestra and Principal Content Provider for "Mijn 365 Coach" that offers dutch employee video training. His main work tracks are around user adoption, training and coaching and governance. He is also not afraid to dig deeper in the technicalities with PowerShell, adaptive cards or custom formatting in lists and libraries. You can listen to him on the biweekly "Office 365 Distilled" podcast.


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