Stepping out of the scenario for a moment – I had planned to title this post “Business Management in Office 365 and SharePoint – Starting with Microsoft Flow”. But, after building this part of the solution with Microsoft Flow and writing much of the blog post, I just didn’t feel that it was the correct tool to recommend. For a straightforward Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) workflow, SharePoint Designer was the better choice.

Building a simple approval process with a few associated stage-gate tasks was too cumbersome and way too “expensive” in Microsoft Flow. This series is targeted at business users. Therefore, as soon as I started writing about creating custom OData filters and how to deal with the many idiosyncrasies of Microsoft Flow encountered when getting at list properties, I knew I couldn’t recommend Flow as the workflow tool for this part of the solution.

No, in SharePoint and O365, there’s more than one way to do it, and SharePoint Designer workflows are much more suitable for building the Contract Lifecycle Management stage-gate tasks. We’ll see more about Microsoft Flow later for sure, but for now Sales will continue building onto their CLM site by using SharePoint Designer 2013. You’ll need to download SharePoint Designer 2013 from the Microsoft Download center if you’re following along.

Basic Workflow Design

Before getting into the workflow, Sales produces a simple drawing to communicate the CLM workflow design:

Sales just needs:

• A workflow which will create tasks for the Sales Manager, District Sales Manager, and Director of Sales to push the contract through its stages and status.
• A list to hold those tasks.
• Also, you’ll need a new list which you can use within the workflow to determine who the Sales Manager, District Sales Manager, and Director of Sales is/are for a given customer.

Setting Up Additional SharePoint Lists for the Workflow

For the two new lists, you do not need a new content type or new site columns due to the lack of need to reuse and/or to target search directly on these properties. You will be reusing existing site columns though.

Navigate to the CLM site and add the following lists.

The Sales Contract Lifecycle Tasks List:

The Sales Customer Representatives List:

Then populate the Sales Customer Representatives List:

*Pardon the example only having two names – this is being built on a test O365 tenant, and I have only allocated limited licenses.

Laying out the Workflow Logic

The way the workflow will basically function as follows:

1. As a contract is changed
   • If its stage is Creation and
     • There is no existing “Sales Manager” task and
     • A customer name exists on the contract
     • Then create the first task in the series
   • Otherwise do nothing
2. As tasks are changed
   • If it’s the “Sales Manager” task and
     • Its Approval Decision is set to “Approved”
     • Then change the Associated Contract Stage to “Collaboration” and its status to “Started”, also
     • Create the “District Sales Manager” task
   • Otherwise, if it’s the “District Sales Manager” task and
     • Its Approval Decision is set to “Approved”
     • Then change the Associated Contract stage to “Execution”, also
     • Create the “Director of Sales” task
   • Otherwise, if….and so-on
   • Any “Reject” decision sets the Contract stage to “Closeout” and the Status to “Completed”.

Something like this:

All of the above list definitions, swim lanes, and flow-charts are representative. You should feel enabled to adjust and iterate as necessary to your exact solution.

Getting Started with CLM in SharePoint Designer (SPD) Workflow

At this point, the tasks list is created, the customer representative list created, and theworkflow business logic has been designed. Move on to create the workflow using SharePoint Designer 2013.

• Launch SPD
• Click the Open Site Button
• Specify the full URL to the Contract Lifecycle Management site in the Site name field
• Press Open and specify your credentials if needed.

Select List Workflow > Sales Contracts

From here, let’s see what the basic requirements for building the first part of the workflow looks like:

Optionally, and highly recommended, is to add logging statements throughout using the Log to history list action:

O365 SharePoint Business Management add log.

Finally, there’s one step missing from the recording, and that’s to set the workflow to run automatically when the item is changed:

And, finally, to test:

In the next post, we’ll see how to move on to work with the rest of the Sales Contract Lifecycle Management tasks.

Categories: Business, Business Management, Contract Lifecycle Management, Office 365 and O365, SharePoint

Tags: Business Management, Management, Office 365 and O365, SharePoint