Integrating SharePoint 2010 Workflows into Backend Systems Using External Data Exchange Services

The key aspect of any workflow is its capability to handle a large variety data. Traditionally SharePoint workflows were mostly focused on handling SharePoint data in the form of list items and documents. However, it is not an uncommon need to deal with back-end systems, issuing tasks that may take days to complete. So what do you do? You put your workflow to sleep and get it to wake up when stuff happened. The only difficulty is that in SharePoint 2007 you can only be notified of changes to SharePoint data. Waking up is not so easy after all! In the real world, this means that you relay communication through hidden lists. In SharePoint 2010 this is going to change in a profound way. You will be able to extend the workflow runtime with custom External Data Exchange Services, allowing you to relay information and communicate with the workflow using standard Workflow Foundation patterns. Learn how to create these EDEs and the rich features they provide such as operation batching. Expect to see lots of code and demos in this technical session.

This session is presented by Wouter van Vugt during SharePoint Connections 2010 in Amsterdam.

Wouter is a Microsoft MVP and independent expert on Office and SharePoint technologies. He has focused on SharePoint Foundation as a developer platform, wrote the world’s first book on Open XML and is an author for MSDN. Wouter is a trainer with Critical Path Training, with which he successfully authored and delivered SharePoint 2010 workshops to hundreds of professional software developers from Microsoft as well as other ISVs and System Integrators that have participated in the private beta as part of the TAP, Metro and Ignite programs.

Check out Wouter’s SharePoint 2010 Development tools project on CodePlex.