A few of the past week's prodcasts have touched on the new workflow engine that Microsoft will be shipping soon, so I thought it would be interesting to have a deeper drill-down on the subject. I put out a few feelers to the product team to see who might be interested in doing an interview. Paul Andrew, a Technical Product Manager for the Windows Workflow Foundation, formerly code-named "WinOE", graciously accepted my invitation and spent some time with me on the phone recently. For those of you who follow Paul, he has co-authored a book on the subject which you can order from Amazon here. Paul also maintains a blog on the Windows Workflow Foundation, which you can read to get even more infomation.
In this week's prodcast, Paul gives an overview of the new Windows Workflow Foundation, which is part of the developer platform inside of Windows. He touches on some of the Microsoft products which will utilize "WF", such as Office 2007, SharePoint Server 2007, Speech Server 2007, and many others. Paul stops short of saying "WF" will be THE SOLE workflow engine from Microsoft going forward, but he does say that that's the goal. Paul highlights some of the workflow templates that will ship inside of SharePoint Server 2007, such as routing workflows from within document libraries.
Later in the interview, Paul gives many examples of how the new engine will benefit developers, since it's part of the .NET Framework 3.0. Paul also mentions third party companies like SourceCode K2 and Captaris who are going to be incorporating the Windows Workflow Foundation into the next versions of their products.
If you'd like to hear more about Microsoft's overall workflow strategy and hear examples of how the 2007 wave of IW products will incorporate human workflow, listen to this prodcast.
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