SharePoint 2013 Workflow Stages

One of the items I promised to look more at recently is the added functionality in SharePoint 2013 Workflows.  Now some people prefer to stay away from SharePoint Designer 2013 and the functionality it offers because of the previous history of the tool, but I believe for organisations working on a budget and looking to leverage as much from SharePoint as they can it proves to be a useful tool.

For this demo I am showing how the new stages on a SharePoint Designer workflow can help show the status of the workflow process.  So we can influence what stage a workflow is displayed at without opening the history.  I have used a simple example of taking a value and moving on to the next stage in the dropdown automatically.  The pauses in my example may often be replaced with Approval steps on a document.

So our workflow has four stages and each one pauses before moving the current item on to the next value.  We will also see how the Stage name appears in our library view as the workflow progresses.

Once the workflow is published we can then add a document and start the workflow manually from the library.

This will then move it on the first stage and display the stage name.

 

In the ‘My Custom Workflow’ column we are shown the stage name.  The same goes for each other stage in the process.

 

And finally.

 

 

This is an improvement with SharePoint 2013 and allows us to be descriptive with the stage information.