Workflow Config

[Shena Goorawa]

Hi 

I am looking to implement a workflow for releases for our development team. Confluence currently hold our release checklists and we manage the workflow in Sharepoint. But if this can be achieved in Confluence, this will be first prize! 

Regards,

Shena 

[Elena Cantero]

Hi Shena,

I’m a product manager with Comalatech, one of Atlassian’s Marketplace Partners. One possible solution to your problem could be our app Comala Document Control. We recently introduced the ability to define a custom workflow which you could use to manage your checklists. You can install the app from the marketplace. If you have any questions please do ask here or via our support team https://support.comalatech.com/

Kind regards :-)

[Mike Rathwell]

Hi @Shena Goorawa ,

I honestly understand the with to move away from SharePoint. While it ostensibly has a workflow engine, it... hurts. Even worse, having a collaboration portal like Confluence that works so well and easily next to one that... doesn't... 

Anyway, while it's not really its purpose, there is a workflow engine for Confluence Cloud. This might suit your needs. That said, given that workflow for Confluence is a bit of a force fit, you might look at Jira (serious process engine) or Trello to run your process and use Confluence as the documentation/collaboration portal.

In my shop, Confluence is used as that along with reports that automatically pull in information from Jira for status, progress, etc. Jira does a fabulous job of running any process one might care to mention and Confluence documents it well without creating information silos that tend to show up with shared docs or, worse, SharePoint.

[Shena Goorawa]

Thanks @Mike Rathwell 

Would you be able to share information on the workflow config in Jira (would this honestly be a suitable replacement to the Sharepoint Workflow?) 

[Mike Rathwell]

Good morning @Shena Goorawa 

Sharing a workflow config is a tough one as there are so many combinations and permutations that and "one" may or may not fit your needs. Rather, I will address the latter part of your question with some thoughts and ideas as to whether Jira would be a suitable replacement for SharePoint workflow....

Having had to deal with SharePoint workflows in the past, the answer to that question is an unequivocal "yes". SharePoint is clumsy, painful to implement, and simplistic being largely just a state workflow with SOME conditions. Conversely a Jira workflow can be essentially anything you need it to be with its limitations only one's imagination. A workflow in Jira isn't just the states/statuses. Rather, the real power lay in the "lines" between the states. In those transitions we can have:

• Conditions
  • A given set of conditions must be satisfied to even present the transition to the next status
  • Extremely useful to make sure a transition can't be attempted if all is not correct on the ticket
  • Can be used to present different transitions based on content of the ticket
• Validators
  • One can select the transition to the next state but ticket content will be validated before the transition is performed
  • If it doesn't meet validation, will provide an error (and often a custom one depending on the validator used
• Post Functions
  • After a transition occurs, a broad variety of things can be done with the ticket automatically
  • Automatic actions can be as varied as changing data in fields, changing assignees, adding/changing ticket watchers, etc.

When one adds in the ability to create custom fields of a variety of types quickly and easily and the extremely rich ecosystem of addins that enhance all of the above along with field types available it gets even bigger. Further, a couple of addons that are staples in any environment I administer let me use Groovy scripts for very complex and automated workflows.

With SharePoint, with its limitations, an administrator/developer/consultant almost always gets to a "good enough" implementation to do things but never an "ideal".  I always found myself frustrated by knowing what I'd LIKE to do for my user base but just could not. Further, what I was able to do was almost always painful to accomplish.

With Jira, I am able to build out a process that exactly fits a given user's needs. In my environment, I have not only the technical and developer processes managed, but also all the marketing, HR, legal, office services, creatives (writers, photo, video, and merch) supported in just the way they need to be and allow for interaction between disparate groups/processes where each runs the way they need to without impacting how another group operates. In all that, I am able to make rigidly controlled processes that don't feel rigidly controlled and the tool with its management control never gets in they way of doing the actual job. An upshot of all this where all process is run in one place and documentation/collaboration/etc is run in only one OTHER place is that I go a LONG way to flattening sources of truth and abolishing information silos. Unfortunately SharePoint actually exacerbates the problem since I have found it so restrictive and incapable, it usually ends up being a rather clumsy file server that has impositions to just getting the work done and causes people to go around the process because it seldom fits.