Student Withdrawal is possibly one of the more complex business process that we will be attempting to recreate in SharePoint 2010. The process requires a large amount of information from various different areas and the process has to go through various people throughout the university, including Student Support, Student Administration and the Students Course Faculty.
We created the content type and all the columns required from work but after that, Michael and I decided that we should work from my house (quieter environment) in order to quickly get through the basics of the workflow in a day. We started with the core process first as that mainly just involves handing various people different tasks to remove the student from the university, tasks like removing them from QLS, calculating tuition fees and awarding them any certificates if required.
The path to the actual withdrawal is a little more complex. The workflow that we created takes two main paths. If the student is being withdrawn due to lack of attendance, emails will be sent out to the Student and a staff member will be asked to send a notification letter through the post. The student is given 30 days to reply to the letter in order to keep their place at the university, this part was difficult to replicate in a workflow as workflows in SharePoint Designer 2010 are incapable of performing loops. As a temparary measure the workflow checks to see if the “Student Replied” field equals true or false, if false it will pause for three days, check it again and pause for another three days, it does this until 30 days have passed or the “Student Replied” field is updated to equal true. When this system is actually used the workflow will check for a reply every day. Once this was finished the rest of the workflow assignes a series of tasks depending on the fields in the form like filling in the exit interview information. This was a slightly ineffective way of carrying it out but it worked. We would start the testing and improve the whatever areas we can in the next session