With the public release of SharePoint 2013, we at Bamboo have been working hard through the (seemingly never-ending) winter to get all of our Bamboo products ready for all of you early adopters out there. For those of you looking to hop onto Microsoft’s latest juggernaut, we plan to be there with our vast assortment of add-ons, applications, and solutions to make your SharePoint environment reach its full potential. For most organizations, that means managing not just people and documents, but business processes as well. To that end, I’m happy to say that we are in the final testing stages of our first 2013 version of Workflow Conductor. Upon release, Workflow Conductor 3.0 for 2013 will boast all of the great new features that our most recent 2010 version added, including:

• Conditional Delays – Pause a workflow until one of any number of different custom, user-defined conditions has been met.
• Email-based Approvals – Let workflow
  

  participants approve or reject items directly from email, without ever having to log into SharePoint. You decide who can do it, and where it works.

• Custom User Tasks – Create custom user polls and store an overall outcome based on configurable business logic.    
• Improved Lookups – Create multi-value lookups, easily add user and group lookups directly from the widget properties, and perform lookups on even more column types. We even added more Easy References.
• Updated Widgets – Many of Workflow Conductor’s existing widgets got some new/improved features, including…
  • Almost 20 new date/numerical/string functions for the Calculate widget
  • The ability to limit Repeat for Each Item activity loops to just the items in a specific list view
  • Optional and required fields on user task forms
  • The ability to add attachments to Approval/Feedback task notification emails

If that’s not enough to get you excited, don’t forget there are a ton of other features that came before the most recent release (3.0), which will be available in the 2013 release as well, including: 

• Easily perform workflow actions on SharePoint items across other sites, and even site collections
• Run each workflow step under specific credentials (the workflow initiator, the workflow designer, or an entirely different account)
• Advanced error handling that allows workflows to be paused when they encounter an error, and resume from the same spot when the underlying issue has been fixed
• Working seamlessly with Bamboo’s large portfolio of products, such as PM Central and Alert Plus  
• And much, much, more…

If you already own Workflow Conductor, and are planning to move to 2013, just make sure you have an active premium support contract, and your upgrade won’t cost a dime (at least not from Bamboo).

The official release announcement will be coming soon, so stay tuned to Bamboo Nation for more info!