This Week in Bamboo (May 2nd, 2010 – May 8th, 2010)

For This week in Bamboo we rolled out a minor enhancement to one of our newest products Workflow Conductor.  With the latest release of Workflow Conductor (R1.1), we fixed some bugs and improved its performance.  See our Product Manager Announcement blog for more details. List of bugs fixed and information on all of the changes can be found below.

Workflow Conductor (R1.1)

Enhancements:

  • Conductor Studio now automatically saves a workflow to the template gallery before it is deployed.
  • Improves Conductor Studio diagram performance and reliability.
  • Enhances the Log Viewer web part.
  • Adds Conductor log management and archiving options.
  • Adds the ability to define options for handling workflow runtime errors.
  • Adds support for passing lookup values and workflow variables to SOAP services in the Call Web Service widget.
  • Adds support for passing lookup values and workflow variables to the Add and Update actions in the Access SP via REST widget.
  • Adds support for storing login credentials in the Call Web Service and Access SP via REST widgets.
  • Adds the ability to return the contents of a single XML tag from the results of a SOAP query in the Call Web Service widget.
  • Improves the workflow initialization form display and the initialization form builder user interface.
  • Adds a new Calculate widget to calculate the average, count, max, min or sum of two or more values.
  • Enhances the functionality of the Compare widget to allow lookups when comparing values.

Bugs Fixed:

  • Conductor does not work in a load balanced Windows Server 2003 multiple WFE farm.
  • The Conductor Studio diagram is unreliable with workflow diagrams that contain more than 20-30 widgets.
  • The Conductor Studio user interface does not auto size correctly at some screen resolutions.
  • Drag and drop of Conductor Studio widgets is sometimes unreliable.
  • Cut/Copy/Delete/Paste is unreliable in container widgets.
  • Cannot send e-mail when using the Use SMTP Secure Authenticated Connection option in General Settings.
  • Conductor is unable to connect to the database when the Conductor database is on a different machine than the SharePoint databases.
  • The Repeat While and Conditional widgets do not always continue the workflow when their conditions are met.
  • Some Easy Reference variables do not return the correct values.
  • The Create List widget does not show always show available sites for the Other Site in Site Collection option in a Windows Server 2008 64bit multiple WFE farm.
  • Workflow errors if workflow variables contain spaces in the variable name.
  • The Send Email widget fails if an address field contains a lookup.

The following are known issues/limitations for this release:

  • You must disable UAC Admin Approval Mode or turn off UAC to run Conductor on Windows Server 2008.
  • You can only drop a widget on the Conductor Studio diagram when the zoom level is set at 100%.
  • When you delete a widget from the Studio diagram, the property of the widget is still displayed in the right panel.
  • When Conductor is uninstalled, the Workflow Conductor Control Panel tab is not removed from the Central Administration site.
  • The Call Web Service and Access SP via REST widgets cannot access an external SharePoint site with Forms Based Authentication (FBA). This is because the MashPoint REST Extensions (required for Conductor widgets to access external SharePoint sites) do not yet support FBA.
  • If you use a Run Parallel widget with an Update Item in one branch and a Set Approval Status in the other, the item's Approval Status will always be set to "Pending" no matter what is specified in the Set Approval Status widget.
  • If you use the Copy Item widget to copy an item with an Approval Status column, the status will always be "Pending". If you need the status to be something other than "Pending", use another widget (such as Set Approval Status, Update Item, or Set Field Value) to update the Approval Status after you copy the item.
  • When upgrading from Workflow Conductor 1.0 to 1.1, you may see two task lists: one called "WorkflowTasks" and one called "Workflow Tasks" (with a space). The default task list name was changed in Workflow Conductor 1.1. You can continue to use the version 1.0 task list by changing the Default Task List Name in the Workflow Conductor Control Panel > General Settings page.
  • A workflow status column will appear in a list or library for only the first 15 workflows. This is default SharePoint behavior.
  • Widget properties may appear out of order if you are running Conductor on a Windows Server 2003 64 bit multiple WFE farm.
  • In the Wait for Field Change widget, lookups are not available for Yes/No and Choice fields.
  • In the Access SP via REST widget, you cannot update a Calendar list item's End Time.
  • Other general bug fixes and stability improvements.