For a few months already, I have been busy playing around with WSS 3.0 (Windows Sharepoint Services) and MOSS 2007 (Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server). Slowly but surely, the new features of both products are becoming clearer. I have not been busy fulltime with them so I am sure I only scratched the surface.

One of the more interesting new features is workflow. Recently, a whitepaper has been created that gives more information about workflows. The document describes how the workflows do their job and is an interesting read. Download it directly from here.

To play around with workflows, I suggest you install MOSS 2007 and check out the built-in workflows for document approval. As a next step, I recommend to use Sharepoint Designer and its workflow wizard to build a workflow using a few simple steps. Sharepoint Designer allows you to create quite powerful workflows without any development skills required. If you are a developer, you can of course create your workflows using Visual Studio .NET 2005 and the workflow extensions.

Be aware that workflows are in the base feature set of WSS 3.0. You do not need MOSS 2007 to be able to create workflows. I suggest you install MOSS 2007 because it adds some out-of-box workflows such as document approval on top of WSS 3.0.