Over at Tridion Developer, Chris Summers posts today about the forthcoming Tridion Bundles feature, and how it may be bringing a revival to the fortunes of Tridion workflow. He says: "Now given the sparkle I have seen in people’s eyes whenever they say 'Bundles…', I am pretty confident that something great is coming in the next major release, and I thought it might be time resurrect the workflow debate in the community – if we get vocal about these things now, we may see some of our dreams sneaking in with the bundles."

Picking up on this thought, I've set out to attempt to articulate what my concerns with the existing implementation have been and what I hope for in any new approach. I don't know very much about the Bundles feature - it's all pretty much still under wraps over at Tridion HQ, so I'm not really going to cast my criticisms and suggestions in terms of Bundles. Maybe the Bundles team have already considered all these concerns, and their design covers the same ground in an entirely different way. I'm just going to put it in terms of how things are now, and you can extrapolate.

So what's wrong with workflow as it now stands? Well you'll get different answers depending on who you talk to. If you ask different people what Workflow features in a product like Tridion should offer, you'll generally get answers that fall roughly in to one of these categories:

1. Something intended to enforce governance requirements, where some level of process automation is a necessary evil
2. Something which is intended primarily to support process automation, and within which enforcing governance rules is one of several possible applications

On more than one occasion, I've heard criticisms of Tridion from people whose prior experience had led them to expect the latter. My defence of Tridion would usually come out of the notion that Tridion's workflow support is in the first category, and was never intended to be the second. (OK - if pressed, I have to accept that the literal meaning of the word Workflow is far closer to the second than the first) Now right there, you've already got a huge debate. If Chris asks: "Why can’t Tridion notify me when I have something to review", then perhaps he's suggesting that some process automation might be a good thing. Whatever...  Chris doesn't need me to put words in his mouth, and I'm sure he'll make his position clear in his promised expansions on the subject. For myself, I don't have a real problem if Tridion doesn't support process automation "out of the box", as long as it's not too hard to wire it up if that's what you want. If SDL chose to offer workflow support as a third-party integration, I'd be fine with that, although I suspect that the amount of architectural changes required might be significant. As a web content management system intended for enterprise customers, there will always be a proportion of those who need to implement governance rules, and for them, I suspect the built-in support would need to do at least this much, as the current implementation does.

In terms of the existing approach, the biggest problem is probably that workflow controls access to versions by riding on the back of the check-in mechanism. The check-in mechanism in turn is designed to ensure that when you are working on something, other people can't see the change until you check it in. When an item "goes in to" workflow, the item is checked-out to the system workflow user, and remains checked out until it leaves workflow. Intermediate saves don't get a new version number, but a "revision", and these revisions are visible to the current workflow assignee if they use the workflow features to access the item. At first sight, this seems like a great plan, because the workflow sub-system doesn't have to do a thing to manage the visibility of the version of the item. If only it were so simple.

Well almost: there's a second mechanism - approval statuses - whereby workflow controls which version of an item can be used for publishing. If this worked as you might intuitively imagine it worked, then it would be great. By using workflow, you can assign an approval status to an item. If you see that approval status, you know that the item has been through a specific workflow activity. Approval statuses are in an ordered list, and you can specify a Minimum Approval Status on a publication target. The fly in the ointment is that Tridion only respects these approval statuses while the item remains in workflow.

This combination of workflow items being checked-out, and an approval status mechanism that doesn't work outside workflow, adds up to some pretty tricky problems to solve if, for example, you want to have workflow on both pages and components. Especially for the end users, it can be particularly disturbing when the edit you have just made to a component disappears when you view the same thing from the page.

The basic idea behind approval statuses is a good one. Specifically, the idea that you can associate data with a given version of an item, and that this allows you to evaluate which version of an item ought to be used for a particular activity, or even more generally to drive any business rule. The key thing here is that the only way you can write that data is to ensure that the item goes through a specific workflow activity. (Apart from that last condition, doesn't this remind you of Application Data?) If this "workflow data" were to include some kind of visibility constraints, then maybe you could do away with the dependency on the check-out mechanism. If nothing else, removing that dependency would probably make it much more feasible to integrate with third-party tools.

OK - as I've said, I'm suggesting a radical re-architecture, and I'm quite sure that such things take far more consideration than it has taken me to knock out a quick blog article, As I understand it, the Bundles thinking is already fairly far developed, and as I've said, maybe they've taken a completely different view of things. Still - I think Chris is right to suggest that now is the time for us to be vocal about what we want. What if the workflow experience were smooth enough that we could consider using it for process automation? As things stand, we mostly end up advising people that workflow is a measure only to be used in cases of necessity. There is so much scope for a positive change here, that I'm really looking forward to the next generation of Tridion workflow, whatever that ends up looking like.