As part of its push to make Microsoft Office the premier business knowledge-management platform, Microsoft has added a workflow design tool to its top-of-the-line Microsoft Office 2000 Developer product. Access Workflow Designer for SQL Server, formerly known by the code name Grizzly, is a set of tools that uses the data access and Web capabilities in Microsoft Access 2000 to read and modify a Microsoft SQL Server database.

Access Workflow Designer is a powerful demonstration of what can happen when key features of Microsoft's premier tools--Access 2000, SQL Server, Visual Basic, and IIS--are merged to accomplish workflow design. The tools themselves are easy to use and deliver sophisticated results. The documentation is some of Microsoft's best, with plenty more to be found on the Office Developer Web site. Best of all, the price is right--at least once you've shelled out the $1,000 or so for the developer version of Office 2000.

Access Workflow Designer lets a process architect create an application that allows users to manage the flow of information among individuals or teams. A user can check the state of a particular task or document and keep track of items within the user's scope of responsibility. The tool builds the workflow's features on a SQL Server database that's customized for each workflow application, rather than requiring data to be forced into a rigid, predefined structure.

With Access Workflow Designer, every workflow project begins with a SQL database that contains information about the process; the database is designed and built before any of the workflow design tools are applied. For example, the database for a client-contract workflow might contain information about the client, project, people involved, and due dates. The database can be designed using a product such as Embarcadero's ER/Studio before turning it into a workflow process.

Next, the database is readied for use. If Workflow Designer, the main tool in the product, is running against a specific database for the first time, the Database Registration wizard starts up. This tool automatically modifies the schema to add fields for maintaining states, which are designer-defined stages in the workflow that correspond to important milestones or other parts of the process; applying business rules; setting up offline replication, so users can make modifications when not connected to the network; and instituting optional row-level security.

In our review, the wizard added seven tables, 31 stored procedures, and three views to the database to keep track of system status information. I'm always a bit leery of applications that modify databases on my behalf, but the tool seemed to do a good job of keeping workflow data separate from the primary data in the tables.

The Database Registration wizard also creates a Web site for the workflow application. Unfortunately, this Web site needs to be located on the default Web server, which must reside on the same machine as the one running SQL Server and the Workflow Designer Server tools. I dislike having multiple servers running on a single machine, particularly Microsoft Internet Information Server and SQL Server, if I expect a heavy user load. Hopefully, this restriction will be eased or removed in future versions of Access Workflow Designer.

Once the database is built, the real fun begins. Using the Access Workflow Designer tools, you can define various states through which the proposal and contract will pass.

For the client contract workflow, I created states for Proposal, Contract Signed, Work in Progress, and Completed, reflecting the normal sequential flow for this project. Since a project can be canceled at any point in its life, I built workflows leading from each of these states to an additional Canceled state. I also designed actions that take a contract from one state to the next, such as a Sign Contract action that moves a project from Proposal to Contract Signed.

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