Problem with terminated site workflows which continue working in Sharepoint Online

Recently we faced with interesting issue in Sharepoint Online: there were several 2013 site workflows on different sub sites which worked this way:

1. Iterate through publishing pages in Pages doclib of the current site and if current date is close to page’s Valid to date, workflow sends reminder email to responsible person
2. Wait 1 day and then repeat iteration through pages

i.e. by itself workflow never ends. However it is possible to terminate workflow from UI: Site contents > Site workflows > click workflow > End workflow (see my previous post Restart site workflows in Sharepoint Online)

We published new version from Sharepoint Designer, ended previous workflow instances from UI and started new instances. And here we found interesting issue: terminated workflow instances continued to work, i.e. they continued to send emails of previous version to the users. In UI their status was displayed as Terminated. At the moment we contacted MS support but if you know about this issue please share it in comments.

Restart site workflows in Sharepoint Online

Once you have published or made changes in existing site workflow in Sharepoint Online site you will need to restart existing running workflow instances in order to get new changes into use (otherwise they won’t take effect). In order to restart existing site workflow instance in Sharepoint Online you may use the following steps. Go to Site settings > Site contents and click “Site workflows” link on the top of the page:

Opened page will show list of all available site workflows together with list of running workflows and list of completed workflows:

If you will click on some workflow name from the top list – it will be started. If you will click on some running workflow instance workflow details page will be opened:

On this page there is a link “End workflow” (it looks like regular text, not as a link). By clicking this link you may stop existing workflow instance, then return to previous page and start new instance which will use new published workflow version.

Show Created date from Sharepoint document library via Word Quick parts

In Word it is possible to add Sharepoint metadata fields directly to the document: Insert > Quick parts > Document properties. The problem however is that we can’t show value of OTB Created field which contains datetime when document was added to the document library (don’t mix it with file created datetime which is shown when we check file properties in Windows explorer):

Fortunately there is workaround which can be used for achieving the same result. The idea is that we will create new custom field CreatedQP and will copy value from Created field to it. The question is how exactly values will be copied. First approach which comes to the mind is to created calculated field which will just copy value from Created field:

However if we will check available document properties in quick parts we will see that newly created calculated field is not shown there as well. So the only option is to create regular DateTime field and then copy value from Created field to it whether by using workflow or event receiver. In this article I will show how to do it via workflow.

So first of all we need to create new field:

After that we open parent site in Sharepoint Designer and create new List workflow for our document library:

Add new action “Update List Item” and configure it to copy value from Created field of current list item to CreatedQP field:

and finish workflow:

After that we configure workflow to start automatically when new document is added to the document library:

and publish workflow.

Now if we will add new document to the document library, open it in Word and add CreatedQP via Quick parts > Document properties:

created datetime from Sharepoint doclib will be shown in the document:

The drawback of this approach is that users will be able to change value of CreatedQP field via Quick part control. One possible way to avoid it is to try to make CreatedQP field readonly, but I didn’t test this approach by myself.

Send email to external users in Sharepoint 2013 workflow

As you probably know Sharepoint 2013 supports 2 workflow platforms:

• Workflows 2010
• Workflows 2013

Using of workflows 2013 in Sharepoint 2013 requires installation and configuration of Workflow manager – there are many guides available in internet at the moment so I won’t add it there. It gives us many new useful features like loops. Unfortunately there are also some limitation comparing with 2010 workflows. For example it is not so simple now to sent emails to external users. In 2013 workflow when you add action Send email you should specify valid (resolvable) Sharepoint user with non-empty email, not email itself. It was done for security purposes. Because of this you can’t anymore send email to external users as simple as it was in workflows 2010 where you could just specify user’s email in To field.

In order to avoid this issue we used Plumsail’s Workflow Actions Pack. Please note that it is commercial product, prices are available on their web site. It also has trial 30-days version when you may try this product. Documentation available on Plumsail doesn’t provide all necessary information which is needed for making actions pack work, so I will describe several additional steps.

When you will install the package there will be number of new actions available in Sharepoint Designer 2013. One of them is “Send email with attachments (SMTP)” (there is also possibility to send email via Exchange, but I didn’t try it). In this action together with email settings (recipient, subject, body) you need to specify SMTP host, port, ssl usage. Note that you may only use those SMTP servers which work with authenticated users. And you need to specify credentials in Email and Password fields of the workflow action together with other SMTP parameters (initially Plumsail documentation mentioned that these parameters belong to Exchange user, but at the moment of writing of this post it was already fixed – good work from their support. Also in Email field it is not necessary to specify real email. Some SMTP servers authenticate users with separate user id, which is not email). If you will leave these fields empty you will get the following exception;

Global Exception LoggerException: System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.    
at Plumsail.WFServices.Common.SmtpEmailRepository.I1e(String  )    
at Plumsail.WFServices.Common.SmtpEmailRepository.SendEmail(Email email)    
at Plumsail.WFServices.Services.ExchangeController.SendEmail(EmailSendRequest request)    
at SyncInvokeSendEmail(Object , Object[] , Object[] )    
at System.ServiceModel.Dispatcher.SyncMethodInvoker.Invoke(Object instance, Object[] inputs, Object[]& outputs)    
at System.ServiceModel.Dispatcher.DispatchOperationRuntime.InvokeBegin(MessageRpc& rpc)    
at System.ServiceModel.Dispatcher.ImmutableDispatchRuntime.ProcessMessage5(MessageRpc& rpc)    
at System.ServiceModel..Dispatcher.ImmutableDispatchRuntime.ProcessMessage31(MessageRpc& rpc)    
at System.ServiceModel.Dispatcher.MessageRpc.Process(Boolean isOperationContextSet)

This is one of limitations, because you can’t use your internal company SMTP server which is available only internally and doesn’t require authentication.

If you specified all SMTP settings with Email and Password you may also get the following error:

Exception: Could not load file or assembly 'Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices, Version=15.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.

In order to fix it you need to install MS Exchange web services API, which is available here. It may also confuse a bit, because Exchange API is needed in scenarios when you use SMTP. However after installation, it should successfully send emails to external users.

Create reminder workflow for Sharepoint Online which send emails when content is outdated

On the production sites it is often needed to monitor that content of appropriate pages is kept up to date. One of the way to do it is to create workflow which will check Modified date of the page and if it is older than specified time interval, sends email to responsible users. It can be done with custom workflow created in Sharepoint Designer 2013, but it is important to use “Sharepoint 2013 workflow” as template, because “Sharepoint 2010 workflow” don’t have very useful Go to action which will be needed in order to start workflow once and run it by the loop (by default in Sharepoint Online only 2010 workflows are enabled. See Enable Sharepoint 2013 workflows in Sharepoint Online post which shows how to enable 2013 workflows in Sharepoint Online).

In order to create such workflow we need to go to Sharepoint Designer 2013 and choose Workflows > List workflow. In the opened window specify workflow name and the platform:

In the workflow designer first of all we need to create workflow local variable called Past with Date/Time type:

Then create stages with actions like shown below:

Let’s go through stages one by one. First stage is called Initialization. Here we subtract 12 months from current date, store result to workflow local variable called Past and go to next stage called Check content and notify. In this stage we check whether Modified date of the current list item (page) is less than Past variable (current date minus 12 month). If yes, we send email with link on the item to the specific user:

Adding link on the current item to notification email in workflow is little bit tricky so I will also show how link is created:

I.e. we need to use Current Item URL from Workflow Context for link address.

On the last stage we wait for 30 days and repeat from stage 1. As result it will be enough to start workflow once for particular page (it can be done e.g. by selecting page in default doclib view and choose Advanced > Workflows in the context menu) and it will run by itself after that without need to restart it manually each month. This is one of the advantages of having Go to action.

Enable Sharepoint 2013 workflows in Sharepoint Online (Office 365)

In Sharepoint Online you may face with the problem when will try to create workflow in Sharepoint Designer 2013: only “Sharepoint 2010 workflow” will be available in Platform Type dropdown list, while new “Sharepoint 2013 workflow” won’t be there:

The problem will be more unclear after you will check in admin center’s settings page that “Block Sharepoint 2013 workflows” checkbox is unchecked:

In order to enable “Sharepoint 2013 workflows” in Office 365 go to Site settings > Workflow settings:

“Workflow Health” in parenthesis is actual a link (very hidden link which looks like text. This is for sure should be fixed by MS somehow). Click on it and you will see the following page:

On this page click Activate button. After that when you will reconnect to the site in Sharepoint Designer you should see “Sharepoint 2013 workflow” option in the list of available platforms:

Please note that this configuration should be made per SPWeb. I.e. if you activated it only on the root site, it won’t be available on the sub sites. You will need to activate it on sub sites where you need Sharepoint 2013 workflow separately. Hope that this information will help you.