I’m doing some work with Nintex workflows at the moment. For those of you that don’t know Nintex Workflow 2010, it’s built on the Windows Workflow Foundation, using the SharePoint workflow engine. As a quick workflow creation tool, it’s a vast improvement over SharePoint Deisgner 2010, but at the heart, it is using SharePoint workflows and thus suffers from the same issues as SPD and VS2010 workflows.
The one that came to light today and is fondly remember from my SP2007 workflow days is that of the Delay activity and the relation it bears to the SharePoint timer service.
Basically in SharePoint 2007, there was a timer job that ran every 5 minutes and would check if any workflows needed deserializing and some actions performing. That’s great until you only wanted to pause a workflow for say 2 minutes, as it wouldn’t refresh until the timer job came around to wake it up.
After looking for the command to change the timer interval in SP2010, I discovered this Technet document regarding the timer service and it’s out of the box jobs and thought I’d be fine as it clearly states that the workflow job runs every minute. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc678870.aspx
Alas it doesn’t, when I checked the configuration for that timer job in Central admin, it’s set to 5 minutes out of the box. but, the good news, you can change that setting in Central Admin/Monitoring/Timer without having to drop to dos and enter a horrible stsadm -o set-property command. So an improvement at least.
Paul.
