SharePoint Designer Workflow 2010 – Task Actions

I’m currently working on putting together a SharePoint Saturday session on the new 2010 Task Process in SharePoint Designer. This is part of my “Lessons Learned” articles to help me organize my thoughts to prepare for this session (SPSNY – July 28, 2012).
In SharePoint Designer 2010, you can choose six different task actions to create and assign a task. I personally prefer the more robust Task Processes, but it’s important to understand what the other Task Options that are available to you are and how they work.
The following items are true for the first three actions (Assign a Form to a Group, Assign a To-do item and Collect Data from a User):
Assign a Form to a Group (Available in SPD2007)
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Field Types Available: (all can be set to allow blank values):
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Single Line of Text
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Multiple Lines of Text
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Plain, rich or enhanced rich
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Number field
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Can set min/max values, set decimal places or set as percentage
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Currency field
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Can select currency, set min/max values, set decimals places
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Date and Time
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Date only or date and time
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Choice Field
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Checkboxes or dropdown, can allow fill-in choices
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Assign a To-Do Item (Available in SPD2007)
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Assigns a task but does not include a form to collect any information from the user.
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The form displays the form name, the description and Complete Task and Cancel buttons.
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Collect Data from a user (Available in SPD2007)
The following is true for the last three options (Approval Process, Custom Task Process, and Feedback Process). You can: As with the first three actions, the following is also true: Approval Process Custom Task Process Task Process Settings:
Task Settings:
Task Process Completion Conditions:
Feedback Process
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Comes with prepopulated task processes that can be edited as needed
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See Custom Task Process images to see what options can be set.
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Default Outcomes – Completed (Submit Feedback)
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These outcomes can be changed
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I personally favor the task processes that are listed as the last three task actions available. I’ve listed some of the cool things they can do above, but I plan to go into much more detail about all the things you can do and some pitfalls to avoid in future articles.