Migrating sharepoint workflows from dev to test to production

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We are new to sharepoint and creating a sharepoint 2010 environment. The first project is a site with 23 different workflows. We have created the site with the workflows in our development environment using SharePoint Designer. To migrate the workflows to our test environment, we exported all 23 workflows using SharePoint Designer into 23 .wsp files. We then imported these into the solution gallery in our test environment and activated them on the test site.

While this worked, it was cumbersome and took a lot of time. Is there a better way? I have tried searching online, and so far have failed to find anything. How do you handle your migration from dev to test to production? Do you recreate in each environment? Is there a 3rd party that offers a solution or tooling?

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sharepointsharepoint-2010sharepoint-designersharepoint-workflow
Are you aware you can script all of the solution adding and feature activating with powershell? If you're touching the mouse, you're doing it wrong. – x0n
This is one of many problem with Sharepoint. I personally use custom workflows in visual studio and powershell because i hate touching the mouse. But according to a Sharepoint trainer certified by Microsoft you really should be doing it manually using the designer recreating every step you did. And by the way you were lucky as I had problems before doing the same process as you exporting as wsp and reimporting. – Luis

1 Answers

1
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I don't know about a 3rd party tool, but I always prefer working in Visual Studio than SharePoint Designer + UI. If you rename your *.wsp files to *.cab files, you can grab the deployable contents of the *.wsp and put them into a single solution which will generate a single *.wsp file.

Also, using Visual Studio will allow you to do other neat things like automatically associate your workflows with specific named lists via a Feature Receiver.