I was doing a bit of digging through the most informative source of SharePoint documentation - my fellow SharePoint professional's blogs - and I discovered something that could have serious consequences for many organizations.  Take a look at Dave Wollerman's blog post entitled Huge MOSS Workflow Issue... What is Mircrosoft Thinking!!!!.  Here is the scoop in short; workflow history is purged after 60 days!  That's alright, it's no big deal if you don't care about storing your information for more than 2 months.  For those of us that live in the real world though, this could be very detrimental, especially for organizations that get audited.

 

I have been working very extensively with an international asset management firm for over a year now, and they get audited regularly.  Luckily for them, the way I build my workflows does not rely on any information being stored within the workflow history.

 

Rather than logging events in the workflow, and assigning tasks that are associated with the item that the workflow was initiated from, I have always opted for a simpler approach.  Now when I say simpler I mean from an end user perspective, not an initial setup/design perspective. 

 

I don't like assigning tasks to users through a workflow because the e-mails that users receive from a newly created task are just too cluttered.  There is a handful of links that take users everywhere except you tube, and in my experience this results in too much confusion to be productive.

 

I also don't like navigating into the workflow details screen to see what has happened.

 

My approach to designing workflows that are simple, easy to understand, and effective, revolves around one concept - centralization.  Rather than having a list item, a workflow, and many associated tasks, all to accomplish one process, I send out custom e-mails from the workflow that link to custom XSLT data form web parts that allow users to update hidden fields on the same list item from which the workflow was initiated.  The end result is that all auditable information is stored in hidden fields on the list item.  These fields can then be displayed on a custom XSLT data view web part as an audit page.  This way when 60 days go by and your workflow goes down the drain, all of the important information is still available via the list item.