“The option for SharePoint 2013 workflow platform is not available because the workflow service is not configured on the server” Of course like most IT Professionals I always read the instructions carefully and follow a whitepaper or something when installing software so I can benefit from a perfect installation. By default, in SharePoint 2013, Workflow Manager Service is not configured. Workflow Manager Service has to be downloaded, installed and configured manually before it can be used in SP 2013. Here is a step by step walk-through. Step 1: Open Microsoft Web Platform Installer.

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Sharepoint 2013 Workflow Tutorial

Microsoft introduced the new workflow engine in SharePoint 2013 – Workflow Manager. This service is based on Windows Workflow Foundation and brings new features to the SharePoint platform, such as scalability, new activities, REST, and instance management.

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This new engine is not available in the OOTB installation. A clean SharePoint installation offers only SharePoint 2010 Workflow.

What we can do to use SharePoint 2013 Workflow?

SharePoint 2013 offers many improvements over previous versions of the platform. Some of those are very apparent, and some are not so much. In fact, there are a handful of new features that almost seem to be hidden by the OOTB (out-of-the-box) installation.

To use a windows server as workflow manager you need to install/configure Workflow Manager in the windows server. Workflow manager is a new kind of application server that host/manage workflow execution. SharePoint 2013 workflow is based on .net framework 4.0. Workflow Manager is designed with Window Azure hosting in mind, but now it supports on-premise installation. If organizations now want to host the workflow on-premise they can still use Workflow Manager but in future if they want to move to Windows Azure hosting for their workflow, the migration will be smoother with this Workflow Manager.

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One of these not so apparent features is the new Workflow engine, exclusively designed for use with SharePoint 2013. Some of you may be asking: where is it, how do I enable it, is it installed by default, etc…?

Before start installing/developing SharePoint Manager you need to know few points:

You should NOT use SharePoint ‘system account’ to test workflow. If you use ‘system account’ to develop/run workflow, the workflow will fail to run, can’t use farm account.
You need to make sure User Profile Service (UPS) is running and the user who is running workflow has profile in UPS. Workflow Manager use UPS under the hood.
Make sure App Management Service is created and running. You don’t need to configure SharePoint 2013 App settings in the server, just creating App Management service (with proxy) will do.
SharePoint 2013 workflow is declarative – means you can only define workflow in XML. You can’t write any C# code inside workflow as you used to do before. All your custom logic should be put outside of SharePoint, inside WCF Service. Then you will call the service from workflow to implement your custom logic in code.
To register workflow Server with SharePoint, a SharePoint site collection URL is provided (see the section Register Workflow Service with SharePoint later in the post). Apparently it seems, each and every site collection need to be registered with workflow server. But it’s not, registering a single SharePoint site collection, will enable workflow manager for all SharePoint web applications/site collections.

The scope of this guide is simply to provide you with the steps needed to take full advantage of this new workflow engine and the improved features that come with it. For an overview of the new engine and what capabilities it offers, please refer to this SharePoint 2013 Workflow Fundamentals page provided by Microsoft. Also here is a reference for How to Install Workflow Manager Certificates in SharePoint Server 2013.

User and Service Accounts

Much misinformation and guidance exists around the user and service accounts, and groups required for Workflow Manager. Commonly two accounts are detailed, the Configuration user and the RunAs User.

The Configuration User (also known as the Setup User) is simply the account used to install and configure the Workflow Manager farm. There is absolutely no requirement whatsoever to create a dedicated user account for this. Obviously one can do so if needed, think of this like the SharePoint “setup” user, which is often promoted as a “best practice” but is nothing of the sort. Regardless of if you are using a dedicated account here, or making use of an existing account, for a three server farm it must be a domain account, which is a local machine administrator of the three servers on which you will install and configure Workflow Manager. This account must also be a Security Administrator and Database Creator on the SQL Server instance you will be using to host the Workflow Manager related databases.

The RunAs User is the service account identity of the Workflow Manager services. For a three server farm again this must be a domain account. The necessary permissions for this account are applied when the Workflow Manager farm is created. Other than creating the service account and specifying it during the farm creation, nothing else is needed. If your organisation implements password policy for service accounts, there is a specific procedure using Windows PowerShell to update credentials within the farm.

The Admin Group is a group containing the principals whom will administer the Workflow Manager farm (for example by running Windows PowerShell cmdlets). By default this will be the built in Administrators group on each server in the farm. That works just great as long as you administer the farm using an administrator account! If you wish to have more control across a three server farm, this should be (not must be) a Domain Group and obviously contain the user accounts needed. Under no circumstances whatsoever is it necessary to add SharePoint Service Accounts into this group. That is just bogus guidance.

Sharepoint 2013 Workflow Tutorial

Now that you have a thorough understanding of the SharePoint 2013 Workflow, let’s begin the installation and configuration.

In order to install Workflow Manager, you will need to download it as part of the Web Platform Installer 4.0, which is packaged with Workflow Manager 1.0. You can download this directly from Microsoft here.

Workflow infrastructure in SharePoint 2013 is not set up as part of the installation process of the platform. You can install WAS in an independent server or in a web frontend server after you have installed SharePoint 2013. There are two options to install Workflow infrastructure for SharePoint 2013:

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Use the Web Platform Installer available at: http://www.microsoft.com/web/downloads/platform.aspx
Download and install the workflow individual components from http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=35375

Installing Workflow Manager 1.0

To simplify the workflow infrastructure setup, we are going to use the Web Platform Installer option explained above: