Like many organizations, much of the collaborative work we perform at Crowe Chizek is done using electronic documents. In years past, we stored many of the documents we utilized in file shares, which had a number of limitations for collaboration. Our biggest challenge was organizing the file shares in an intuitive fashion.

Our company wanted to build a workflow process around the task of approving new clients. A workflow is a series of tasks performed to complete a particular goal. We perform financial services, so client approval is important for risk assessment and regulatory compliance. We began turning to online collaboration tools to organize our processes. Often, online collaboration is performed as a part of a workflow process.

Requirements for our client approval process essentially amounted to review and approval by various individuals within our organization. The approval routing was dynamic and based on the group making the client approval request. We decided to use SharePoint, the Microsoft standard for online collaboration, for the document receptacle, but we realized we needed to augment it in some way to incorporate workflow in the process. We wanted to utilize the power of our InfoPath 2003 installation to quickly design forms. InfoPath stores its data as XML documents.

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