Workflow Running Instance Migration

Question

Hi Folks,
In our current project we have scenarios where the current business transactions have proceeded to a certain stage(a given business transaction goes through various stages) . During migration we have developed the upload program to bring the transactions to the current stage as in legacy system.
The problem we are facing now is to bring the workflows to the exact same stage so that the later processing can be monitored by workflows.
e.g. For a change of supplier scenario where the current state of the switch document is not in completed status and the respective workflow is waiting for certain actions to be actioned how do we synchronise the workflow to the same state as it was in the legacy.
I would like to know how in other projects we have acheived migrating running instances of a given business transaction in to workflows.

Answer 1

Hi Imran,
That's a real tough one.  I have never been thru this migration effort like yours, but I would hazard a guess that you can't easily accomplish this...
One approach - let the documents go thru workflow from start to where they should be.  This may require a lot of manual steps (doing prveious approvals, etc) but at least you get the full auditable workflow log.  Depending on the volume, this may be do-able.
Another (perhaps not too late to implement) is to determine the state your documents are in, and implement an abbreviated version of your 'real' workflow - with the prior steps eliminated from the flow, so that it picks up where you need it.  Or, add conditional logic to test the status of your document, and then proceed to the correct step.
Thinking totally out of the box here, but I hope this is some help,
Sue