With the addition of Windows Workflow Foundation in SharePoint 2007 the possibilities for the way lists are used in business processes are huge! With the inclusion of the friendly interface to create workflows in SharePoint designer it is amazingly easy to add custom workflows.

One of the most common requests I get is for a list item to be routed by email to a particular person based on one of the item values. Eg. If an item has the country field set to UK send an email to John Smith but if the country field is set to USA then send an email to Chuck Saltman. This is now extremely easy using the conditional workflows but it took a bit of fiddling about with the fields in the body of the email to produce a link to the current item.

The link to put into the body of the email message is as follows:

<a href="http://[serverName]/sites/[siteName]/Lists/[listName]/DispForm.aspx?ID=[%[listName]:ID%]">Link to item</a>

So in the case of a list called Products this would be:

<a href="http://[serverName]/sites/[siteName]/Lists/Products/DispForm.aspx?ID=[%Products:ID%]">Link to item</a>

Introduction to SharePoint Designer workflow