21.1. Exploring SharePoint Workflow Settings
The SharePoint administration Web pages provide administrators with a number of settings at various levels for managing workflows. These settings are accessible by using the SharePoint Central Administration Web pages of the SharePoint farm and the Site Settings Web pages of a SharePoint site collection or a SharePoint site.
21.1.1. Working with global settings in SharePoint Central Administration
The global settings for workflow management on a SharePoint farm are available at the SharePoint Central Administration Web site. You can access the SharePoint Central Administration Web site on a SharePoint Web server (a Windows Server 2003 machine) by choosing Start 
Administrative Tools 
SharePoint 3.0 Central Administration. The SharePoint Web application level workflow settings are available in the Workflow management section of the Application Management tab. Clicking the Workflow Settings link in the Workflow Management section takes you to the Workflow Settings Web page, as shown in Figure 21.1.
Figure 21.1. Web Application–level workflow settings
Use the Web Application dropdown menu to choose the SharePoint Web application you want to change the settings for. The Workflow Settings Web page allows you to configure the following settings:
User-Defined Workflows: This setting enables or disables the use of the user-defined workflows on the selected Web application. If you disable user-defined workflows by using this setting for your SharePoint Web application, you can't create new workflows via SharePoint Designer.
Workflow Tasks Notifications: These settings allow you to configure the behavior for the workflow tasks that are assigned to users who don't have access to the SharePoint Web site. The Alert internal users who do not have site access when they're assigned a workflow task? option allows you to send an e-mail to the users, making them aware that a workflow task has been assigned to them. The Allow external users to participate in workflow by sending them a copy of the document? option allows you to configure if the workflow document can be sent to the user in an e-mail for task completion.
If the User-Defined Workflow option is disabled by using the setting described earlier, Web designers using SharePoint Designer can't use or create workflows. You need to keep this setting enabled if you're using SharePoint Designer workflows on your Web site.
21.1.2. Configuring site collection settings
The Site Settings Web page for a SharePoint Web site also has a number of Web pages that can help administrators view the state of workflows. These settings, however, don't show any SharePoint Designer workflow-related data or settings. They can be used to activate or deactivate SharePoint out-of-the-box workflows. You can access the Site Settings page by choosing Site Actions 
Site Settings in the top-right corner of the SharePoint site. On the Site Settings Web page, under the Site Collection Administration section, is the Site Collection Feature link. Click this link to open the Site Collection Features Web page, as shown in Figure 21.2, where administrators can activate or deactivate features. This includes the workflow features that are installed by default with SharePoint.
Figure 21.2. Checking the activation status of workflow features by using the Site Collection Features Web page
Also, the Galleries section on the Site Settings page has the Workflows link, which can be used to view and monitor the status of SharePoint out-of-the-box workflows being used inside the Web site. The status column in this list indicates whether the workflow has been activated on the site for usage, while the association column lists the total number of workflow associations.
21.1.3. Managing content type settings
As indicated previously, workflows created via SharePoint Designer can't be associated with SharePoint site content types. The SharePoint content type settings available in SharePoint sites make sense only for the out-of-the-box SharePoint workflows or custom workflows developed programmatically and deployed to the SharePoint server.
The workflow settings for a particular content type are accessible by using the Content Type settings page. Click the Site Content Types link in the Galleries section of the Site Settings page to access the Content Type settings page. Then, in the list of content types for the Web site, click the content type you want to view the workflow settings for. As shown in Figure 21.3, clicking the Workflow settings link in the Content Type settings page allows you to associate a workflow with the chosen content type.
Figure 21.3. Associating workflows with content types
Only the SharePoint out-of-the-box workflows are available for association with content types. SharePoint Designer workflows aren't available for association here.
Other than the workflow settings described in the previous sections, SharePoint also allows you to configure workflow behavior to a certain extent by providing properties that can be set by using stsadm.exe, the command-line SharePoint administration tool. Before you review these properties, it's important for you to understand that workflows generate events that are queued by SharePoint by using an event-queuing mechanism. The SharePoint Timer service (owstimer.exe) is responsible for reading this queue and performing operations based on the schedule of the event. For example, when the workflow runtime engine encounters a delay activity (like the Pause for duration action in SharePoint Designer), it logs a workflow event in the SharePoint event queue and then dehydrates the workflow. The SharePoint Timer service repeatedly polls the event queue and, when the appropriate time is reached, assists in rehydrating the workflow. The workflow properties that are discussed in Table 21.1 are useful in tuning the SharePoint event scheduling and polling mechanism. This table lists the workflow-related stsadm properties that can be used to change workflow behavior at an application or site level: