A custom workflow activity allows you to add complex processing steps to your configurable workflows. Workflows are ideal for long-running processes as they do not face the two-minute timeout limitation that plugins have. Workflows can be run on demand as well as after triggering an event. Workflows can be configured by power users using a point and click user interface. Once custom activities are defined they can also be used as a point and click configuration without requiring additional .NET coding.

Creating a customer workflow activity is very similar to plugins. In this recipe, we will create a custom workflow activity that executes the exact same functionality as the plugin described in the previous section. In fact, rather than writing the workflow from scratch, we will turn the plugin into a workflow.

One of the great features of a custom workflow activity is that it can take input parameters and generate output parameters; a great feature if you want to process some data and pass the output to another workflow step.