What's the difference between an "Integration" in U-LINC and a "Workflow"?

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I have always been a stickler when it comes to technical terminology because often time’s miscommunication occurs when someone inadvertently says one thing, but means another. My coworkers (and my wife :) hate it when I “correct”their statement using a more precise &/or correct word. However, I believe it is important for the listener to fully understand the thought that is being conveyed.

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That being said, our internal team as well as our customers and partners have had some confusion as we have rolled out U-LINC in distinguishing where an “Integration” ends and a “Workflow” begins. 

Quite simply, a U-LINC Integration is the definition of the business critical data that we want to listen for changes on in SQL Server.

From Websters Online Dictionary:

Workflow

A workflow is a reliably repeatable pattern of activity enabled by a systematic organization of resources, defined roles and mass, energy and information flows, into a work process that can be documented and learned. Workflows are always designed to achieve processing intents of some sort, such as physical transformation, service provision, or information processing.

Workflows are closely related to other concepts used to describe organizational structure, such as silos, functions, teams, projects, policies and hierarchies. Workflows may be viewed as one primitive building block of organizations. The relationships among these concepts are described later in this entry.

The term is used in computer programming to capture and develop human to machine interaction. Workflow software aims to provide end users with an easier way to orchestrate or describe complex processing of data in a visual form, much like flow charts but without the need to understand computers or programming.

In the case of SharePoint, the automation of a “Workflow” is handled by the SharePoint Workflow engine and is comprised of “Steps” and “Actions”.  You can group your workflow actions within a series of steps.  These steps can mirror your current manual business process.  The actions can then automate some of the work that needs to occur to complete a particular business process.  SharePoint has several workflow actions included out of the box and you can extend the workflow actions available to you through the many extensibility tools available for SharePoint, some free, some for a fee.

Given these definitions, we can have a single “Integration” which could have multiple “Workflows”.  For example, you have a workflow for customer credit limit changes and a workflow for collecting a customer tax exemption number.  Both of these workflows would be supported by a single U-LINC “Integration”.

I hope this brings clarity to the difference between these tightly interwoven concepts.