Step by step Install SharePoint Workflow Manager

With SharePoint 2013 comes a new way of doing workflows.



Installing SharePoint Server 2013 gives you the same functionality as a SharePoint 2010 workflow out of the box, however to make use of the much greater feature set that is workflows in SharePoint 2013 you need to install the newWorkflow Manager.

Co-located or Standalone

Before installing you need to decide if you are going to run the Workflow Manager co-located with a running SharePoint 2013 instance or if you are going to install it as a standalone server. Installing it as a standalone server has obvious advantages in
that it removes the load of running workflows from your SharePoint farm to a server that you can tailor to your specific needs.

Installing SharePoint 2013

You don’t need to install SharePoint 2013 if you are running Workflow Manager as a standalone server but I thought I would share a couple of items of interest I found while installing my SharePoint farm. I am not going to cover installing SharePoint 2013
in any detail, there are plenty of blogs out there that cover that. In my farm I have SharePoint 2013 installed on Windows Server 2012 and one thing I have found is that the pre-requisite installer fails when trying to configure the web server role. The workaround
for this appears to be to install the Web Server role manually with the IIS6 scripting options installed and to also install the .Net 3.5 features manually as well specifying an alternative source as the installation DVD with a path of D:\Sources\SxS (where
D: is the drive letter of your DVD drive)

Once they are installed manually the pre-requisite installer is quite happy installing the other software and you can install SharePoint 2013 with no other issues.

Installing Workflow Manager

The installation of Workflow Manager uses the Web Platform Installer from Microsoft, thisinstallation link should open the installer for you.

Once the installer runs then it will load up the Web Platform Installer.





Clicking Install will pop up a window showing you the pre-requisites.





Clicking I Accept will start the install of the pre-requisites.





Once installed you will need to configure the Workflow Manager.





Clicking Continue will pop up the configuration screen.





From this screen you can choose to configure with the default settings, this will install a standard Workflow Manager Farm which you can join servers to in the future or you can choose to select the option to use custom settings.

Lets do the custom settings option so you can see what types of settings you can choose.

The first screen is where you set the database connection and database names. You also use this screen for authentication and certificate settings. You will also need to set a certificate generation key, this is used if you decide to join other servers to
the workflow manager farm.





NOTE

Ensure you enter a FQDN for the user ID such as
user@domain.local

The next screen configures the settings for the Service Bus.





From here you can again set the SQL database instance and names and also the settings for service accounts and certificate generation keys, you can tick boxes that set the service bus to use the same settings as on the last screen.

The final summary screen shows you the settings that will be used to configure Workflow Manager





Click the tick to complete configuration, a pop up window will show you the progress of the configuration





Once the configuration has finished you can close all the screens that appear and Workflow Manager will be installed.

The next post will go through the options available to you to use Workflow Manager with SharePoint 2013