Announcing the Public Availability of Workflow Manager 1.0

Today is a great day in my organization as we’re able to publically announce the release of Workflow Manager 1.0, which is now available for download.  Workflow Manager 1.0 allows you to host and manage long-running Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) applications.  Workflow Manager was designed to meet the scale and multi-tenant needs of your modern enterprise applications while also increasing developer and administrator productivity.  Workflow Manager is the backing technology for SharePoint Workflows in SharePoint Server 2013 and the next version of Office 365, and SharePoint support has been a key focus for this first release of Workflow Manager.

MEETING THE NEEDS OF SOFTWARE-AS-A-SERVICE ISVS & THE ENTERPRISE
Workflow Manager 1.0 extends the functionality originally delivered with Windows Workflow Foundation and allows ISVs and enterprise organizations to host and manage these long-running workflows.  This includes support for deployments which require multi-tenancy support, scalability and high availability.

• Multi-tenancy – Tenants in Workflow Manager may represent the various departments of an enterprise or the customers of an ISV.  Workflow Manager ensures that applications for one tenant cannot see data from other tenants or interfere with the execution of other tenants’ applications.   This lowers the development effort and application maintenance required to support multiple tenants, while providing a higher density execution environment which minimizes system resource requirements. 
• Scalability & Redundancy – Multiple Workflow Manager nodes can be joined together into a farm deployment to scale the service.   This farm can be integrated with a load balancer to provide high availability across nodes, with additional support for failing over to a secondary farm.  Efficient message handling, asynchronous processing and Service Bus integration provide for high throughput, while ensuring reliable and coordinated message delivery and workflow execution.  The same high scale technologies used to power Office 365 workflows are leveraged to support Windows Server deployments. 

DEVELOPER AND ADMINISTRATOR PRODUCTIVITY
Workflow Manager 1.0 allows you to build on the core programming model and runtime of Windows Workflow Foundation in .NET and extends the programming model with new declarative data and messaging options; this includes support for calling REST services and simple pub-sub based communication, leveraging the newly released Service Bus 1.0 for Windows Server. 

Workflow Manager 1.0 also provides new capabilities for managing system tenants, activities and workflow instances.  This includes repository and version management for published activities and workflows.  In addition, workflow instances can be programmatically started, queried and terminated, and all management operations are supported via a set of REST services, PowerShell cmdlets and a client API.

Messaging and management are clearly two critical areas for building and maintaining workflow solutions, and this is an area where we will continue to invest as we evolve this technology.

PRICING AND LICENSING
Workflow Manager 1.0 is available today from the download center and is a free piece of technology for use with Windows Server.   Workflow Manager 1.0 is also supported in Windows Azure Virtual Machines.
For examples of the various features in the product, please refer to the content provided here. For any questions and/or feedback, please reach out to us on the Workflow Manager 1.0 MSDN forum.
We are excited to bring this solution to the market and look forward to seeing the solutions customers and partners deliver with it.

Learn more about Workflow Manager 1.0

Jürgen Willis
Principal Group Program Manager