How to deploy a SharePoint workflow created in Visual Studio 2008?

Question

I have created some sharepoint workflows in Visual studio 2008 and they work exactly as required on my machine. I have tested by deploying them to several different web applications on the sharepoint server. As a package to the client, I created WSP's for the three workflows and sent them to the client along with an install.bat and an uninstall.bat to setup or uninstall the features from the sharepoint site. However, there is a strange problem occuring at their end which is that the features cannot be activated from the stsadm commands in the install.bat file. The features are also not listed in the Site Collection Features screen so they cannot be activated from there. Also, in the Solution Management from the Operations page; the solutions are globally deployed. I am unable to access the server due to some IP restrictions so I cannot play around with the problem. I want to ask, other than using the wsp's to deploy the workflows; what other ways can i use to deploy a workflow. I mean what stuff should I send to my client and what deployment instructions he should follow? (a method that does not require using wsp's)

Answer 1

Using WSP files is the only correct way to deploy code to SharePoint. While you could copy the same files manually, that's both more complicated and unlikely to fix the issue.

Since activating the features doesn't work, there is probably something going wrong with the install step. Check that the expected feature folders exist in the 12 hive, and that the ids in the feature.xml files there match the feature ids you are trying to activate - VSeWSS often generates features with the same name but different ids, which will cause all sorts of problems if an earlier version is present. You'll also want to check that the features aren't hidden, which is possible if they were intended to be activated programmatically.