Security and Audit Trail of Workflow Tasks in SharePoint 2007 & Visual Studio 2008

Two requests that are probably part of every SharePoint workflow design:

1. Permit only the users who are assigned a WF tasks to edit (i.e. complete) them
2. Record the user name of the person who completes a task (instead of the System Account)

Not suprisingly, neither of these pretty simple, seemingly obvious design concepts can be done out of the box / without some customization.  Also, certain configuration screens might trick you into thinking you can do this directly within the SharePoint UI (you can't; more on this in the deeper blog posts).

Part 1: Security of Workflow Tasks in SharePoint 2007 and Visual Studio 2008

Part 2: Audit Trail of Workflow Tasks in SharePoint 2007 and Visual Studio 2008

 
There are a couple of good blog sources for each of these customizations, but I didn't find any of them to be thoroughly detailed with screenshots, pitfalls, etc.  So what I hope to do in this two part blog post is cover some portions I think those sources left off, and provide updates relevant to Visual Studio 2008. 

CodePlex module?

At a high level, one would like to specify these widely useful features in the Workflow Settings screen or even within the Task List settings.  I may eventually release this into an extension on codeplex so if someone might find this useful, let me know. 

E.g.

Package an extension to the content type = Workflow Task List's General Settings page that pre-packages the code and intercepts the creation of new task items by tacking on special permissions.  It'd go right here: