Notes workflows are almost always implemented as code attached to various buttons, form events and agents. By contrast, the Microsoft platform encourages the use of declarative workflows — the workflow is expressed as a set of rules that can be entered, modified, and (best of all) understood by a non-programmer. You can write code if you need to, but this code is usually confined to “activities,” the units of action that you wire together in your declarative workflow.
Declarative workflow capabilities have improved significantly in SharePoint 2010. First of all, you get a much richer set of out-of-the-box workflows to use in your applications. This list depends on what edition of SharePoint you install and which SharePoint template you are using, but at a minimum it should include an Approval Process, a Collect Feedback review process, a Collect Signatures review process, and a Disposition Approval workflow for managing content lifecycles. You can now customize the out-of-the-box workflows if needed or design your own from scratch.
If you do need to design your own workflows, you can benefit from the new capabilities in SharePoint Designer. This option was somewhat limited in SharePoint 2007, which forced many companies to use Visual Studio instead, but those days are gone. Now SharePoint Designer workflows can address the need of the majority of the workflows found in Notes applications without having to write code.