Archive for Uncategorized

Forms Designer for Sharepoint Services

// February 14th, 2010 // 1 Comment » // Uncategorized

Many of our clients operate in the small to medium entreprise (SME) and thus either make the investment into Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server (MOSS) whilst many opt for Windows Sharepoint Services (WSS) as a pilot or proof of concept.

The differential always comes down to a couple of deal breakers:

1) The extent that search will play a role in their organisation
2) The role of the automation of business processes within the organisation

When deciding between MOSS and WSS, for most organisations using Sharepoint 2007 as an intranet, it is normally the deal breakers mentioned above which entice them to go MOSS 2007 or WSS 3.0. When WSS 3.0 was released intially back in 2006, the difference between MOSS 2007 and WSS 3.0 was quite obvious. But as each of the above have been implemented, sharepoint services companies have slowly developed small features to make up the ground between the two. Take Stramit’s Masterpage Picker which gives one the masterpage and branding type functionality of MOSS with a simple feature or Bamboo’s Mashpoint allowing WSS to take advantage of BDC-like functionality. Im not saying that WSS with a couple of codeplex features will replicate the functionality of MOSS, things like Excel Services, Information Management Policies, Search and Navigation. But what am i saying is that WSS can provide a very rich interface for intranet and extranet deployments.

With the advent of Microsoft Search Server Express, search has become extremely powerful in WSS allowing organisations to use WSS to search Sharepoint Content, Website Content, Fileshares and Exhange Public folders (no people search which is at times a real make or break). Nonetheless i feel it still provides a rich functionality which makes me think that Infopath Forms Services is the real deal breaker. How many of you have used Sharepoint Designer to manipulate Sharepoint List Forms? Ever added a new column and then had a look if your customized form inherits the new column? Ever tried to create business rules around a form? For everything that Infopath provides us, i find that we suggest MOSS time and time again purely on the basis of automating business process within a organisation.

Many would disagree with the above, and yes, there are many features which MOSS adds where WSS does not compete, and theres no doubt, given a client has the budget, id suggest MOSS everyday. However id still love to have the “why do you suggest MOSS over WSS” discussion with some of our colleagues at Sharepint, especially to cash strapped SME businesses.

The crux of my post

Infopath has an almost complete set of functionality available to browser-enabled Sharepoint forms. The ability to “import” and “export” data from Line of Business Systems, addition of business rules and branding of Forms makes it the only option to publish forms with rich functionality to Sharepoint. Why is it that Infopath is the only player in the Forms department. There are multiple workflow providers, Nintex and Blackpoint to name a few. They make designing more complex workflows slightly easier to the average business user or sharepoint consultant and certainly have helped our clients save many hours in the solution development lifecycle. With the business process automation market almost captured, why is it that there isnt a forms provider who can compete with the Infopath juggernaut?

It would certainly lead me to recommend WSS to many cash-strapped SME’s depending on the price or licensing model and with the strong built-in workflow capability of WSS, it seems a no-brainer…. or maybe not?

Forms Based Authentication (FBA) on SharePoint 2010

// February 2nd, 2010 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

Article on setting up Sharepoint 2010 for Forms Based Authentication

Qantas Australia to use Sharepoint

// February 1st, 2010 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

Its great to see large corporates in Australia switching to Sharepoint

Document Management – Cash Management System

// January 29th, 2010 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

A client of mine is involved in gaming and retail, essentially a ‘club’ where patrons engage in gaming (poker machine) and eateries. They turn over a decent amount of revenue per day which they need to then capture in an excel spreadsheet and physically track the money with a large vault where they store all cash. Revenue is generated by:

Gambling machines
Point of Sale Systems (Eateries, Drinks etc)
Post Office
Gym

and cashiers are responsible for their own monies from the time they are handed money to the end of their shifts when they empty their POS systems. Naturally, like any retail business, there are variances between the POS system and the physical cash amount brought in, which need to be tracked. These are recorded in a list in Sharepoint.

At the beginning of each day, the cash supervisor will create a new spreadsheet (Cash Sheet) which will be used to capture all revenue. He/she will create this new spreadsheet using a content type created which is attached to the physical Microsoft Excel Sheet. He/she will then save this document and check it back into Sharepoint. Documents in this case must be checked out since all changes are then captured within multiple versions of the documents, each version having capability to be rolled back to.

At the end of each shift, cash supervisors then count the cash and do a reconciliation. They then record their findings in the “Cash Sheet”. This requires checking out the document, making changes, saving and checking back in the document. This is repeated 3 times during the day, until finally all shifts are completed.

At the end of the final shift, the cash supervisor then locks the document down, using a “Lock Document” workflow. In this Sharepoint workflow, the permissions are automatically applied by Sharepoint such that all users only have “read-only” access to the documents. This prevents changes to the document once the document has been “locked”.

Below is an image of the dashboard used:

This solved a number of different issues for the business. Some of these are listed below:

- Manual processes that are time consuming and non-value adding
- Increased opportunity for errors due to manual keying and re-keying of data
- Data redundancy as information is entered multiple times on each spreadsheet
- A lack of audit and tracking control:
- system is open to „massaging? of data
- no locking down of daily takes – open to fraud
- spreadsheets are open for editing across all users
- Lack of accountability on variances as there is no current reporting on variance by
person by time
- System does not enforce follow up on variances

The document could not be created

// January 27th, 2010 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

It seems that Office 2010 and Sharepoint 2007 (MOSS 2007 and WSS 3.0) dont play too nicely. Office 2010 is only in beta, so give Microsoft a break ok?

Getting the following error?

“The document could not be created”?

Got Office 2010 installed? im afraid you going to have to revert to Office 2007

Australia Sharepoint Conference

// January 25th, 2010 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

I just saw that the Australia Sharepoint Conference is being organised by fellow Sydney Sharepointers Kathy Hughes, Debbie Ireland, Brendan Law, James Milne and Mark Orange for Sydney in June. Wooah! What good news.

Hopefully ill be invited to talk!

Office 2010 and Sharepoint 2007 – The list cannot be displayed in Datasheet view…

// December 17th, 2009 // 4 Comments » // Uncategorized

Cant edit a Sharepoint List in datasheet view? using office 2010?

Here’s the answer

Installing Sharepoint 2010 in Single Server Mode on Windows 7

// December 14th, 2009 // 1 Comment » // Uncategorized

So i finally got this up and running…

I used the following resource:

Setting Up the Development Environment for SharePoint Server

Follow it step for step. However there are a couple of prerequisites you MUST install which are listed in the above document:

All the ones listed in Step 2, Number 7 of the MSDN document above PLUS
WCF Hotfix

there a few things you should know that i never found on other blogs:

1) Do the install within your company network, otherwise you’ll get errors in the configuration which will fail on Step 2 with “Exception: Microsoft.SharePoint.SPException: User cannot be found.” You have online access to the domain controller .

2)The following error:
Failed to create the configuration database.
An exception of type System.Security.Cryptography.CryptographicException was thrown. Additional exception information: The data is invalid.

Can be solved by:

Give Full control to NETWORK SERVICE on the folder c:\program files\common files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14

3) The following error:
Failed to create sample data. Exception of type Microsoft.Office.Server.userProfiles.userProfileException was thrown. The request channel timed out while waiting for a reply… Increase the SendTimeout value on the binding.

Can be solved by:

Install WCF FIX: A hotfix that provides a method to support the token authentication without transport security or message encryption in WCF is available for the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 (Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2) . Please note the 2008 fix also applies to Vista, while the 2008 R2 fix also applies to Windows 7.

Remove Code from your Infopath Form

// November 20th, 2009 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

Thanks to Paul Galvin, i managed to find out how to do this: check it out here

Dynamic Sharepoint Workflows: How to

// November 18th, 2009 // 1 Comment » // Uncategorized

Ive been itching to write this blog post for a while. See ive been holed up a major car company for a little while now who had a basic requirement. They have MOSS 2007 and were wanting a basic Infopath form and multi-step approval workflow behind it, which just did the basics like sent emails and reminders such as “please approve/reject this form” or “please review this form”. In 95% of Sharepoint Workflow articles (the State machine workflows) ive found that Sharepoint Experts create multiple tasks, with multiple correlation tokens etc etc and it all seemed just a little too confusing and long winded. Now im sure its best practice to create workflows in this manner, but is it easiest? Better yet, is it DYNAMIC? How do i redeploy this workflow for another client and update it without any code changes?

Far too often ive spent time sitting at clients creating each one a custom workflow for their needs, then deploying and moving on, only to find a similar requirement next week at another client. I can write Visual Studio State Machine and Sequential Workflows all day, but surely there is a way to reuse what ive done, better yet, deploy one workflow, and tweak it outside of Visual Studio (without code manipulation) Was there essentially a way for a Business User to update their own workflows?

Well immediately Products such as Blackpoint, Agilepoint or Nintex came running through my mind. They all give the user the ability to create their own workflows, just a little training on those, and id never have to write another workflow. However, most of my clients cannot afford these wonderful products. So they were a no go. Still i was convinced there was a way to create the dynamic workflow!

Well heres my answer:

Essentially every workflow is state based really, it moves from state to state, whether it be sequential or not. A simple example would be a travel request:

State 1: User fills in form -> State 2: send to manager -> State 3: Manager reviews -> State 4: Form approved/rejected.

Within a state machine workflow, the workflow may respond to an event such as OnWorkflowItemChanged and move from state to state depending. The state is normally dictated by the a field in the form, in my example above is the status of the request:

1. Pending
2. Approved
3. Rejected

From this i worked out that i need my form to manage the state of the whole process and my workflow to respond to these changes. Based on what state the form was manaipulated to when a user changed values within the form, execute the relevant workflow step which is associated with that form state. So how might this work in a diagram?

basic workflow step

Based on the above diagram i have created 2 videos which run you through both the Form and the workflow itself, explaining how i enabled the form to save the latest state within the form, and how my workflow reacts to these changes:

Form Video

Workflow Video

If you do have any questions, please post comments below, i will try to help out.