Geeky Girl : SharePoint

Content Ratings

JessMeats — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 13:05:00 GMT

Continuing my series of posts about new features in Microsoft SharePoint 2010, I’d like to talk about content rating. This is a feature that was much demanded in MOSS 2007. So many people wanted it, that the code for content rating was included in the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 community kit.

Microsoft listened to the feedback about MOSS 2007 and have included this feature out of the box in SharePoint 2010. Now you can quickly and easily rate SharePoint content, discussions, documents and list items out of five and see the results of other people’s ratings displayed as a simple graphic.

It’s a simple click to provide your rating and now everyone can see what content is liked, as well as sorting and filtering by the average rating.

If you buy MOSS 2007 with Software Assurance now, you’ll get the upgrade rights to 2010 when it’s released. There’s no better time to buy!

Get Going Now

JessMeats — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 08:30:00 GMT

With the SharePoint Conference this week, Microsoft has begun lifting the shroud of secrecy around the next version of SharePoint, Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, due out in the first half of next year.

In light of this release of information, I’m expecting to get asked more and more, “Why should we buy SharePoint now? Shouldn’t we just wait until the new version?”

Good news! You can buy SharePoint now and get the new version. That’s what Software Assurance is for. Software Assurance is a licensing deal which entitles you to some or all of the following: spread payments, receiving training, using additional copies of certain software at home, discounts on Microsoft products, telephone and web support, error reporting tools, extended hotfix support, even free licenses for back up servers.

Along with all these benefits, you can also get upgrade rights to newer versions. If you buy Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 with Software Assurance, as well as getting all the other benefits (including free licenses for PerformancePoint Server), you will get the right to upgrade to 2010 when it comes out. So you can deploy SharePoint now and start feeling the benefits, without having to shell out loads of money for the next lot of licenses.

What are you waiting for?

The Housing Analogy

JessMeats — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 11:54:00 GMT

I’d like to share an analogy for SharePoint. Just imagine you’ve bought a new house. That house is SharePoint.

The chances are, you will have had some help in the process from the likes of solicitors, estate agents, removals companies and so on. Those guys are the SharePoint partners. Their job is to help you find the house and get settled in.

And maybe that’s it. Maybe the house is exactly what you need. After all, SharePoint out of the box does provide a lot of features that can be used to solve business problems. But the chances are that you’ll want to do something. It could be as small a thing as a fresh coat of paint and some new curtains, or it could be a loft conversion, or it might be a whole new extension. Depending on how major the work is and what your skills are, you might try some DIY. Or it might be time to call in the partners again.

I’ve had people ask me why go with SharePoint they then need to do loads of customisation work. The answer is that it’s a lot quicker and easier (and generally cheaper) to do a bit of adaption to something that already exists than it is to start from scratch, in the same way that it’s easier to do a kitchen refurbishment to an existing house than it is to build your own home from nothing. Plus, you can move into a house and start getting the benefits of living there; the construction work can take place later as appropriate. You can deploy SharePoint and start getting some return on investment and add in the customised features at a later stage of the project.

We can take this metaphor a step further, because there is more than one type of house and more than one type of SharePoint. You could have a little terraced house, a spot in the suburbs or a large place in the country. You can have Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Standard, or Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Enterprise.

In this economy though, not everyone can afford to buy a house of their own. What do they do? They rent. SharePoint Online.

InfoPath in the real world - Care Services

JessMeats — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 14:07:00 GMT

I’d like to continue talking about the use of InfoPath in the real world by talking about Children’s Electronic Social Care Record. If you’ve been following local events in the UK over the past months, you may be aware that we’ve had some problems in identifying children who are at risk and working to protect them. In answer to this problem, Microsoft Gold Partner Deverill created a solution using SharePoint and InfoPath.

The situation was such that social services care team staff were being put under pressure to have more visits to children who were at risk. For each visit, staff had to fill out a thirteen page paper form. This form was manually handed to an administration team to be processed, which took days and could include many errors. As staff were being told to go on more visits, the increase in administration was going to be unmanageable.

Deverill created a solution using WSS 3.0 and InfoPath. The social care staff were equipped with tablet PCs with InfoPath installed. The original paper-based form was converted to an electronic form with handwriting recognition capabilities. The staff could fill out the form on the tablet, which would automatically save the form to a portal area on the network. The administrative team could then access this portal area to progress the case and collaborate. This has significantly reduced the amount of administrative work needed per form, removed the need for a typing pool and made report data more readily available. The data is now more accurate and entered more efficiently, allowing for significantly improved care levels in the community.

SharePoint on the Web

JessMeats — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 16:39:00 GMT

SharePoint is generally known as intranet software, a tool for enabling workplace collaboration or a method for producing company portals. It can also be used to produce internet-facing sites. This might seem a little puzzling to people who hear SharePoint and think of project sites and team collaboration. That seems a long way from the web.

But there are a lot of reasons why you might want to use SharePoint to create an internet site.

The first reason is that a lot of hard work has been done for you. If you want to create a website from scratch, you will have to do a lot of work around navigation, building menus and so on. There are a lot of websites out there with forums; SharePoint gives you discussion boards out of the box. If you want to have a blog or a news feed, you’ve got them. SharePoint is searchable. SharePoint allows you to have simple publishing policies for new content. It’s easy to produce and edit content without being a web designer.

Many of the features which make SharePoint such a strong proposition for corporate intranets (audience targeted content, customisable site templates, choice of webparts) can make it just as strong a proposition for the web.

One situation where SharePoint could be particularly applicable would be a franchised organisation. You might want some things to be universal across the franchise, but for subsites to be able to have their own content and branding. You could create a site collection in SharePoint, managed by central policies, but allow administrators for each member of the franchise to customise the content and/or look and feel of their sites. Yet each of those sites could use the same resources of organisation-wide information. The end user would know the difference when moving between different members of the franchise, but still feel a unified experience.

There are even situations where corporate features might make sense on a website. Perhaps you want to show a graph of key organisation figures with the general public. Traditionally, this graph would be an image. You would have to do the calculations to work out the graph, create the image file and then add it to the website. With SharePoint, you could have a spreadsheet on the server, displaying the graph through the browser using Excel Services. As soon as you update the spreadsheet, the Excel graph would be updated, which would in turn update the graph on the website. This could save enormous amounts of time and ensure that the users always see the most recent results.

Why not use SharePoint? I’ve known some people to express doubts about using SharePoint for a public facing site. They seem worried it might seem ugly or boring. This doesn’t have to be the case.

Scenario: Stock Ordering

JessMeats — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 12:34:00 GMT

Another simple scenario where SharePoint and InfoPath can work together to make life easier. A SharePoint dashboard which monitors stock levels is linked to an InfoPath form for ordering new stock, which kicks of a workflow to get the prodcuts delivered.

Live Partner Training

JessMeats — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 13:27:00 GMT

We're putting on some readiness training in the upcoming months. These events are free and open to all Microsoft partners.

Processes and Forms in SharePoint – Reading 22^nd September

A look at InfoPath Forms Services and workflows within SharePoint deployments. An introduction to the capabilities of SharePoint as a forms and business process solution and a demonstration of how to create your own deployments. Presented by Jess Meats

Click Here to Register

Document Management and Records Management in SharePoint 2007 – Reading 12^th November

A look the need for efficient document management and records management systems, with a demonstration of the document and records management capabilities of SharePoint Server 2007. Presented by Tara Hellier.

Click Here to Register

BPIO Platform Strategy update & Partner Opportunity

Microsoft offers you a tremendous opportunity to grow your business by offering Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Microsoft Office solutions to your customers. Partners that specialised in these solutions have experienced strong customer demand, are realising the benefits of significant investments in sales and marketing by Microsoft, and can look forward to strong cross-sell opportunities. Join Hayley Rixon Channel Development Managers at Microsoft UK for this informal, workshop-style session, which will take a look at the partner opportunity. You’ll also get to see some of the Microsoft technologies first hand, with detailed technology demonstrations. Click Here to Register

Edinburgh 30^th Sept

Reading 8^th Oct

SharePoint Conference 2009

JessMeats — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 12:34:00 GMT

There's still time to sign up for the SharePoint Conference in October.

This event is open to Microsoft partners and customers interested in learning more about SharePoint. It's a great opportunity to learn more about the product and to build a network with others who may have knowledge that can help you grow with this product.

We're expecting a lot of exciting information to be revealed about Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, so this is really a great year to go. Plus, it's in Las Vegas!

Go ahead and register for the conference or get more information from the official site. When you register, please remember to include my full name (Jessica Meats) as the referral name.

Partner Training

JessMeats — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 10:16:00 GMT

The SharePoint partner team in the UK have been planning training and readiness for the next year and we've got a series of web seminars lined up. These seminars are sales training focussed around different aspects of SharePoint and how to sell WSS or MOSS as a solution to a particular type of business problem. Each of these seminars will be about an hour long and can be viewed either on their own or as a whole series.

If you're a Microsoft partner, you can register for these seminars using the following links.

Live Series – Portals and Collaboration

Live Series – Document Management and Records Management in SharePoint Server 2007

Live Series – E-forms in SharePoint

Live Series – Search in SharePoint Server 2007

Live Series – SharePoint Workflows

Scenario: Budget Request

JessMeats — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 11:05:00 GMT

Another scenario where InfoPath and SharePoint can aid business processes. In this demo, an employee fills out a budget request form, which is ammended by a manager and the results tracked using key performance indicators.

Scenario: Holiday Requests

JessMeats — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 17:17:00 GMT

This is a short demo showing a potential scenario for InfoPath and SharePoint workflows improving common processes. In this demo, an employee requests holiday, their manager reviews and approves the request, and then the holiday is added to a SharePoint team calendar.

Generating a unique form number - a SharePoint counter

JessMeats — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 11:06:00 GMT

I’ve had a request to expand on my post about generating automatic numbers for InfoPath forms. I was asked to go into more detail about how to set up a SharePoint list to act as a counter.

Go to the SharePoint site where you have your document library and create a custom list by the standard process. There are a couple of different ways to do this. You can click Site Actions, then create. Or you can click on lists to get a list of all the lists on the site, and then click create. Or you can click on view all site content, then create. Either way, you will be taken to a menu screen offering a selection of things that could be created. The top link in the fourth column is custom list. Click this.

Now you have a new list with only one column showing, title, and no elements.

Click on settings and then create column. Add a column that contains a number with no decimal places. I’ve called this count. It doesn’t really matter what you call this column, so long as you remember the name.

Once you’ve got the column, add an element to the list. It doesn’t matter what you put in the title field but you need to put 0 in the count column (assuming there are currently 0 forms in your library).

That’s your counter made.

Now, open up SharePoint Designer. You’ll want to create a new workflow. Select the options to attach this workflow to the form library you want to set the auto-numbering in. Disable the options to allow users to manually start the workflow or to start the workflow when items change. Either of these would mess up your numbering.

Click next to get to the next screen in the wizard. This is an extremely simple workflow that only requires two actions. Click on the action button and add the inbuilt actions do calculation and update list item. Click on the first blue “value” links in the do calculation action, then click the function button that appears. This gives you the opportunity to choose an existing value. For source, choose your counter list with the count field as the field. Now SharePoint needs to know which item to bring back from this list, so set the field to be the ID field and the value to be 1 (since there’s only one item in this list). For the second value, just enter 1.

In the update list item action, click the blue this list. From the drop-down menu, choose the counter list. Add a field to be updated and choose the count field, selecting as the new value the calculated value (from the workflow data). Again, you need to specify the exact list item. Select the field ID and the value 1.

Then click finish. Now your counter will increment every time a form is added to your library. You can now reference this list from your InfoPath forms to create the form ID number.

Generating a unique form number

JessMeats — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 15:15:00 GMT

I’ve had someone ask me about automatically giving InfoPath forms a unique number. The scenario in question was one where the forms were being saved to a SharePoint document library with a unique number attached.

Documents in a SharePoint library do get given an ID, which is unique within document library. This can be used as the unique identifier of the forms out of the box with no additional work. The problem is, this only works so long as your forms remain in that document library. Once you start moving or copying forms (perhaps as part of a workflow) the ID will change.

In those situations, you will have to add a bit of work to your form to generate this number. You just have to be careful about when you generate it. If you have the possibility of multiple people filling out the form at the same time, you need to make sure the number is created in such a way that the method doesn’t result in forms being given the same number. If the form were to create this number on open, basing it on the number of files in the library, you would have issues when someone else opens the form template before the first form has been saved to the library. The easiest way round this issue is to have the number generated on submission.

Here I will describe a simple method of creating this auto number.

Firstly, you will need to create a data connection. If your forms (or a copy of them) are going remain in the document library they are submitted to, then you simply need to create a connection to retrieve data from that library. You only need to retrieve the data from one column. For the sake of argument, we’ll say the unique_number column. I’ll discuss another possibility in a bit for the scenario where forms will be moved or deleted from the library.

Set up the data connection using the wizard as you normally would, but uncheck the box when it asks whether to retrieve data when the form opens. You won’t want to get this information until the end. You will also want to set up the data connection to submit the form to the appropriate form library. Do this as you normally would, but make sure that one of your promoted fields is the unique_number field where you’ll be storing the unique ID of the form. From the submit options menu, uncheck the box labelled Show the Submit menu item and the Submit toolbar button. This is because you don’t want your users to just submit the form; you need the form to perform other actions first.

To allow your users to submit, add a button to the form. You’ll want this button to be set to trigger rules and custom code. Click on the Rules button, then Add, then Add Action. The action you want first is to query using a data connection. Choose the data connection you created to retrieve data from the form library.

The second action is to set a field’s value. The field will be your unique_number field. Click on the function button next to the value field. Insert a function. You have a couple of different options here. You can choose to perform the count function on the items in any field, or the max function on the unique_number field. Either way, you should end up with the most recent unique number assigned. So now, you just add one to get your new one.

The third and final action you need to add to this button is to submit the form.

So there you have it. Your form will now check how many items there are in the form library, create a unique number based on that value and save the form back. Brilliant!

But you can probably see why this method only works for scenarios where you leave the forms in the library. If you have a process that involves moving the form from that library to another, the count value will almost certainly be wrong and the max value might well be. There are probably several different ways to work around this. One simple way is to create a SharePoint list to act as a counter.

Have a list with one numeric element. You’ll want to set this list up so that it’s not visible from the menus on the site since you’ll only want to access it through the form and workflows. Initially, this will have the value of 1. Create a one step workflow using SharePoint Designer and attach this workflow to the form library. The workflow should trigger every time an item is created in the form library and all it should do is add 1 to the value in the counter (using the calculate value and update list item inbuilt actions). Then your form should retrieve data from this list instead of the document library and use the counter value as the unique_number.

Improving Form Performance

JessMeats — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 18:45:00 GMT

When you load up InfoPath forms in a browser, do you see this message?

Probably. The important question is, for how long? Does the form open in a couple of seconds, or are you sitting waiting for minutes?

There are various reasons why a form might be slow in loading up. In this blog post, I’m going to cover the most common and explain ways to improve performance. A lot of the credit for the content of this post should go to Rafiq El Alami on the InfoPath team in Redmond for his presentation at TechReady on forms performance best practices.

If you have a form that’s loading slowly, ask the following questions. If the answer to any of them is yes, look below for suggestions that might help solve the problem.

1. Are several hundred controls (text boxes, option buttons, lists, etc.) appearing when the form loads?

2. Is the form doing lots of complex calculations?

3. Does the form have deep nesting (i.e. groups, within groups, within groups)?

4. Is your form requesting a lot of data?

5. Are your controls as simple as they can be?

1. Are several hundred controls appearing when the form loads?

Each of those controls takes time to load. Each may only take a fraction of a second, but those fractions add up. Each text box, drop down list and check box adds a tiny bit extra data for the form to download and display. When your form has a few dozen different controls, it will probably open in a few seconds. If you have a few thousand... you’ll be waiting minutes.

Plus, think about it from a usability angle. If someone opens up a form and sees thousands of controls, they’re going to be put off.

One way this can occur is when you have repeating tables or sections, within repeating sections. The form may load perfectly fine the first time but be a nightmare once a user has clicked the “add section” button a few times. Yes, repeating sections can be immensely useful under the right circumstances, but always bear in mind what will happen if they’re taken to extremes.

Another way to get round the problem of too many controls is to use views. You can create multiple views and display different controls in each, with back and next buttons triggering rules to swap between views. This way, the end result is still the same data being collected, but the user doesn’t get overwhelmed and the form will load up in a reasonable time.

2. Is the form doing lots of complex calculations?

InfoPath includes the capabilities for quite complex calculations, whether written in through the standard rule interface or coded into the form’s logic. This can lead to some very powerful forms being tied directly into business processes, but calculations take time.

The first thing you need to check is whether it’s really necessary to do the calculations. The answer is likely to be yes, otherwise you wouldn’t have written them in the first place. In which case, the thing to do is to decide when the calculations need to be done. Do they need to be done when the form is first opened?

Spreading out the calculations doesn’t reduce the amount of work being done by the form, but it significantly improves the user’s experience. Do calculations only when they’re necessary rather than when the form first opens.

3. Does the form have deep nesting?

When a form opens in a browser, most of the work is being done by that browser. The browser is not designed to deal with complex form logic. If you have deep nesting in the form, the browser is likely to send requests back to the server to ensure the information is being displayed and acted upon correctly. Each request takes time.

The simpler you can make the logic of your form, the easier it will be for the browser to handle and less requests will be needed. When designing forms, aim to have all your fields listed in the main data source window in a single line. I say to aim for this, I’m not saying you must have this. In large forms, you’re going to end up with some grouping, particularly if you use repeated tables or sections. But trying for a simple layout will mean that you avoid any unnecessary grouping that might slow down your form’s performance.

4. Is your form requesting a lot of data?

This is the big one. Do you have your form linking up to several databases, web services or lists to pull data into the form? If so, make sure that the data isn’t being pulled in from all of them right at the start.

You can easily set rules to query a data connection. For example, if you have a drop down list populated from an external source, add a rule to that list to query the data connection and select that the form doesn’t retrieve data on open. Now, the form will only query the data connection when someone goes to use the control. That way, if the list is optional and a user doesn’t click on it, the data is never requested. If you have multiple lists of this type, the time needed to retrieve data during form filling will be a lot less noticeable than if the lists all pull in data at the same time.

Only pull in data when it’s needed. You can link data connections to fields or buttons to ensure that the data is there when it’s required, but it doesn’t slow the initial loading.

5. Are your controls as simple as they can be?

Do you have a rich text box when all you need is a text box? Do you have a scrolling region when you just need a section?

Some controls are more complex than others. The simpler the control, the less time it will take to load. Try to simplify your controls. For example, there’s no point having a read only date picker. If you have a date field that is read only in a particular view, you can display it as a text box without altering the format of the data.

When you have things like combo boxes or multi-selection list boxes in your form, ask yourself whether they’re really necessary. The same goes for rich text boxes. Does it actually matter if the user can italicise their text?

Keep things simple and you’ll improve performance.

How to: Display a form in SharePoint

JessMeats — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 12:37:00 GMT

Continuing my "how to" series with this requested demo. In this video, I show how to embed an InfoPath form as a web part in a SharePoint page.

If you have a request for a feature you'd like to see demonstrated, please leave a comment.