Geeky Girl : Word

Office 2010 beta is here!

JessMeats — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 08:51:00 GMT

It’s time to have a play.

The public beta has launched and now you can get hold of Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010. You can download it from www.microsoft.com/2010 and try out some of the new features such as:

· Conversation threading in Outlook

· Improved rules management in InfoPath

· The ribbon UI in SharePoint

· InfoPath “quick” publish functionality

· The Business Connectivity Services for SharePoint (a much improved version of the BDC)

· The new SharePoint Workspace

· Tighter integration between SharePoint and Office (including InfoPath list editing)

· New InfoPath controls

· Slicers in Excel

· The Office “backstage” tab

Personally, I’m really excited about some of the major improvements in InfoPath 2010. I think this means I’ve spent way too much time dealing with forms in the past if I get this excited about a piece of forms creation software!

InfoPath in the Real World - Web Seminars

JessMeats — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 14:04:00 GMT

This is the first of an ongoing series showing how InfoPath has been used in real-life situations. No matter how good the sales pitch is, there’s nothing like knowing that a product has actually helped organisations out.

This first example is one that is pretty close to me. Microsoft have a lot of different processes and procedures. One of them is around organising web seminars. The organisation of these sessions is handled by the local events team, who, among other things, make sure the relevant information is prepared beforehand, manage the broadcast of the seminar and then see to it that materials and recordings are put online in the right place afterwards. So if you want to organise a web seminar on a subject close to your heart, you have to tell the events team about it and make sure they have all the appropriate information.

I was planning a web seminar for Microsoft partners on some of the features of SharePoint including InfoPath Forms Services. So I was annoyed when the events team sent me a form to fill out and it was a Word document. My irritation grew as I tried to fill out the form. Some parts were no problem. There were appropriate spaces to enter information for name, date, description and so on. Where it got irritating was the target audiences section.

This had been laid up with the various audience headings and each had a little check box. Only, they weren’t check boxes. They were text boxes. Fine. I just have to type an X in the box and that’s no problem. It only takes a couple of seconds more than ticking a box.

The next section on the form was to do with the questions in the feedback form. There was a list of potential questions and the instruction to highlight whichever ones applied. Sure, I could do that. After all, Word has a highlighting feature. But, again, it took a few seconds longer than I felt was necessary.

At the end of the form, I then have to send it to the appropriate person. But first I have to save it. I don’t know what the standard naming conventions are. I name it as seems appropriate to me, but I have no way to know whether the person receiving the form will name their forms in the same way and so be able to find mine amid the countless Word documents she no doubt has on her computer. So I save it, create an email and add the file as an attachment, which takes considerably longer than just clicking a “submit” button in an InfoPath form.

In the email sending this form, I added a note asking if the events team wanted to learn more about InfoPath. We set up a half-hour meeting and I showed them some of what InfoPath could do. Within ten minutes, they were sold. They went away and, with no training, created a new InfoPath form to collect the information. The form includes a submit button which, when clicked, emails the form to the appropriate person with an automatically generated name which makes it much easier for the events team to organise the received forms.

Within a couple of days, the events team sent round an announcement saying that the web seminars would now be booked using the InfoPath form. A couple of days after that, I received a thank you from someone in the events team. Apparently she’d had very positive feedback from the end users saying that the form was no much easier to fill out. The events team were also happy because the forms automatically went to the right people with a suitable name.

In terms of time saved, it’s probably only about a minute per form for those wanting to present, which doesn’t sound like much until you think about the number of web seminars organised in each by Microsoft employees. It’s harder to estimate how much time is saved by the events team, but I expect there’s quite a lot of frustration avoided as they no longer have to hunt around for forms that people have named strangely.

And, if the events team want to set up a workflow to help automate some of the tasks involved in organising a web seminar, it will be a lot easier to do from an InfoPath form than a Word document.

SharePoint for Document Management

JessMeats — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 17:39:00 GMT

Continuing my series of videos showing the capabilities of SharePoint as a solution for various business problems. This video shows some of the features relating to document management.

Better with Office - Workspaces

JessMeats — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 12:37:00 GMT

Continuing this series of blog posts, I’m going to talk about document workspaces. The idea behind these is that sometimes a document needs multiple people working together on it. A document workspace is a site in SharePoint that can be used for collaboration. The standard template for this site includes a document library, discussion board, list of users, task list and a few more features to make it easier to work together. The normal method to create a document workspace would be to go through SharePoint’s menus and select create and then choose the appropriate template. But that’s not the only way.

When you’re using an Office program, for Excel Word or Excel, you can go to the main menu, go down to Publish and then choose Create Document Workspace from the options. This will open up a new area to the right of the document (but you can move it) to enter a name for this workspace and select the URL. All you need for this is to know the address of a SharePoint deployment where you have permission to create sites. You may be prompted to save the document, but that’s all it takes to create the site.

The workspace information will be displayed on the right hand side of the document. This contains five tabs: status, members, tasks, documents and links. These items are synchronised between the document and the SharePoint site. Initially, the status will have one item in it and will display the whether or not the document is synchronised with the version on the workspace. This is because you have a local copy of the document open. This status tab will allow you to make sure that the local copy and the version on the server are the same, even when other people are editing it.

The member tab displays information about the people who have been added as users of the SharePoint site. If you have a Microsoft Unified Communications solution, you will see presence icons so you know whether they are available, busy, offline and so on. Initially, this tab will just list yourself. You can click on the “add new members...” link to, unsurprisingly, add new members. This opens up a little window that you use to type in usernames or email addresses. You then choose what level of permissions to give to those users. Do you want them to be able to edit content or just view it or to have control over the site?

The task list allows you to assign work to the various members of the site. You can create new tasks, set alerts and see what workflow tasks are ongoing. Clicking the “alert me” link will open up the appropriate SharePoint page to enter choices about the type of changes you want to be alerted to. The adding tasks and viewing workflow tasks options both open up new windows within the Office program to complete the actions.

The documents tab shows all the documents that are stored in the SharePoint document library and gives you the ability to organise them, add new documents and set alerts. You can’t create new documents from here, but you can upload existing files to the workspace by clicking on the add option. For the documents in the library, you can view status, open files, delete the file and set alerts.

The final tab is links. This simply allows you to view the links that are stored in the site’s links list and add some new ones from within Office.

So you get access to all these SharePoint collaboration features from inside Office. You can create a site, add users, add documents, work together, share tasks and more, without ever opening up SharePoint. This means that people who are already familiar with Office get to work in an environment they know, but still get the benefits of the rich features SharePoint can offer.

Better with Office - Workflows

JessMeats — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 17:35:00 GMT

SharePoint has two levels of workflow capabilities. With Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, you get the ability to create your own custom workflows either with code or using SharePoint Designer’s workflow wizard. With Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 standard, you get that ability still, but you also get some out of the box workflows for common tasks such as document approval and collecting feedback. These capabilities can be accessed from within Office.

One of the options from the Office menu is Workflows. When you select this option, you get a menu listing the various workflows associated with a document that can be manually started. This will include any workflows enabled over the whole SharePoint deployment as well as any specific to the document library the file is stored in. You can start any of these workflows from right within the Office document.

For the out of the box workflows, this will open up a window within Office to enter any required information, for example, the name of the person to approve the document. With custom workflows, clicking on start from this menu will take you directly to a SharePoint webpage for the workflow to initiate it.

Once the workflow has started, this will assign tasks to the appropriate people. These tasks will be associated to the document. When someone opens this document, SharePoint will check whether that person has a workflow task assigned to them. If they do, a notification is given at the top of the document stating the task and with a button labelled “edit this task.”

If the workflow is one of the out of the box ones, a window will open up within Office to complete the task, otherwise, you will be taken to a SharePoint webpage to complete the task.

So, if using the out of the box workflows, you can complete tasks from within Office without ever needing to open up a SharePoint page. With custom workflows, you can be alerted to tasks and directed to exactly the right place to complete your assigned tasks. You don’t need to check back with a SharePoint site to know what work you’ve got to do or navigate through task lists to do what’s required.

Users get to stay within Office as much as possible and so experience an interface they're familiar with. This can mean significantly lower training costs and much greater product uptake from within the organisation.

Better with Office - versioning

JessMeats — Thu, 28 May 2009 14:17:00 GMT

This is the second part in my series of posts about the benefits of combining SharePoint with Office. I’m going to talk about versioning.

Versioning is one of the major benefits a document management system has over a file share. A common scenario is for people to have a document stored in a shared network drive and all work on it there. They start off with one file and everything’s fine. But, after a while, someone will make significant changes or decide they’ve reached a point where they should save the document as a new file. So now they have version 1 and version 2 sitting next to each other in the same drive. This will often happen multiple times and different people may have their own naming conventions regarding new versions.

Pretty soon, there are several versions of the same document and it’s not always clear which is the most recent one. Someone might edit the wrong version and then you have a document with a later edited date than the one which claims to be the most recent version. When next someone wants to make changes, which version do they edit? It doesn’t take much to turn a shared folder into a hideous mess.

A good document management system will give control over these different versions, making sure that users edit the correct version but maintaining drafts as appropriate.

Within any SharePoint document library, you can turn on versioning. The setting options are for either major versions or major and minor versions. When versioning is turned on, each time you edit a document, SharePoint will save it as a new version. This means that all the older versions of the documents are maintained, so you can compare changes or go back to an older version if appropriate. But users who go to the document library will only see the most recent version. This means you get all the benefits of maintaining a history of previous drafts, but none of the confusion.

But what’s this got to do with Office?

Within the menu of Office, under the Server heading, is the option to view version history. This will open up a list of all the previous versions of the document. You can use this to see who made changes and when, as well as opening up those previous versions to compare changes or even to revert back to an older version if the recent one has been corrupted or altered incorrectly.

This version history is stored and maintained by SharePoint, but it’s easily accessible from within the Office programs.

You also get the option to publish new versions and add version comment from within Office. The following image shows the dialogue box given when you want to save changes back to the server. Users are asked to choose whether they’re saving a major or a minor version (assuming the document library settings are for both major and minor versions) and to add comments which are stored in the document’s metadata.

So users get access to this rich, document management functionality from inside a tool they’re familiar with. Users don’t actually need to open up a SharePoint page to gain access to some of the benefits the program can offer.

Better with Office - Metadata

JessMeats — Tue, 26 May 2009 17:59:00 GMT

What is metadata? The simple definition is that it’s data about data. In the case of SharePoint, it’s information about files and documents stored within SharePoint. There are some bits of metadata that are included as standard, such as who created a document, who last edited it, where in SharePoint it is and so on. You can add your own metadata as appropriate. If you want to have documents labelled as whether they’re confidential or not, or attach a next review date to official documentation, you can do so.

If you’re running MOSS 2007 standard or enterprise, you can set policies and rules across the whole of the SharePoint deployment. One example of this I’ve seen was a situation where the company wanted to label some documents as being key documents. So every document in SharePoint had this piece of metadata associated with it, which was a yes/no option stating whether or not that particular document was key. Those that were key were then displayed to the users through a portal page. What’s more common would be to create document types and to associate certain pieces of metadata to those types.

Metadata can also be applied at a document library level. This is true for WSS 3.0 and both levels of MOSS 2007. In a document library you’ve created, you can add a column by clicking on Settings -> Create Column. Then you will be given options to set about the data that should go into this column. These options are things like whether it’s a line of text or a number or a choice from a list. You also get the option of setting a default value, calculating the value from other values or setting the column as required. Once you’ve clicked OK, you’ve associated a new piece of metadata to this library. All documents created here or added to the library will now have this bit of information stored about them.

But what’s this got to do with Office?

Well, when you open up a file from this library in an Office 2007 program, you will see a Document Properties section in which to enter this information. This gives the user space to enter metadata, shows metadata already associated and shows which fields are required. This means users can enter information that’s used by SharePoint, without ever needing to go to SharePoint.

If you’ve set some metadata fields as required and the user tries to save the document without them, they will see an error message. This informs them what has happened, takes them to the Document Properties panel and highlights the problems. If data has been entered that’s incorrect (for example, text in a number field) this will shown by a red dashed line around the field. A red asterisk will show required fields that have been missed. The error message explains this formatting to the user so they will be able to see what has gone wrong.

Users can save documents straight to SharePoint document libraries from within Office. This all means that users can be making use of the document management features of SharePoint without actually opening up a SharePoint page to put information in. This makes the process of document management incredibly smooth and efficient, while allowing users to work in an environment they’re familiar with. It can cut down training costs immensely if employees are already used to Microsoft Office.

Better with Office - introduction

JessMeats — Tue, 26 May 2009 17:58:00 GMT

SharePoint is part of the Microsoft product stack. This doesn’t mean that it’s just another item on a Microsoft price list. What it means is that it’s designed to work with the other products Microsoft produces. In other posts, I’ve talked about using InfoPath and SharePoint together, but that’s not where it ends. There’s a lot of integration between SharePoint and Outlook, particularly synchronising lists, forums and document libraries so that you can view things offline, see changes or submit new items via email. There are case studies that show SharePoint working alongside Project or the Dynamics products to deliver valuable solutions. There’s a SQL reporting add-in. There’s a connector to BizTalk Server. The integration with Office Communication Server leads to great Unified Communication solutions.

SharePoint has been designed and tested alongside these various products and gives a great integration story.

What I’m going to focus on though is how SharePoint works with Office 2007. SharePoint can be used as a document management solution for all kinds of files, regardless of the program they’re created in. SharePoint’s document management capabilities can be applied to any files, whether they’re InfoPath forms, PDF files, OpenOffice documents, videos or whatever your company happens to deal in. But when you’re using Microsoft Office 2007, those capabilities come out of SharePoint and are presented to your users through the Office client.

Over the next few posts, I’m going to go into some of the features of SharePoint which can be presented to end users through the various Office programs. I’m going to talk about metadata, versioning, workflows, document workspaces, data connection libraries and slide libraries.

It's not piracy - it's the Ultimate Steal

JessMeats — Tue, 12 May 2009 12:54:00 GMT

If you're a UK higher education student or staff member, you can get Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007 for the ridiculously cheap price of £38.95 - if you buy before 30th June 2009.

Just go to The Ultimate Steal, register with your academic email address and buy online.