Geeky Girl : libraries

Better with Office - Slide Libraries

JessMeats — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 16:17:00 GMT

I’m going to finish off this series of Better with Office posts, but there’s more that could be said. If I’ve peaked your interest, I’d suggest reading the Fair, Good, Better, Best whitepaper which goes into more technical information about the integration between SharePoint and Office products.

In this final post, I’m going to talk about slide libraries. These are a feature provided by MOSS standard that link in with PowerPoint 2007. When creating a new library in SharePoint, slide libraries are one of the templates that come out of the box.

Once you’ve created your slide library, you can start uploading slides. Unlike in other document libraries, where you upload files through SharePoint’s interface, when you go to upload and click publish slides, you get taken to PowerPoint. You pick a presentation as though you were open a file, but then you get a new window displaying all the slides of that presentation. Each slide has a check box beside it. You can pick specific slides or choose select all and then click the publish button. This will take your chosen slides and put them into the slide library. You can start off this process either from inside the slide library or by going to the main menu and choosing publish from inside PowerPoint.

The thing that’s worth noting is that each slide is displayed, rather than a whole file. If someone watched one of my presentations and thought that a particular slide was really useful, they would be able to download just that slide, rather than a whole PowerPoint deck.

To use slides, you just click in the check boxes beside the slide preview and then click the Copy Slide to Presentation Button.

You have the option to either put this slide in a new presentation or to put it in one that’s already open. By default, the slide will take on the formatting of the presentation deck it’s being copied into so you don’t have to worry about changing background and font colours for every slide, but you can override this option if you so wish. The other option that’s worth noting is the ability to be informed with the slide changes. This can be really useful if you’re using a slide that will be updated. For example, you might be using a slide showing sales figures. If you choose this option, you’ll be told when you open your presentation if there is a new version of the sales figures slide, so you can make sure your presentation is up to date.

Slide libraries are a wonderful feature if you’re in an organisation where PowerPoint presentations are common and where people often want to share and reuse slides created by someone else.

Better with Office - Data Connection Libraries

JessMeats — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 14:02:00 GMT

Previously in this series, I’ve talked about general Office documents, which might be Word files, PowerPoint slide decks and so on. In this post, I’m going to go a bit more specific. I’m going to talk about data connection libraries and how they are they can accessed using Excel 2007.

A data connection library, as the name might imply, stores data connections. But what do I mean by data connections? Let’s say that you’re creating a spreadsheet that using information from somewhere else. Maybe you’re using Excel to make graphs of sales trends based on figures in a company database. Maybe you want to use SharePoint and Excel’s capabilities to create a visual representation of stock levels in a particular location and tie in a workflow for restocking. Whatever the data is, the point is that you have information stored somewhere that you want to use in Excel. You probably don’t want to manually copy the data over because this is time consuming and would mean you’d have to manually update your spreadsheet whenever the data is changed.

So, you create a data connection. This links your spreadsheet to Access, a web source, a SQL databases, an Analysis server report or a few other options. This allows the data to remain centrally stored but you still get the ability to analysis, view and visualise using Excel’s capabilities.

These data connections are part of Excel’s Business Intelligence offering. My focus is SharePoint, so I’m not going to go into too much detail about how to set up and use these connections. What I am going to talk about are data connection libraries, which are a feature of SharePoint 2007.

The idea is that more than one person is likely to want this data. If you have a database or a SharePoint list storing information that people are going to create connections to, there’s no point each of them having to go through the process of setting up the connection. It’s always possible people will link to the wrong table and bring back incorrect data. Instead, one person, who knows exactly which table or list is the relevant one, will create the data connection and put it in this SharePoint library. From then on, users will be able to access this data connection and don’t have to worry about setting up their own.

There are a few different ways to add a data connection to this library. The first is to simply upload a pre-made data connection file.

If you have a data connection already set up for a spreadsheet, you can open up the properties for this and choose to export the connection. You can then save the connection file into the SharePoint library.

Finally, if you’re connecting to a SharePoint list, you can save it to the library when creating a connection from SharePoint. In a SharePoint list, there is the option to export to spreadsheet from the actions menu. Choosing this option will create the necessary data connection and, at this point, you have the option to the save the file and can choose the data connection library as the location.

Once you have your data connection library populated with this connection files, users can access them from Excel. From the data tab, users should click existing connections then to browse for more. In the browse window that opens, users can go to the address of the data connection library and pick the correct file. If you’re going to be putting a lot of connection files into this library, it’s absolutely vital that you name your files clearly, otherwise users won’t know which is the correct connection.

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.

Check-out and edit in SharePoint document libraries

JessMeats — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 16:00:00 GMT

When I'm asked a question by a partner and feel that the answer is likely to benefit more people, I shall write a blog post about it.

The question in this case was regarding checking out documents from a SharePoint document library and editing documents, and why check-out and editing aren't the same thing.

By default, document libraries in SharePoint don’t require you to check out a document to be able to edit it. When you check out a document, a checked out icon appears next to it in the library and no other user can open the document for editing. This prevents multiple users editing the same document at the same time.

However, under SharePoint’s default settings, users can select to edit a document without checking it out. If the document is an Office 2007 document, then other users trying to edit it will be informed that it is being used by someone else, preventing issues with simultaneous edits. If the document is of a different format, this doesn’t necessarily happen, which can cause problems.

It is easy to change the settings of document libraries to force checking out before editing. There are plenty of help files and blog posts explaining how to do this, so I won’t repeat the information here. If check-out is required, then any user clicking to edit a document will be checking it out at the same time, without needing to explicitly say that they are checking it out.

The question I was asked was this: why isn’t required check-out the default?

It’s a good question. Given the number of sources I’ve seen that recommend getting users to always check out a document before editing, it seems surprising that required check-out isn’t the default.

There are two answers.

The quickest is that required check-out prevents users being able to edit multiple documents in datasheet view.

The second answer is that required check-out can make life harder for developers. SharePoint is a set of incredibly valuable tools in its own right, but it’s also a platform for developers to build custom solutions. In researching the answer to this question, I came across a few forum posts where developers were struggling to write custom workflows that involved editing documents that were in libraries where check-out was required. These workflows needed extra steps, extra code and therefore extra work. The workflows needed to include the check-out and check-in steps, which could sometimes cause conflicts with other steps in the workflows.

So if you, your company or your customer are not planning on coding any custom workflows, then maybe you should change the default settings to require check-out. On the other hand, think whether it would be easier to simply tell the users to always check-out first. You might be saving your developers a headache later.