SharePoint Solutions Blog - SharePoint, XBOX, .NET, Technology

6/22/2007 The Three-State Workflow - The Forgotten Out-Of-The-Box Workflow for Both WSS and MOSS

Many people believe that MOSS comes with only four out-of-the-box workflows (Approval, Collect Feedback, Collect Signatures, and Disposition Approval), and that WSS v3 doesn"t come with any out-of-the-box workflows. In actuality, there is another work flow that is available out-of-the-box to both WSS v3 and MOSS—it"s called the Three-state workflow.

The reason that even many seasoned SharePoint professionals don"t know much about the Three-state workflow is because the feature isn"t activated by default—you will have to go into the Site collection features, and activate it.

Once you have activated the Three-state workflow feature, it will be available as a workflow template to all your lists, libraries, and content types.

The Three-state workflow allows you to track the status of an item between three states. This is very useful when tracking issues, project tasks, leads, or other similar items.

I won"t bore you with details on how to use it; Microsoft has already done an excellent job of explaining how to use the Three-state Workflow. My mission here is just to let you know that it exists. I will leave you with one small screenshot though, just to whet your appetite. Look at all the options you have for the task and email details for each transition step.

Enjoy!

6/12/2007 TechEd Buzz, SharePoint Governance and Site Provisioning Assistant

One of the most prevalent buzzwords floating around TechEd last week was “SharePoint Governance”. By Microsoft TechNet’s definition, the term SharePoint Governance is:

“… the set of roles, responsibilities, and processes that you put in place in an enterprise to guide the development and use of a solution based on SharePoint Products and Technologies.”

Is SharePoint Governance on your mind? If so, we believe that our new Site Provisioning Assistant product for SharePoint 2007 may help you to get a bit more sleep at night. Just as SharePoint MVP Shane Young and Microsoft’s Joel Oleson were quick to point out upon viewing a demonstration of SPA from our TechEd booth, Site Provisioning Assistant provides key features to assist in your SharePoint Governance strategy.

In a recent blog Post, Joel Oleson identifies a key component to SharePoint Governance as:

“… Self Service approach to deployment (bottoms up) - how can I keep Help desk from being a bottleneck to information worker productivity.”

We couldn’t agree more, and that is exactly why we developed the SPA add-on for WSS v3 and MOSS 2007. With Site Provisioning Assistant, you can automate the process of handling requests for new WSS v3.0 and MOSS 2007 sites. As a SharePoint administrator, SPA provides you with a solution to these key questions:

How can I enable our users to have the SharePoint sites they need in a timely manner, but maintain the integrity of our organization"s taxonomy?
How can I give my users an easy to use, consistent interface for requesting new SharePoint sites?
How can I automate my organization"s approval process for requesting new SharePoint sites?

For more information or to download an evaluation copy of SPA, visit the Site Provisioning Assistant Product home page.

To further help you with your SharePoint Governance planning, here are a few more useful links:

SharePoint Governance, by Mike Gannotti

Key Governance Considerations in a SharePoint Deployment, by Joel Oleson

SharePoint Governance, Part 1, by Robert Bogue

SharePoint Governance, Part 2, by Robert Bogue

6/1/2007 Great new SharePoint book by Ted and Dan, see you at TechEd

Inside Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

The SharePoint book that I have been waiting for the most has finally arrived. It seems like Clinton was still president when I ordered it :), but this book was well worth the wait. Back when I first heard that Ted Pattision and Daniel Larson were teaming up to write a SharePoint book, I got pretty excited. I knew these guys would have a knock-out book for SharePoint developers, and I"m happy to say I was right.

With this book, you will learn how to:

Build application pages and site pages
Develop and deploy reusable Web parts to enable customization and personalization
Exploit Windows SharePoint APIs to deploy Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX components
Use XML and Collaborative Application Markup Language (CAML) to create provisioning components
Design and implement custom document libraries
Use Windows Workflow Foundation to create applications that automate business process
Create Site Definitions to aggregate components and package them for deployment
Implement Code Access Security, Trust Levels, authentication, and authorization

Do yourself a huge favor, and go spend five minutes on Amazon ordering yourself a copy.

I hope that I get a chance to run into Ted and Daniel next week at TechEd in Orlando, to compliment them on the outstanding book. Are you going to TechEd? If so, please stop by our SharePoint Solutions booth and say hi. We"ll be happy to demo our software add-ons for SharePoint, show you our training materials, talk about consulting, or just shoot the breeze. Our booth number in #254.

5/23/2007 Need expert InfoPath knowledge?

There are lots of people who use and develop with InfoPath and many of them post tips, tricks, etc. to their blogs.

One that stands out, in my mind, is actually an entire company that is devoted 100% to InfoPath consulting and solutions. InfoPath is ALL they do.

The company is Qdabra Software and they share their expert InfoPath knowledge on a public site they host named InfoPathDev.com. On this site, there are well over 100 "How-to" articles, tips and tricks. And, they don"t write articles about "101" InfoPath topics. They write about the difficult issues that we all face when we try to implement an InfoPath solution in the real world.

There is a reason that Qdabra has all of this deep InfoPath knowledge. The company was founded and is owned by Patrick Halstead, one of the original Program Managers at Microsoft on the development of InfoPath v1. Also, Patrick is the author of the best advanced-level book on InfoPath 2003, Developing Solutions with Microsoft InfoPath. (If you follow this link to Amazon, you will find that the book has a rating of three-stars out of five. Don"t be fooled by that. I"ve read the entire book from cover to cover and have used it extensively to develop InfoPath-based applications. It is not perfect, but it is by far the best text out there on advanced usage of InfoPath 2003).

So, while there still is a real shortage of expert-led classroom-style InfoPath training, there are some very good resources available on the Internet and InfoPathDev.com is one of the best.

(If you go to their site, you will see that a lot of the most recent tips are written in Japanese. If that is not your preferred language, keep searching their site because the tips in English still far outnumber the Japanese ones. The reason they are posting a lot of new tips in both Japanese and English is because InfoPath is BOOMING in Japan. :))

5/16/2007 Branding SharePoint

There are lots of articles and tips for branding SharePoint 2007 and customizing the look and feel. Just do a Google search or hunt down the bloggers that specialize in this area.

But what if you are under the gun to do a SharePoint branding/customization job and you really need to absorb all of the details fast and get the job finished as soon as possible?

In my mind, you can"t find a better solution than our Extreme Makeover SharePoint 2007 Edition course. It"s a three-day class and will cost you roughly $2000, but you will leave with a thorough understanding of how to do this type of work and will have worked through numerous hands-on labs practicing the art.

Since this course is all about the visual aspects of SharePoint 2007, maybe the best way to sell you on it is to show a before and after image of the kind of thing you will do in the class:

Before:

After:

Here is a quick and dirty list of some of the topics that the course covers:

The SharePoint 2007 CSS files and architecture
Master Pages
Page Layouts
Site Definitions
List Definitions
Themes
SharePoint Designer
Customization of navigation and the UI
The "Features" feature

The full course description and outline is available here.

On top of all this, the course was written and is taught by a true expert in SharePoint branding and customization. You won"t often hear his name tossed around in the SharePoint Community, but he has as much, if not more, experience branding SharePoint as anybody out there.

His name is Kevin Pine and he has a background as a professional web site developer. For the past three years, he has been devoted full-time to SharePoint branding here at SharePoint Solutions. He wrote our Extreme Makeover 2003 course that was very successful and popular during 2003 - 2006. He has also done numerous SharePoint branding projects for our consulting clients including BP, Central Michigan University, Sarah Cannon Cancer Research Institute, and many others.

On top of all this, Kevin is an outstanding classroom teacher.

So, if you need to come up to speed quickly on all of the details and nuances of SharePoint 2007 branding and customization, in my opinion you can"t find a faster and better way to do this than come take Kevin"s class.

We run the class every 4 - 6 weeks and rotate it around through our different locations. Here are the next two classes on the schedule:

June 5 - 7, Charlotte, NC

July 24 - 26, Nashville, TN

You can register here.

5/2/2007 Released: Site Provisioning Assistant Public Beta

Managing user requests for new SharePoint 2007 sites just got a whole lot easier. Our new Site Provisioning Assistant for SharePoint 2007 is now available for public beta evaluation.

SPA provides you with centralized management for controlling how new SharePoint 2007 sites are requested and provisioned in your organization. Based on provisioning profiles that you define, users are presented with an easy-to-use interface for requesting a new site. Site requests can be associated with custom workflows that match your organization"s approval process. Upon succesful workflow completion, SPA automatically provisions the SharePoint site, and notifies the requesting user.

To read more about Site Provisioning Assistant, visit SharePoint Solutions Software Support knowledge base. Here"s a list of Site Provisioning Assistant KB articles.

How do I create a provisioning profile?
How do I edit a provisioning profile?
How do I set a provisioning profile to inactive?
How do I create a custom more info provisioning profile page?
How do I create a new workflow and make it available to provisioning profiles?
How do I request a new site using Site Provisioning Assistant?
How do I approve or deny a site request using Site Provisioning Assistant?
How do I view my site request history?
How do I view a history of all site requests?
How do I modify the e-mail notification messages sent by Site Provisioning Assistant?
How do I create a new provisioning template?
How do I setup provisioning groups?

To download the SPA public beta, visit our Releases and Downloads page.

Site Provisioning Assitant is available as a stand-alone product, and is also included in Extranet Collaboration Manager - Enterprise Edition.

4/25/2007 MSDN: Team-Based Development in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

Eric Charran of Microsoft recently published a MSDN article covering team-based development on the SharePoint 2007 platform. Eric begins by delineating the roles of artifact development and assembly development, discussing environmental and procedural similarities and dissimilarities. Eric’s article then covers integration builds and deployment processes, with the aid of some well-designed illustrations. Overall, Eric’s article is informative, and should be read by anyone seeking a high-level understanding of team software development on SharePoint.

For a few years now, our software engineering team here at SharePoint Solutions has been using a development environment similar to what Eric describes. Because we are geographically distributed, we rely on local virtual development environments (robust Dell laptops running Virtual Server 2005 RC2), that connect to Team Foundation Server over VPN. Prior to TFS and VPN, we used Visual Source Safe with SourceGearSourceOffSite and CruiseControl.NET. SourceOffSite was (barely) a workable solution, but now seems like the dark ages in comparison to Team Foundation Server. As for the source code vault itself, we take the approach of using a common mainline for team builds, with each of us working in isolated virtual build labs for incremental building and testing. We merge from our independent VBLs to the common Mainline, and kick off team builds for testing and release.

We are primarily focused on producing software solutions for redistribution, so every artifact and assembly we create must be packaged for deployment. In Visual Studio, our solutions are comprised of modified C# class library projects which have been customized to output SharePoint deployment packages (.wsp). Although the VSeWSS toolset has some nice conveniences, it just doesn’t provide us with the granularity we need for packaging commercial applications. A simple example of how we structure a project can be found in my October 2006 post Anatomy of a SharePoint WSS v3 Feature Project in Visual Studio 2005.

Finally, we depend on the WiX toolset for creating Windows Installer packages to distribute our software products. Here too, we use modified C# class library projects which have been customized to output MSI setup packages. The last step of our team build process zips up the appropriate outputs, then places them in a staging area where they await manual release to web (RTW).

4/21/2007 Automation in Visual Studio 2005 for WSS v3 Feature Development

I"m anxiously awaiting Microsoft"s release of Visual Studio Extensions for SharePoint Services as mentioned by Mathew Cosier here, Mart Muller here, and Wes Preston here. When released, these new extensions should make our lives as SharePoint developers a bit simpler. In the meantime, if you follow a consistent approach when laying out the structure and outputs of your WSS v3 Feature project, it becomes possible to create useful and time-saving tools for automation inside the Visual Studio 2005 IDE. In my development environment I"ve defined and frequently use tools to add, deploy, upgrade, retract, and delete a WSS Solution Package (wsp). My favorite of these tools is the upgrade operation, as it allows for a quick "build and test" iterative development cycle. Behind the scenes, each of these tools call the appropriate stsadm.exe operation and display the command"s result in Visual Studio 2005"s Output Window.

As I previously mentioned, for these external tools to be useful across all of your WSS Feature projects requires consistency in how you structure the artifacts and outputs of your project. In an earlier post, I walked you through the anatomy of a WSS v3 Feature project. Three key factors of my example Feature project"s anatomy allow my external tools to function and be re-used. Please take a look at my earlier post for the specifics on how these are implemented:

Makecab.exe is called from the Visual Studio project"s AfterBuild target to create the WSS Solution Package including the project"s freshly compiled assembly.
The WSS Solution Package (wsp) is placed in the Package subfolder by Makecab.exe each time it is rebuilt.
The WSS Solution Package"s name is defined by the Visual Studio 2005 $(TargetName) variable.

Let"s take a look at specific implementation for each of the external tools I"m using. To define these tools, from Visual Studio 2005 go to Tools->External Tools on the menu bar.