Monthly Archives: May 2012

Building Workflows with SharePoint Designer 2010

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For enterprise business users who are determined to reduce the development costs usually associated with building automated systems, a computing platform that includes SharePoint Server 2010 and SharePoint Designer 2010 should be carefully considered for implementation. The workflow feature of SharePoint Designer 2010 can be used to build many applications at a fraction of the cost of custom development. Therefore, the no-code approach to system development offered by SharePoint Designer 2010 is a methodology that may provide a solution to this need for lower development costs. It should be noted that SharePoint Designer 2010 is a tool that should only be used by SharePoint 2010 power users, including SharePoint Administrators, Site Collection Administrators, Developers and Architects. Average users should not make use of SharePoint Designer 2010 without specific training on using this tool.

Rehmani Consulting, Inc has included a video tutorial, “Creating a Workflow on a List using SharePoint Designer 2010″ within our SP201 – SharePoint Designer 2010: Create No-Code Solutions curriculum on SharePoint Designer 2010 fundamentals. This video tutorial is an example of the effort we make to support our audience of SharePoint Server 2010 power users (Gartner’s “Citizen Developers”) with video recordings of the type of SharePoint training they require to deliver on the promise of an investment in SharePoint.

Our tutorial focuses on a common daily task, adding events to a calendar, which is a type of activity that has the potential to add support to collaboration across a business. Asif Rehmani, the author of this tutorial, demonstrates how a set of simple automated procedures, including:

  1. Informing team members of a new calendar event by email
  2. Creating an announcement from a calendar event for publication on a SharePoint 2010 Team Site, and
  3. Simultaneously initiating processes like the two processes mentioned in (1) and (2) above

can be easily created with the workflow feature of SharePoint Designer 2010 in 5mins or less.

The combination of collecting actions, creating the conditions required to specify when actions are to be used and, finally, the timing of actions is consistent across the production for site or list workflows. Therefore, SharePoint Designer 2010 is a free-of-charge tool that can be implemented, successfully, by trained users to deliver a rich range of automated procedures.

If your enterprise organizations needs to lower development costs as quickly as possible, you ought to consider implementing SharePoint Server 2010 and train your power users in the usage of SharePoint Designer 2010. We are certainly available to discuss your needs. Please contact us at (630) 786-7026, or Contact Us to further a discussion about our video training content.

As ever, use this link to place an order for an annual subscription to SharePoint-Videos instructional content

© Rehmani Consulting Inc, all rights reserved

Use SharePoint Designer 2010 to Ensure that List and Site Column Data is Included for All Lists

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As noted on Microsoft® MSDN in a library entry, “Introduction to [SharePoint] Columns”, site and list columns are defined as ” represent[ing] an attribute, or piece of metadata, that the user wants to manage for the items in the list or content type to which they added the column.” This library entry goes on to differentiate site and list columns. A site column “is a reusable column definition, or template, that you can assign to multiple lists across multiple SharePoint sites.” With regard to list columns, the library entry notes that “[w]hen you add a column to a list, SharePoint Foundation copies the site column locally onto the list as a list column. You can then make changes to the list column; these changes apply only to the column as it behaves on that list”

We think that site columns and list columns are features of SharePoint 2010 that most business users will want to implement, especially where a business needs to collect data for analysis and, especially Business Intelligence (BI) about documents, lists (calendars, contacts, etc) that are stored in SharePoint 2010 sites. Naturally, the recommended method for implementing these features is to assign SharePoint Administrators, Developers & Architects with the the task. After all, these higher level users should have the understanding to accomplish the task with SharePoint Designer 2010, whereas average users may not understand how to correctly implement the power of this tool.

Elsewhere in this blog we have recently discussed metadata, tagging, the Term Store and Taxonomy for SharePoint Server 2010. We simply note here that any tool (and especially a free-of-charge tool like SharePoint Designer 2010) that can simplify the process of adding this type of important data for SharePoint deserves study and, potentially, implementation. Therefore, we encourage administrators/developers/architects who are subscribing to our video tutorial content to make sure to review our tutorial video for SharePoint Designer 2010 on this subject, “Creating a List and Modifying its Schema,” which is included in our curriculum for SharePoint Designer 2010.

For business users who may review this post, we need to explain that the term “schema” as used in the title for our video tutorial, “Creating a List and Modifying its Schema”, means the information architecture of a list. In this video Asif Rehmani presents the information architecture for our sample “Contacts” list through his discussion of columns. This video includes a demonstration of how the process of creating site and list columns is quite straightforward with SharePoint Designer 2010. In comparison, using a browser to accomplish the same information architecture process requires our intended audience of SharePoint power users to waste time navigating through several screens of choices before they can successfully add the same information that can added in a maximum of 1-3 steps, by simply clicking on the name of a specific list to access a summary page for the list (which includes the column editing feature under “Customization”) from which they can easily added the column data.

If you understand the value of SharePoint Designer 2010 for your group of users and would like to learn more about the best training practices for groups that we recommend for this tool, we welcome an opportunity to speak with you. Please contact us at (630) 786-7026, or Contact Us to further a discussion about our video training content.

As ever, use this link to place an order for an annual subscription to SharePoint-Videos instructional content

© Rehmani Consulting Inc, all rights reserved

Using SharePoint Designer 2010 to Connect Specific Actions to SharePoint Lists

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Our SharePoint-Videos curriculum on the fundamentals of SharePoint Designer 2010 includes a course on connecting specific actions to SharePoint lists with SharePoint Designer 2010. The intended audience for this class are SharePoint Administrators, Developers and Architects. Our course author, Asif Rehmani, uses this video tutorial to demonstrate how custom actions can be assigned to specific SharePoint lists.

By simply clicking on a list name in SharePoint Designer 2010, one can access a Summary Page for the list, which includes a “Custom Actions” section. Creating a custom action is as simple as clicking on the “New” button, naming the action, and providing a description for it. One uses the radio buttons on the bottom of the new custom action form to, for example, program a call to a stored form, or to activate a workflow stored in SharePoint, or even to visit a specific URL. Any of these options will be displayed when a drop down menu for a specific list is clicked in SharePoint 2010 by a user.

Obviously this is a powerful feature that permits a group of users to use SharePoint 2010 as the platform for regular business functions like adding customers to existing contact lists, or updating records based upon conditions. The power of the feature is derived from the considerable cost savings represented by this point and click addition of specific actions to lists, a feature that would cost much more money if developed with Visual Studio or another scripting tool. After all, specialized personnel with requisite skills would be required to write the needed scripts to deliver this same functionality. Finally, it should be noted that writing a script for a custom computing environment, rather than SharePoint 2010, represents IT development with a much higher cost.

By no means is the entire procedure accomplished merely by connecting specific actions to lists. Rather, workflows will have to be developed (once again with SharePoint Designer 2010) and/or custom forms, depending on the desired deliverable. In sum, this video covers a lot of the ground that will need to be traversed to connect custom no-code workflows and/or forms to SharePoint lists. It is worth noting that Asif Rehmani makes clear at both the start and finish of the tutorial that power users with the requisite permission levels to produce this type of functionality should be the sole audience for the instruction.

If you have questions about putting together the requisite video tutorials from our set, which should provide your group of SharePoint users with the instruction they require to build custom forms and workflows (as well as the related actions), please contact us at (630) 786-7026, or Contact Us to further a discussion about our video training content.

As ever, use this link to place an order for an annual subscription to SharePoint-Videos instructional content

© Rehmani Consulting Inc, all rights reserved

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Inserting Web Part Pages into SharePoint 2010 Sites with SharePoint Designer 2010

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In August, 2005 the Microsoft Technet site added the following note to its library: About Web Parts (Windows SharePoint Services 2.0). This note includes the following definition of a web part: “[a] Web Part is a Microsoft ASP.NET server control that serves a particular purpose, such as displaying data from a spreadsheet or streaming stock quotations from an online Web service.” We were unable to locate a clear definition of a “server control” on any of Microsoft’s websites; however, we did locate the following definition on the W3Schools website: “[s]erver controls are tags that are understood by the server”. Microsoft’s support website does include the following example of asp.net server controls: [t]he ASP.NET page framework includes a number of built-in server controls that are designed to provide a more structured programming model for the Web. These controls provide the following features:

  • Automatic state management.
  • Simple access to object values without having to use the Request object.
  • Ability to react to events in server-side code to create applications that are better structured.
  • Common approach to building user interfaces for Web pages.
  • Output is automatically customized based on the capabilities of the browser.

In addition to the built-in controls, the ASP.NET page framework also provides the ability to create user controls and custom controls. User controls and custom controls can enhance and extend existing controls to build a much richer user interface.”

From the above we can deduce that web part pages are web pages constructed with specific server controls to facilitate quickly adding content with assurance that browser differences (for example) with regards to web page mark up will be seamlessly handled by the asp.net server controls included on the page.

Our tutorial on adding content to SharePoint 2010 sites, “Creating a Web Part Page with Custom Text, Lists and Web Parts,” which is included in our set of video tutorials on the fundamentals of using SharePoint Designer 2010 includes a note from the series author, Asif Rehmani notes that when a “new type of page” is added to expand on content already included on another page of a SharePoint 2010 site, the type of page will be a “web part page,” which “will be able to carry your web parts, your lists, your libraries and also your custom text content.” Asif demonstrates how to build a web part page with SharePoint Designer 2010, which is the easiest and the most powerful way to put together this type of site page.

Through a series of mouse clicks, starting with a click on the icon for “Site Pages” on the Quick Launch and, subsequently, a click on the option displayed on the ribbon for a Web Part Page our instructor shows us the ease with which we can set up the right type of page with SharePoint Designer, 2010. Further, we are shown how to correctly edit the right sections of this web part page, meaning the web part zones at the header, the body and the right column.

The instruction included in this tutorial is entirely indicative of the rich video tutorial instruction included in our set of video tutorials on SharePoint Designer 2010. If your organization can benefit from a controlled, but pervasive use of SharePoint Designer 2010, you ought to speak with us. Please contact us at (630) 786-7026, or Contact Us to further a discussion about our video training content.

As ever, use this link to place an order for an annual subscription to SharePoint-Videos instructional content

© Rehmani Consulting Inc, all rights reserved

Easily Create SharePoint 2010 Components with SharePoint Designer 2010

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Components for SharePoint 2010 can be easily produced with SharePoint Designer 2010. In a video curriculum that covers the functional no-code fundamentals of SharePoint Designer 2010, authored by Asif Rehmani, we present an overview of building components for SharePoint 2010 with SharePoint Designer 2010. This entire curriculum can be accessed either through:

Our instructor summarizes for us that it is “faster, easier and more effective” to create components for SharePoint 2010 with SharePoint Designer 2010 than any other method. In a short 7 minute video tutorial, “Easily Create SharePoint 2010 Components with SharePoint Designer 2010,” Asif Rehmani demonstrates how easy it is to create sites, lists and pages that users will find beneficial with this tool. We tour the Back Stage of SharePoint Designer 2010′s user interface, where all of the different types of components can be created. Our instructor accesses the Subsite component, selects a theme from the template gallery and, with a single click, creates a sub site for our example.

With one click a list is added from the set of components included with the theme template selected for the subsite. From the ribbon a type of SharePoint list is selected. With two or three subsequent clicks of the mouse the list is custom configured for the purpose of our subsite example. Finally, a web part page is added once again, simply with one or two mouse clicks.

An example of editing a page from the SharePoint Designer 2010 interface affords our instructor an opportunity to prescribe that operations such as an edit ought to be performed with SharePoint Designer 2010 in “Normal Mode” rather than in “Advanced Mode” to ensure that other areas of the site are properly insulated from any possible mistakes that might create serious damage to the site. This type of caveat is indicative of the high quality of our video tutorials, which clearly delineate user understanding of the range of possibilities of working with SharePoint 2010 components with this software.

© Rehmani Consulting Inc, all rights reserved

SharePoint Designer 2010 brings application development for web page solutions within the reach of business users

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As noted on Microsoft’s product page for SharePoint Designer 2010, “[u]sing SharePoint Designer, [communities of users] can rapidly create SharePoint solutions in response to business needs. Compose no-code solutions that encompass a variety of common scenarios, from collaborative sites and web publishing to Line-Of-Business data integration, business intelligence solutions, and human workflows, all leveraging the building blocks available in SharePoint in an easy to use environment.”

Clearly the tools included in SharePoint Designer 2010 are intended to outfit a computing user within an organization supported by SharePoint Server 2010 with the type of development capabilities that would make someone like Gartner’s “Citizen Developer” very happy. This computing user, once educated about using SharePoint Designer 2010, will have with an ability to deliver a range of web page solutions all the way from conceptualization to working reality without recourse to potentially costly software development. Therefore, we think that SharePoint Designer 2010, when properly implemented and managed is a very useful tool that may add substantial value to SharePoint for an organization that can positively use its feature set.

Nevertheless, there are many organizations who have opted to restrict (and in some cases completely exclude) access to SharePoint Designer 2010. As noted by Microsoft’s Office web site, in an article titled Managing SharePoint Designer 2010, “[t]here are some areas of customization that can affect and potentially break other SharePoint sites. In addition, it’s possible to customize pages in a way that affect the maintenance and performance of the server running SharePoint 2010. All of this can result in more work for a SharePoint administrator, and as a result, many SharePoint administrators would like to prevent this level of customization altogether.” For the record, we entirely concur with Microsoft’s statement, meaning that we respect the facts that have lead many organizations to restrict users from utilizing this tool

For organizations where the use of SharePoint Designer 2010 is an approved option, we offer a set of video tutorial fundamentals on SharePoint Designer 2010. This collection of training content is available for individual use at a cost of $195.00. The same collection of training content can be purchased for unlimited use across an enterprise.

We think it makes lots of sense for larger organizations of SharePoint users to implement SharePoint Designer 2010 in a carefully managed manner for low cost development of web page solutions through the use of no-code features of the product. For these groups that have the capability to safely utilize SharePoint Designer 2010 a potential exists to, at one and the same time, build requested web page solutions while reducing, substantially, development costs. If your organization is seriously considering an implementation of SharePoint Designer 2010 within a larger, global plan for delivering web page solutions, then we welcome an opportunity to speak directly with you.

Please contact us at (630) 786-7026, or Contact Us to further a discussion about our video training content.

As ever, use this link to place an order for an annual subscription to SharePoint-Videos instructional content

© Rehmani Consulting Inc, all rights reserved

Navigating around the SharePoint Designer 2010 Environment

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Our SharePoint-Videos video tutorial set on SharePoint Designer 2010 begins with an introduction to the SharePoint Designer 2010 environment. The author of this curriculum, Asif Rehmani informs us that SharePoint Designer 2010 is the “premier tool to configure and customize SharePoint 2010″. When one considers that this software is provided by Microsoft to the user at no additional charge, the case for SharePoint Designer 2010 grows that much more compelling. Nevertheless, Asif does not neglect to point out a very important caveat, that “formal training in [SharePoint Designer 2010] is a necessity to learn to use it properly without any unintended damage to your SharePoint environment”. Finally, we are also informed by our instructor that SharePoint Designer 2010 cannot be used to open SharePoint 2007 sites, etc.

The intended audience for this video tutorial, which is part of the above mentioned SP201 SharePoint-Videos curriculum, are SharePoint Administrators, Site Collection Administrators, Developers and Systems Architects. Feature of the SharePoint Designer 2010 computing environment including:

  • The Back Stage, which is utilized to first open a site, which site may then be accessed by clicking on the file menu on the top left of the computer screen
  • The Navigation, or Quick Launch which includes all of the site objects that should be readily available, as required
  • The Ribbon which is now ubiquitous across all of the software tools included in Microsoft Office
  • The Summary Page that includes all of the various components of the object selected via quick launch (navigation)

Asif Rehmani also explains how the features of the ribbon change as different objects are selected from the Quick Launch, in a “context sensitive” manner to display new components that a user may implement to make changes to the selected object.

With regard to sites, themselves, we review how the Summary Page displays the page title, descriptions and even permissions that have been set to enable users to work with a selected site in much the same manner that they would work with other objects. The features of the graphical interfaces for SharePoint Designer 2010 are uniform across any/all objects for SharePoint 2010. The emphasis, as Asif points out for us, is clearly upon the various components that make up objects, which are depicted along with the range of actions that a properly authorized user can take to change them, as required.

We are confident that most individuals reviewing this tutorial will recognize that the author’s intention is to quickly focus on points for instruction. There are no “talking heads” in any of our video tutorials. Further, the author clearly eschews most all abstraction for terse instruction that gets right to the point. If you see the benefit of our approach and would welcome further discussion, then please contact us at (630) 786-7026, or click this contact us link to further a discussion about our video training content.

As ever, please use the following link to place an order for an annual subscription to SharePoint-Videos instructional content

© Rehmani Consulting Inc, all rights reserved

Configuring Administrative Settings including Security for Business Connectivity Services

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As noted on Microsoft’s Technet Website in an article titled Business Connectivity Services (BCS) security overview (SharePoint Server 2010), “[t]he security features of Microsoft Business Connectivity Services enable administrators to safely connect to and interact with external data in a SharePoint Server deployment.” It is important to note that the author(s) of this article discuss a method “to safely connect to” external data. In the interests of ensuring that any/all data communication between SharePoint Server 2010 and any/all external data sources is as safe as possible, the task of managing the administration of BCS must be strictly restricted to SharePoint Administrators and those other users with equivalent permission.

We are sensitive to the security requirement for BCS. Included in our video tutorial set for BCS for SharePoint Server 2010 is an 8 minute video course on BCS Administration and Security presented by the author of this set of SharePoint training, Raymond Mitchell. This tutorial demonstrates settings to be made via Central Administration for the SharePoint Farm. Interested parties can purchase this tutorial at a cost of $195.00 for individual use, or at a cost of $1995.00 for an enterprise license for unlimited viewing by an enterprise user community.

Our administration and security video tutorial demonstrates how to create administrative models (including security settings) that may be exported and imported across a SharePoint Farm and Site Collections, as required. We include an example that avails of the “Set Objects Permissions” feature of Business Data Connectivity (BDC) Services. Raymond Mitchell notes that the permissions set with this feature are not useful for any permissions required to connect to external content, rather, these permission settings are used to manage who may access the external content types, lists, profile pages, etc. that have been built with external data.

Raymond Mitchell further notes that the “Set Objects Permissions” feature can and should be used to manage access to the Metadata Store, itself, which allows an administrator to configure the BCS in a manner that will be inherited by any subsequent external content type that may be created in the future. As well these settings can be propagated across the SharePoint Farm, even if the settings are made after access settings have been configured for specific external content types that may have been created at an earlier time.

This video tutorial demonstrates how to use SharePoint Designer 2010 to create a BDC model (which can include multiple external content types, etc) as well as how to export the model so that it can be managed via Central Administration.

If your organization is considering the administrative and security aspects of BCS within the context of a wider change in how SharePoint is used within your organization, we welcome an opportunity to discuss your application with you directly. Please contact us at (630) 786-7026, or Contact Us to further a discussion about our video training content.

As ever, use this link to place an order for an annual subscription to SharePoint-Videos instructional content

© Rehmani Consulting Inc, all rights reserved

Set Up BCS Profile Pages to Present Item Specific Information from External Data Sources in SharePoint 2010

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As noted in a post to the Microsoft Business Connectivity Team Blog back on the 19th of October, 2009 Overview of Business Connectivity Services, Business Connectivity Services (BCS) “is all about connecting end users with enterprise data that they need to do their job – without having to leave the applications that they use today: Office and SharePoint.” We think that this observation is very important as it defines one of the most attractive values, from a business perspective, that BCS delivers to users. Namely, by enabling BCS within a SharePoint 2010 environment, organizations looking to standardize upon a single computing platform for any and all operations for a single computing platform have taken a big step forward in the right direction, a step that can substantially reduce typical costs for systems development and support.

We think a compelling example of the value that BCS can deliver is to be found through enterprise implementation of BCS Profile Pages, which are web part pages with unique URLs that can be crawled by SharePoint Search to present users with an enterprise search capability that can encompass relevant external data from Line of Business (LOB) groups. We offer a tutorial on the subject, “BCS Profile Pages and Search”, which is included in our SharePoint 2010 Business Connectivity Services Training DVD. The intended audience for this tutorial are SharePoint Administrators who likely possess the permissions required to configure these pages via Central Administration.

As this tutorial presents, utilizing BCS Profile Pages, an organization can equip users with an ability to search external data resources for specific information. Once SharePoint Search successfully locates the desired information, the user will be served with an informative web page presentation of all of the information related to the item. Without SharePoint 2010 and BCS, the costs of developing this type of capability for a user community that has opted for browser access to information from an Intranet would be, we are confident, geometrically more expensive than is the case with a method built on SharePoint and BCS. We think this type of cost saving, achieved without any degradation of the quality of the user computing experience is the type of value contribution that can result in SharePoint playing a mission critical role within an organization’s computing paradigm.

If you see the value of features like BCS Profile Pages and would like to discuss implementation planning and user training, then we welcome your contact. Please contact us at (630) 786-7026, or Contact Us to further a discussion about our video training content.

As ever, use this link to place an order for an annual subscription to SharePoint-Videos instructional content

© Rehmani Consulting Inc, all rights reserved

BCS Actions Provide a Method of Quickly Obtaining Targeted Results with Data Accessed through External Content Types

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In the interests of ensuring that SharePoint Server 2010 may be used as an attractive support for approved collaborative activities that involve communication with external web sites on the Internet, an organization should consider configuring BCS Actions. Creating custom actions for user organizations which will automate otherwise repetitive manual procedures is the type of activity that can contribute to an effort to hasten user adoption of SharePoint. Examples of these types of manual activities including checking weather conditions for specific geographical areas, or collecting specific information about known individuals within a business from well known social web sites on the Internet.

Our set of video tutorials on Business Connectivity Services, BCS for SharePoint 2010 authored by Raymond Mitchell includes a specific course on setting up BCS Actions. The intended audience for this set of training videos includes SharePoint Administrators, Developers and Architects.

As Raymond Mitchell notes, BCS Actions allow users to “link to application pages and to pass business data to those applications.” Therefore, as a preliminary to proceeding on this training on BCS Actions, it makes complete sense to verify rights to transmit company specific data outside of organizational firewalls. Once permissions have been verified, following Raymond Mitchell’s instructions can produce highly useful procedures.

It should be noted that SharePoint Designer 2010 cannot be used to create BCS Actions. Access to SharePoint’s Central Administration web application is required to configure these processes; hence we have reduced our intended audience for this video tutorial to SharePoint Administrators and suitably authorized developers and/or architects. Further, an appropriate level of access will be required where a SharePoint Administrator has the authority to utilize the “Manage Service Applications” tools.

Utilizing these tools, it is a straightforward procedure to add BCS Actions, though we need to note that a minimal amount of scripting is required to complete the “Add Parameter” feature of the Actions tab on the Ribbon, simply including parameters for a targeted and specified URL along with a corresponding definition for each of the parameters.

To reiterate BCS Actions must be configured by SharePoint users with appropriate permissions. Generally, these users will be SharePoint Administrators. These users will also need to decide on the security risk of transmitting organizational specific information beyond firewalls, over the Internet. Where each of these caveats is acceptible, BCS Actions constitute a promising feature of SharePoint 2010 that can be used to hasten user adoption of the platform. We will be happy to elaborate on any of these points. Please contact us at (630) 786-7026, or Contact Us to further a discussion about our video training content.

As ever, use this link to place an order for an annual subscription to SharePoint-Videos instructional content

© Rehmani Consulting Inc, all rights reserved