SharePoint Use Cases

In last few weeks I noticed a lot of posts on Twitter about Nintex Workflow 2007 and SharePoint. All these came from a single user: Bjørn Furuknap (@furuknap). So I followed him for a while and I learned that he wrote a FREE e-book about Nintex Workflow 2007. If you are reading this blog on a regular basis you probably know that I think highly of Nintex Workflow 2007. If you are already using it and you would like to learn more, or just prospecting, take a look at Bjorn’s guide:

In this 128-page special issue of Understanding SharePoint Journal, I will introduce you to Nintex Workflow 2007, and:

• show you how to install, configure, and test Nintex Workflow 2007
• teach you how to use the Nintex workflow designer
• explain how to write completely custom workflows
• put in plain words how to use and modify workflow templates and snippets
• show you how to use both sequential snd state machine workflows, including combining the two
• walk you through the development of a complete workflow solution to send Get Well Soon greetings to sick employees
• show you some of the gotchas, do’s and dont’s, and problems you may encouter
• explain some best practices and advice on monitoring and managing workflows
• AND you’ll get a subscription to the FREE USP Journal newsletter that gives you special offers, discount codes, and previews of other issues

Download here…

If you ever taught end users on how to use SharePoint you probably noticed they have a problem using all these nice SharePoint menus. I love the SharePoint UI very much, but I am a geek and SharePoint is made by geeks… Average SharePoint user are not geek they are Information workers, and as Mark says: Information Workers don’t care how it all works, they want to know why they should change their existing work habits to accommodate this new way to store their files. That said, you probably noticed that they have a problem hitting all those small arrows to expand the menus and stuff.

James Milne wrote a nice web part (Content Type Toolbar) to overcome one of these problems. It extracts all the content types of a document library and shows them with big icons above document library. It is easy to deploy and your Information workers will just love it.

Back in summer of 2008. Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood launched stackoverflow.com, a Q&A community site for programmers. In just few months it became on of the most authoritative sources for programming questions. These guys made a perfect site which is so much better than thos crapy MSDN/Technet forums and other Q&A sites over the web. Great job guys!!!

Few weeks ago the second site called serverfault.com launched. It is a community site for IT professionals.

Toni, how is this site related with SharePoint?

Believe it or not there is a lot of SharePoint releated questions on both sites and our small SharePoint community is groving every day. So if you have a programming or it pro (admin) question about SharePoint visit one of the links below.

- SharePoint tagged questions at StackOverflow (programming)

- SharePoint tagged questions at ServerFault (it pro)

Toni, how would you improve these sites for SharePoint community?

Well Jeff believes that programming, it pro and end user questions should be strictly separted (this is why they have different sites for each group). However SharePoint is am unique platform where programming, administration and end user questions are overlapping all the time. It would be cool if we could use a single site for all the SharePoint questions.

Reputation

Each user earns reputation from asking/answering questions here is mine for both sites :)))

From time to time, when I have to write a specification for CRM system based on top of Microsoft Dynamics CRM I need a list of build in CRM reports. Although this list is available in CRM I sometimes cannot access CRM instance and I was not able to find it on the web. So here it is:

• Competitor Win Loss
  Compare how your sales team performs against competitors.
• Campaign Comparison
  Compare two campaigns.
• Lead Source Effectiveness
  Compare your lead sources.
• Activities
  Display a list of activities.
• Neglected Accounts
  Identify accounts that have not been contacted recently.
• Neglected Cases
  Identify cases that have not been contacted recently.
• Neglected Leads
  Identify leads that have not been contacted.
• Account Distribution
  Identify patterns in top revenue-generating accounts.
• Top Knowledge Base Articles
  Identify the most frequently used knowledge base articles.
• Campaign Activity Status
  Track a campaign.
• Campaign Performance
  Track the progress and status of campaigns.
• Sales History
  Understand past sales performance.
• Account Summary
  View a chronological summary of an account.
• Account Overview
  View a one-page overview of an account.
• Quote
  View a quote and its line items.
• Invoice
  View an invoice and its line items.
• Order
  View an order and its line items.
• Sales Pipeline
  View anticipated potential sales.
• Products By Contact
  View products that are used by a contact.
• Products By Account
  View products that are used by an account.
• Case Summary Table
  View the patterns in cases.
• Service Activity Volume
  View the patterns in service activity volume.

Laura Rogers posted an interesting business requirement at Stump the Panel of End User SharePoint:

Here’s a question that came in from jlschu1:
I am trying to create a web part on a SP blog site that will display the top bloggers for that site. There is a large group of people writing posts on one blog site, in one list of posts. I want to show the top bloggers based on their number of posts.

Laura solved the problem with SPD workflow which sounds interesting. Laura, I can’t wait to see it.

I took a different path and created a “non-code“ required web part to solve this. This web part is similar to my Blog Posts Archive web part. Check these out.

In last few weeks Laura Rogers has been posting interesting articles about Data View Web Part (DVWP). Check them out here.

I know a great deal about Data View Web Part and there are numerous solutions I posted here which were created with it (Blog archive | SharePoint Lists and Libraries, Outlook Style | KPIs), however Laura taught me something new:

• Yes, you can use Data View Web Part to pull data from subsites
• Yes, you can use Data View Web Part to aggregate data from more than one list

For more details check her post, or attend one of the online workshops about DVWP at End User SharePoint.

The benefit: This is very important for Windows SharePoint Services users since you do not have Content Query Web Part in WSS. By using DVWP you might be able to aggregate and present information in very interesting ways.

The problem: Although DVWP can aggregate data from subsites you would have to pre-configure all the sources. In case you add a new site you will need to ad it to your data sources.  (I presume it might not perform very well when multiple sources are used).

Conclusion: No matter how hard you learn, when it comes to SharePoint, there is always something new to learn. Keep your eyes open!

I haven’t posted in a while. First I have been to Windays 2009 and then to New York City. Although my posts are just a paragraph or two it takes few hours to prepare, test and describe a solution I am writing about. Usually I am writing these around 1 AM. So from time to time I really need vacation.

I did “some work” in New York; I had lunch with Mark Miller of End User SharePoint. Mark brought his digital camera and caught me by surprise. :))). Videos are posted on End User SharePoint.

I just got an email from SlideShare.net

Congratulations! Your presentation ‘WinDays 2009 - SharePoint For End Users - Shortcuts To Success’ is currently being showcased on the ‘Technology’ page on SlideShare.

Hi tonifrankola!

Your presentation WinDays 2009 - SharePoint For End Users - Shortcuts To Success is currently being showcased on the ‘Technology’ page by our editorial team.

It’s likely to remain there for the next 16-20 hours…

Cheers,
- the SlideShare team

Nice! Thanks SlideShare!

In last two weeks I did not have enough time to post here as I was preparing to deliver a session at Microsoft Windays conference.

As I promised here are the slide decks.

Scenario

Let’s consider the following scenario: Your company is working with a partner. All support requests are being submitted via email.

You have a a team of people submitting requests:

Furthermore, sometimes you need to include additional people on your side. The communication channels might get even more complicated (the more employees you have working on this, the more complicated it gets :-)).

The real problem here is email as communication channel. Email is a great tool, easy to use and everything. But the problem is that knowledge from each conversation is lost in a personal inbox. If the receiver does not forward the email to other team members he will be the only one able to solve the problem.

This is where SharePoint kicks-in; in this article I am going to describe a simple procedure to automate the knowledge capture with SharePoint (WSS included :-)).

We are going to configure SharePoint to receive emails and stores them to a document library, and configure Outlook clients to forward all emails coming from Partner directly to SharePoint.

Step by step guide to set it up

SharePoint configuration

I will try to explain how you could setup this solution. I will use Microsoft as my partner but you can adjust this solution to match your settings.

• Create a document library (e.g. Microsoft Support - Knowledge Base), we are going to use this it as knowledge repository for this partner.
• Enable incoming e-mail integration (learn more about Enabling and configuring e-mail support for a list or library) for it.
  I am using the following e-mail integration settings:

  

• Create an email alert for all members in your team to be alerted when new item is created (use Alert me functionality or a workflow)

Outlook configuration

The next step is to configure a rule in Outlook to forward all the emails to your Knowledge base library, I created the following rule:

Apply this rule after the message arrives

from Microsoft Support

 and contains Re: in the subject

forward to ms-knowledgebase@intranet.local

My Outlook is going to forward each email sent by Microsoft support and containing “Re:” (sometimes we are getting some other emails and I do not want these to be forwarded). Each email will be received by SharePoint and stored to your online knowledge base.

Conclusion

Benefits of this solution:

• Everything is automated. Once you set it up, you do not need to do anything else
• Every team member is being alerted when there is new information in the Knowledge base
• You can benefit from SharePoint search capabilities to search it:
  • New team members can use your Knowledge base to learn more about previous support requests. This is very important!
  • Other people from your company can also check the knowledge base periodically

Potential problems:

• Although Outlook rules can be Exported/Imported this procedure is not so trivial. So you will probably need to instruct each team member on how to create rule
  • Maintaining rules might also be problematic
• Sometimes support requests cannot be solved with just one email. When you are having a multiple emails going back and forward between you and your partner (all being part of one support request), under proposed incoming email settings, SharePoint will create one folder for each reply.
  Change the incoming email setting to match your needs. Configuration options are limited, but it is something we can live with.