Yeah i know….me again.

We’ve had a speaker drop out at short notice so I’m going to speaking at AMITPRO this month. The topic is one you’ll probably know is something I quite like talking about – SharePoint!

My presentation will be titled – SharePoint as a Helpdesk

I’ve had the idea for the while so it’s something Guy and I have been sort of keeping in reserve just in case we had any issues with speakers so I finally get to roll it out this month.

So what exactly do I mean by SharePoint as a Helpdesk?

One thing I’ve found when talking to other partners is that because SharePoint is such a flexible (large?) product is that many of them find it difficult to get into quickly. I can understand this as it can be an awful lot to take in.

However, I really do think many partners are missing out on revenue opportunities because of this! Now that don’t necessarily mean you need to instantly became a master in SharePoint but if you have a basic understanding of what it can do then you can always partner with a company that does if you have a client who might benefit from such a solution.

Partnering with other companies is something SBSC partners are good at!

So….what I’m going to try to do in the time I’ll have is to create a basic helpdesk. All IT companies know what a helpdesk is and what sort of functionality it needs so we can create a quick and dirty SharePoint application that showcases what SharePoint can do.

I’ll be touching on,

Lists and Libraries.

Columns and Views.

Content Types and E-mail Integration.

Web Part Pages and Web Parts.

SharePoint designer and Workflows.

Office integration and Mobile access

And if there is time another topic I like to shout about…InfoPath

Time depending of course!

Our other speaker is Dell Quinn from Microsoft.

She’s going to talk about the changes to the Microsoft Partner Network and how it’ll impact Small Business Specialists.

All this as well as the usual pre and post event banter that goes on at any AMITPRO event!

As always guests are more than welcome. If you’ve never attended a user group event we’ve love for you to come along.

If you’d like to know more than leave a comment here, visit the AMITPRO site or get in touch with me directly (or on Twitter)

Look forward to seeing you there!

I got an email earlier this week from Richard Tubb asking a couple of questions about InfoPath.

This is also the same Mr Tubb who has been “nagging” me to post more about InfoPath and SharePoint. I do take his point as I’ve posted very little on the topic since I spoke about it at AMITPRO last year (can’t believe it’s been nearly 12 months since that!)

So….InfoPath!!

I’ll talk about InfoPath in the Office 2007 world at the moment. Even though the latest version is upon us the current version will be hanging around for a while. Also the skills are transferrable and I’ll need material for future posts right?

What is InfoPath?

In a nutshell it’s all about electronic forms.

If you’ve ever created a form in Microsoft Access it’s along similar lines. What’s cool about InfoPath though is that it isn’t tied into a specific database system. It can talk to SQL Server, Access databases, SharePoint (which is is it’s main strength) and more. You can even make use of InfoPath forms within Outlook to gather information via e-mail!

I also think that when stacked up against a form in a Word document InfoPath wins a lot!

InfoPath allows you to do form validation to ensure data is entered correctly.

It’s biggest strength is it’s capability to “unlock” data which a Word document just can’t do. (Unless you want to do a lot of VBA coding)

This means an simple example is in order.

Lets say you had a Word document that your staff used to enter their weekly hours worked.

It might look like this.

As you can see there is a lot of important information here.

At the top we have data that lets us know who the time sheet belongs to, and when it’s for.

Moving down we have the actual data itself.

The hours worked.

Finally we have a brief summary of data so you can see at a glance what’s going on.

So what’s wrong with this?

Data Validation

You would have to trust whoever fills out the form to put a date in right place and numbers in the hours worked fields. What if someone enters 25 hours for single day? What if “Sales” isn’t even the correct name of the department?

Now you can sort of do this in Word 2007. But it’s not exactly simple. In fact, good luck finding how to insert a form field – The developer tab is hidden by default (I’ll explain how to display them in another post). Then you have to contend with “legacy form controls” and the new Office 2007 form controls. Not fun at all!

Calculations

Once again you’d need to trust whoever is filling out the form to get their maths right. As with data validation you can get Word to do calculations on tables but it’s not exactly simple or intuitive!

Trapped Data

This is the biggie!

I’ve only showed you one form. Let’s imagine you’re Mr Anderson’s line manager. Your boss walks up to your desk at 9am Monday morning and tells you that your department is spending a fortune in overtime. He wants to know exactly how many hours your department logged in overtime for the last three months overall and on a per-person basis…..and he wants it for the management meeting at 11am!

So lets say that each person would have 4 timesheets per month. That’s 12 per person.

If your department had 5 people in it that’s 60 Word documents you need to open, read through, check the maths and note the important figures to bring into your total summary.

That’s going to take some time!

How does InfoPath help?

Here’s the same form designed in InfoPath

At first glance you’ll notice it’s essentially the same form as before

But if you look in the first block of data

You can see a calendar control button. This means I can choose a date with the mouse as well as typing one in.

It won’t let me put anything other than a date in the field.

You’ll also notice all the fields in the first section have a red star next to them.

This because I’ve made them mandatory fields. It’s a little visual notification to remind the user to put some data in.

You also get InfoPath to pop up a little message if no data is entered!

The fields that contain the hours worked data also have some validation rules.

This screenshot shows I’ve tried to enter some text in a numeric field

We get the nice red dotted border AND a tooltip to let me know what’s wrong.

What’s really cool about this is that I didn’t even need to set this up. Just by specifying that the field was numeric InfoPath setup the basic validation for me.

Each control has LOTS of options around data validation to make sure we get exactly the correct data in.

You may also have noticed that the department field is a drop down list.

This means that we can ensure that only valid departments are entered. You’ll see why this can be quite important later on.

Also, the data is actually pulled in from a SharePoint list.

This means that these lookup lists can easily be managed without having to edit the InfoPath form. We can also set security on the SharePoint list to ensure only specific people can make changes to the department details.

InfoPath also has rules and events we can work with. We could actually set this up so all the staff names appeared in another drop down and that once a department has been chosen only the staff in that department are shown (or vice versa. You choose your name and your department is automatically filled out)

This totally solves the Data Validation problem I mentioned above.

So what about calculation?

Easy!

Same form as above with the same data entered

However this time the summary data is updated automatically.

I’ve set the summary fields to do a simple bit of addition and then made them read-only so they just work on there own without any user input needed!

Sorted!

Data Validation and Calculation all dealt with quickly and easily.

I could understand if you were still a little sceptical at this point though. As i said lots of similar functionality is already available all across the Office suite. That brings me onto the final point I made above.

Trapped Data

The real magic happens when this is published to a SharePoint site.

When I published the form I specified that I wanted the summary fields to be pushed through to the SharePoint form library.

This is called “property promotion”.

Here is the time sheet Tom Anderson just filled out on the SharePoint site.

I can now see how many hours Mr Anderson worked that week without even opening the file!

Multiply this across the whole team and you can see at a glance what everyone was up to!

Let’s throw a bit of SharePoint magic in.

I’ve grouped by Department and then by Week Commencing Date.

Can you see why it was important to get the department entry consistent?

We can now get a real overview of the hours entered by each person.

And one finishing touch.

I’ve asked SharePoint to sum the totals fields.

This can look a little confusing your grouping as it gives you overall totals as well as a total at each group level. You’d be better setting up a filtered view to do this.

Something like this.

I’ve removed a level of grouping and filtered to only show the Sales team.

You can now see really easily over the last two weeks the Sales team have posted 18 hours of overtime.

Just to show off….you could then dump this out to Excel for further analysis.

I created that chart with about five clicks of the mouse. Getting that report together for the boss would be nice and simple.

Finally one other cool thing about using SharePoint and InfoPath for a solution like this.

The files themselves are stored in XML format

This means if yoy needed integration with another system (your accounts package for example) this makes the whole thing a lot easier.

I’ll stop there….this was supposed to be a quick introduction.

If you’ve made it to the bottom of this post thanks for the reading!

This was just one example of how you can use InfoPath in a real world scenario.

There is lots more you can do, especially when you put it together with SharePoint.

For example, imagine having an expenses form tied into a workflow so that management approval is required when a certain monetary threshold is met?

Hopefully this all makes sense and you can see why I’m such a fan of InfoPath!

Please comment if you want me to post more about InfoPath and I’ll be happy to do so

*I’ve just noticed all the dates are in US format….I didn’t change the regional settings on my newly created test site…..i’m not re-doing the screen shots though! *

With everything that’s been going on personally and professionally the last few months the newest version of Office sort of skipped by me

Sure I installed the “alpha” when it was released on one of my machines but I wasn’t using it full time

Yesterday I had to do a rebuild of my main office PC so I took the opportunity to install the Beta

This post isn’t about the shiny new features though, it’s about the different suites you’ll be able to purchase

This time around we get four retail versions (from the Office 2010 engineering blog)

Office Home and Student1	Office Home and Business	Office Professional	Office Professional Academic
Word 2010	Word 2010	Word 2010	Word 2010
Excel 2010	Excel 2010	Excel 2010	Excel 2010
PowerPoint 2010	PowerPoint 2010	PowerPoint 2010	PowerPoint 2010
OneNote 2010	OneNote 2010	OneNote 2010	OneNote 2010
	Outlook 2010	Outlook 2010	Outlook 2010
		Publisher 2010	Publisher 2010
		Access 2010	Access 2010

On first glance I’m really pleased

OneNote for everybody!!!

However on second glance I’m a bit gutted as you’ll notice that once again there is no InfoPath unless you buy Office via licensing (Office Professional Plus for most businesses)

I commented before on how I think a lot of smaller businesses are missing out because InfoPath is inaccessible to them

It’s frustrating when we can sell Small Business Server 2008 with one of the key features being the inclusion of SharePoint and then not being able to create some really great solutions because a key piece of software isn’t as easily available. A quick search found Infopath 2007 box product to be somewhere in between £100-£140. Licensing is obviously different but if you’re going down that route you may as well just get Professional Plus

So it’s left to the SBS team to save us! Here’s my idea,

If you ever release SBS 2008 R2 (and I understand that is IF) can we get some InfoPath licenses added to the Premium CALS? 

I know that is unlikely to happen but a guy can wish right?

I’ve just got back from tonight’s AMITPRO meeting where I was speaking about InfoPath (if your still wondering what InfoPath is I’ll post about this soon!)

All in all I was pleased with how it went down and got some great comments from people there

Since I’m my own worse enemy when it comes to things I do I’m going to critique myself to make sure I learn!

If the ultimate goal was to give everyone an overall view of what InfoPath is, how it works, how much it costs, etc I think i achieved that. Driving back i thought of a couple of things I’d have liked to improve

1) Slides – some slides I skipped over far too quickly. I’d put the slide in there for a reason so why bother not using it?

2) Specific plan – I would have no hope of memorising some sort of script, etc so my plan was to use the slides as prompts and then talk from my own knowledge and experience which I think generally worked ok but i possibly over emphasised some things and glossed over other points altogether as I tried to make sure I covered everything. The other problem with this is that if I had to give the same presentation again it would probably be very different. It also meant I sort of dwindled away instead of having a clear specific ending

3) Speed – it felt to me like I raced through the entire thing though obviously that’s just my perspective as I was concentrating on recalling other things while talking at the same time

4) Demos – My demos weren’t as structured as I’d have liked (this sort of follows on from point 2) which I sometimes ended up wandering down dead ends

We rarely have group members speak at meetings so it was personally big deal for me to get it right. If you were there tonight thanks for your attention. Any feedback you have (good or bad!) is appreciated

I enjoyed the whole experience though I could probably do with a laptop upgrade  

There has been a rumour kicking around the last few weeks that Microsoft are to make SharePoint designer available for free

(Posts from various SharePoint based blogs here, here and here)

Any software announcement scheduled for April 1st always makes me suspicious (a couple of the blog posts I’ve mentioned have updated to say it’ll be the April 2nd now) but the post that made me think this could be the real deal was from the Lady Licensing blog (If you haven’t already subscribed to her blog do it…it’s very helpful!)

Product Licensing Changes to SharePoint Designer, PerformancePoint Server and Forms Server – April 2009

The post outlines that SharePoint Designer will become free (if you have software assurance you can get a copy of Expression Web 2 in replacement) and also says that Performance Point Server 2007 and Forms Server 2007 are to be retired

I’ve got a few thoughts on this so lets start with SharePoint Designer

If this is true then i think it’s a move that makes sense. When your working with SharePoint you have three ways to customise your site

1) Through the browser

2) With SharePoint Designer (SPD)

3) Using developer tools such as Visual Studio

SharePoint designer is sort of pitched as an advanced end user tool but in reality (based on my own experience) someone with specific knowledge would do this on your behalf (such as your IT consultant)

If you want to do anything more advanced then you’d get developers involved who would side step SPD completely so I’ll bet Microsoft aren’t selling too many copies of SPD and I imagine the people who are at this level are using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) as opposed to Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) so they are already paying customers

Since WSS is free making it a part of that adds to the overall feature set and wont make too much of a difference to the Microsoft bottom line

Just for the ability to create workflows alone i think SharePoint Designer is an excellent tool, that’s before you look at any of the other stuff it can do

While it can be quite a scary product (people worry about “breaking” their SharePoint sites) it is extremely powerful and worth getting to know (Penny Coventry’s book on the subject is great!)

Forms Server 2007 and PerformancePoint

According to the information on Emma’s post both of these products are being retired

PerformancePoint is being rolled up into the next release of Sharepoint and will be called “PerformancePoint Services for Sharepoint” (see here for official details). They did the same thing with Content Management Server which helps build on the feature set of MOSS

Forms Server though is an odd one which falls under the same category of InfoPath

I personally think Microsoft missed a trick with InfoPath and the small business market. InfoPath is a very useful tool when combined with SharePoint but it’s one of those products no one knows about. (I have the same argument about OneNote – but that’s for another time)

This is because of the way it is bundled. InfoPath 2007 comes with Office 2007 Professional Plus and Office Enterprise (we’ll just pretend “Office Ultimate” doesn’t exist) which means buying it under a volume license agreement. While we do have customers who buy office in this way lots of them prefer to buy their office software OEM with a new PC

You can buy InfoPath separately but that means boxed product (expensive) or via volume licensing but if you going to do that you may as well get Office Professional Plus right?

So if you don’t already know InfoPath lets you create electronic forms which are much more powerful than anything you could create in Word (which is where most people create their forms!)

They also integrate nicely with SharePoint so you can unlock the data within them and when combined with workflows you can create powerful solutions (timesheets and expense claims i always think are a good examples)

The downside to this is that obviously you must have InfoPath installed to work with the forms. This is where Forms Server steps in. You can create a form and then convert it into a web form so all you need to fill it in is a browser (you can even create forms for your mobile device!)

This functionality is “baked in” to MOSS so the product is aimed for those people using WSS but with the need for web based forms. Generally this means smaller businesses so as an example what costs more?

10 user system

1 copy of InfoPath  + Forms server 2007 and CALs

or

10 copies of InfoPath

I imagine Microsoft aren’t selling too many copies of Forms Server so i can see why this is being retired. I couldn’t find any official announcement so I’m not sure if that’s the end of Forms Server and if you want that functionality you’ll have to move to MOSS or if we’ll see some Forms Server functionality in the next version of WSS (fingers crossed!)

It’s April 1st tomorrow so i guess we’ll at least find out something then!

Richard Tubb gave me a call a couple of days ago as he was having a problem with his user account in SharePoint (read about it here)

He mentions I’d had a similar problem

It was along the same lines but worthy of a blog post I think

I have a client who uses an Infopath form as a time sheet. On the form is a drop down list with all the staff members names to identify who the time sheet belongs to. I’d gained access to the user list via one of the SharePoint web services (I posted about this technique here) 

The problem was that some staff members had left the company and after I’d deleted their user accounts the names were still showing up in the Infopath form

This entry on the WSSFAQ site pointed me in the right direction

I had deleted the user from the SITE but not from the SITE COLECTION (e.g a site collection could be 10 sites but specific users only have access to 3 of them. Hence the need to remove them from both places – though I imagine deleting them from the site collection will sort out the other sites)

To do this I did the following

From the site at the top of the site collection click the Site Settings menu then Site Administration. In the “Site Collection Administration” section click  “View site collection user information “

From here I was able to delete the user and they disappeared from the Infopath list

An Infopath solution wasn’t quite behaving as expected.

I wanted to make some changes and try some things out so i copied some of their XML files into my sharepoint document library so i’d be able to test against real data

I made the changes to the template but when i tried to edit one of the existing forms the new changes weren’t displayed. New forms were fine though

I went back into design mode and checked that the “automatically upgrade” option was selected.

I manually changed the form version number in case it hadn’t be incremented. No difference

The answer came from the newsgroups! (Thanks Scott L. Heim!)

If you open the XML file in notepad at the top of the file is a HREF entry that points to the XSN file. The entry was invalid as the files were now in a different document library (mine!)

I manually changed the entry so that it reflected my setup and all was well and i resumed testing without issue

This was a problem i encountered a while back but thought it was just me doing something silly when i was messing around with print views.

You set up the form and specify in the page setup you want it landscape but no matter what you do it always ends up in portrait (even in print preview)

Turns out installing Internet Explorer 7 is the problem.

One of my colleagues was trying to print out an expense claims form when i realised it wasn’t just me (obviously my move to Vista and Office 2007 made the problem go away for me!)

There is a hotfix available here. Give your local Microsoft support number a call and ask for the hotfix (remember they are free)

I installed it this morning and the problem has gone away..yay!

I’ve been working on an InfoPath solution for one of our customers. I’ve certainly learnt quite a bit while doing this.

Just wanted to post about this excellent tip

I needed a list of SharePoint users in a drop-down list box.

Your can’t access the user list in the same way you would a standard list

This post from Jan Tielen shows how to give one of the web services a kick to return the information you need. The post is very in depth but it’s actually pretty straightforward and i had it working in no time

Top marks to Jan!

#Note 1 # I used this on Sharepoint 2003 & Infopath 2003. I’m not sure if any of this applies for 2007

#Note 2 # Jan’s tip talks in the conext of a Visual Studio based solution. This particular project didn’t call for that but it still works perfectly well if your using vbscript in the background