SharePoint Workflow Strategy

Save users valuable time with custom SharePoint Search

Matthew McDermott, a Microsoft SharePoint MVP, believes that every hour a developer dedicates to working on search saves 100 hours of end-user time.

SharePoint is a great tool for managing files, documents, and anything else you can put into a list, but if you aren’t careful you could end up with unmanageable lists and libraries (especially if documents are added frequently). One solution is to use views with different filters and groupings, or to split your data across different folders. Then the problem changes, if you don’t have all the details you need to traverse through the tree of views and folders you will have a very hard time finding documents.

This is where SharePoint search crawls onto the stage. It is incredibly easy to get the SharePoint search crawler to index your custom columns, and very simple to add them to an advanced search box. SharePoint search is very scalable; adding more items just means it takes longer to perform a full crawl. On the other hand, views are limited to the View Threshold Limit (default is 5,000 items), and it is not suggested to increase that number too much. So it makes a lot of sense to utilize the search service especially if you plan for your document libraries to grow beyond 10,000 items.

Now for the fun stuff…

Adding Custom Columns as Searchable Properties

1. Login to Central Admin
2. Application Management -> Manage service applications
3. Click on your Search Service
4. Under Queries and Results click Metadata Properties

 

You should see something like the following:

This is where you can manage the SharePoint searchable properties. Also note that new properties will not be searchable until after a full crawl is performed.

1. Give it a meaningful Property Name; this will be used in search queries and results
2. Also a good idea to put details in the Description text field
3. Select the data type
4. Add the column mapping(s)

 

Mappings to crawled Properties section is where you actually define what columns map to this searchable property. You can define one or more columns; if you define multiple you have two options on how you want those values to be treated. You can include all of the properties, or you can include only the first one it finds based on the order in which you define them.

Mapping multiple columns to a single property is a great way of consolidating columns from different content types to a single searchable field. Suppose you have several content types each with their own cost column (Fuel Cost, Materials Cost, Project Cost, Insurance Cost); you could map all of these columns to a single searchable property, Cost. This would allow someone in the financial department to search all documents in SharePoint and only specify a single filter if they want to search by cost.

You select columns via their internal SharePoint name; some of these names are more cryptic than others. “Created By” is simply, Author, a custom column like “Project Name” might look something like “Project_x0020_Name”. A promoted InfoPath column on the other hand will be slightly more cryptic, _x0033_5d06fe7_x002d_ae68_x002d_454d_x002d_936a_x002d_b7821b271721.

2 easy ways to get the internal name of a column:

1. Sort by the column in the List view.

Or

1. Edit the column in List/Library settings

After the page loads the URL will contain the internal name of the column.

..SortField=_x0033_5d06fe7_x002d_ae68_x002d_454d_x002d_936a_x002d_b7821b271721&SortDir=Asc

… {96DC46B1-7316-449F-B719-D64F604BB633}&Field=Project_x0020_Name

After SharePoint completes a full crawl, your new properties will be searchable.

 

Configuring an Advanced Search Box with other Properties

1. Create a new SharePoint page (or modify an existing page)
2. Add an Advanced Search Box web part to the page
3. Click Edit Web Part
4. Expand the Properties section
5. Copy/paste the Properties textbox to your favorite text editor
6. You should see something like the following:

<root xmlns:xsi=”http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance”>

<PropertyDefs>

<PropertyDef Name=”Created” DataType=”datetime” DisplayName=”Created”/>

<PropertyDef Name=”CreatedBy” DataType=”text” DisplayName=”Created By”/>

<PropertyDef Name=”ModifiedBy” DataType=”text” DisplayName=”Last Modified By”/>

</PropertyDefs>

<ResultTypes>

<ResultType DisplayName=”All Results” Name=”default”>

<KeywordQuery/>

<PropertyRef Name=”Created” />

<PropertyRef Name=”CreatedBy” />

<PropertyRef Name=”ModifiedBy” />

</ResultType>

</ResultTypes>

</root>

 

The Parts of PropertyDef

• Name: The crawled property name
• DataType: text, integer, decimal, datetime, or yesno.
• DisplayName: What you want users to see in the dropdown selection

 

Simply add a PropertyDef for each property you would like your users to be able to filter by, and add the corresponding PropertyRef to the ResultType. After that is done you have done all you need to do to search and filter by any column you want within SharePoint.

 

The next thing you’ll want to do is to surface custom properties within the search results, but that is out of scope for this article. In short, you would need to add a Search Core Results web part to a page (or the same page as the search box), and add your properties to the XSL of the results.

 

SharePoint Security – The myths, the facts, and the how-tos

Kyle, SharePoint Consultant
for Entrance Software
3-14-2012

Myths about SharePoint Security

Data security is not nearly as exciting as Hollywood or the media at large would have you believe. Most of the threats to your organization’s data aren’t going to come from malicious bespectacled hackers using cleverly-written applications to bypass your organization’s firewalls and hardware security measures. In fact, a recent survey found that over half of the threats to your organization’s security are coming from inside your own walls! Intrusions from outside accounted for only 14% of security threats, according to that same study.

Secure Information with SharePoint 2010

Fortunately, securing your company’s digital assets is simple with the right tools and mindset. Microsoft SharePoint 2010 not only makes it easy to collaborate and share information within an organization, but also to secure that information and protect it from individuals who should not have access. The trick is to understand SharePoint’s security features—of which there are many—and leverage the appropriate capabilities depending on your organization’s needs.

First, it’s important to understand how SharePoint works with your existing security infrastructure to make managing security easier. Most small and medium-sized businesses already utilize Active Directory internally to manage user identities and credentials across a domain. Out-of-the-box, SharePoint recognizes your internal Active Directory-enabled domain and authenticates users accordingly. SharePoint can also be tied to other authentication providers if your organization uses a non-Microsoft user management system or forms-based authentication if you would like to provide users with a separate login and password.

Authentication providers are tied to zones (with example zones being Internet, Intranet, Extranet, and Custom zones). Users from each zone are challenged and routed (through your Alternate Access Mappings) according to the zone they’re arriving from. In SharePoint 2010, you can tie multiple authentication providers to each zone, allowing users multiple ways to log in.

SharePoint User Permissions

Once users are authenticated, how do you manage what they can and can’t see? By assigning permissions, of course! There are two popular schools of thought on how to set this up:

• Assign permissions to existing user groups from your authentication provider. For example, use your existing Active Directory groups to assign permission levels to each group.
• Manage user permissions using SharePoint user groups containing individuals.

There are benefits and drawbacks to both. For medium-sized organizations with a relatively static organizational structure and rigid divisions between organizational units, tying permissions directly to AD groups can be beneficial and save a lot of management time. SharePoint user groups are the way to go if you’re planning to share documents between departments and manage permissions more granularly.

After setting up the appropriate permission groups for your organization, you can then manage the permissions for every item in your SharePoint farm’s hierarchy. SharePoint 2010 makes it easy to customize permissions from the site collection level all the way down to specific documents in specific libraries. By default, items are configured to inherit permission levels from their parent—sites inherit the permissions of their top-level site, libraries inherit the permissions of their parent site, and documents inherit the permissions of the library in which they’re contained. At any point along this hierarchy you can break permissions to establish custom rules that propagate to the lower levels.

SharePoint Customization

I’ve only scratched the surface of SharePoint’s security capabilities. Using custom code in combination with SharePoint’s out-of-the-box workflow engine, powerful solutions can be sculpted to manage the fine-grained permissions of an approval process, a business intelligence dashboard, or any other complex application your business may want to implement.

Custom SSRS Reports – the SharePoint tool you didn’t know you had.

The time is now to upgrade to SharePoint 2010

Collaborate or die: Business Collaboration as survival of the fittest.

Carol, SharePoint Team Lead
for Entrance Software
2-21-2012

Why Business Collaboration is kinda a big deal:

No matter what industry we find ourselves in, we can all benefit from collaborating with other people in our business, whether those people are sitting next to us, down the hall, on a different floor or clear across the globe we benefit from others’ experience and knowledge.  We already do it – work on documents, learn who knows what, categorize our work and work through data to try and make our best decisions. But SharePoint has revolutionized mundane activities and made them true business insights. Businesses profit most when collaboration is seamless and, let’s face it, captured to build a knowledge base for the future. And it’s is a proven model for growth: “In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate most effectively have prevailed.” – Charles Darwin

SharePoint has become synonymous with business collaboration and the latest version, SharePoint 2010, provides your end users with a number of possibilities for business collaboration that include: document collaboration, discussion boards, wikis, blogs, RSS viewers, contact lists, calendars, announcements, alerts, workflow, MySites and search.  All of this and it provides a highly intuitive user interface that interacts seamlessly with the programs your organization is already using on a daily basis such as Word, Outlook, Power Point, Excel, Access, OneNote and Visio.  SharePoint Workspace 2010 is a new addition to the SharePoint toolbox that allows your team to take their collaboration offline whether they are in the field or in the air and sync their changes with other users’ changes when they are reconnected.

Document Management

SharePoint has been proven to deliver solid business collaboration through its document management capabilities.  It seamlessly improves our ability to track versioning including who and when the file was created and modified, capturing these details behind the scenes with zero additional effort by your team.  It provides us the ability to do major or major/minor versioning.  Major is good enough for most needs, but major/minor versioning allows us to granularly control who is seeing a minor version and who sees a major version.  Add in a publishing workflow and suddenly you can edit your policies and procedures in place, only allowing Policy Owners to view minor versions and everyone to see major versions.  Once the workflow collects all required approvals it can publish a major version making new changes visible to all consumers.  Add to it an automated alert based on publishing a major version and you can keep all those who need to know in the know.  Not to mention, your file names can become so much more meaningful because we no longer have to track version and date information in the title.

MySites

How many times have you needed to collaborate with someone on a task in front of you and aren’t sure who to ask?!  SharePoint’s MySites, when implemented and championed correctly, can take the guess work out of who has the knowledge/experience you are looking for.  2010 improves on previous MySite functionality with colleague suggestions that recommend colleagues based on your reporting structure, communities memberships, email distribution lists, office communicator contact lists and analysis of the most common office outlook e-mail recipients.  It also offers an organization browser to navigate your organizational structure to see managers, peers, and direct reports.  My Profile page allows your team to enter information about themselves including interests, skills, and previous projects they’ve participated in.  My content gives your users a place to store documents, favorite links, personal blogs and wiki pages. The added benefit of having a picture and presence available should not be discounted either.  It can turn your business collaboration a much more personal experience.

Ratings & Tags

2010 improves Business Collaboration over previous versions of SharePoint with Ratings & Tags.  We’ve all seen ratings used in online websites.  Ratings allow the consumer/user to rate a particular item, basically ranking its value as good or bad, positive or negative.  The potential consumer benefits from previous consumers’ experiences being captured and can information can help them to make a decision about which item is going to perform best for them and their needs.  SharePoint introduces this new feature to empower your users to rank the content in your portal.  Administrators can use this information to find content with poor ratings in order to improve upon it or simply remove it.  It’s also used by SharePoint to promote higher ranked content to the top of the search results list.  The new tagging feature improves business collaboration by allowing users to apply either a set of predefined tags i.e. Taxonomy or to apply their own tags i.e. Folksonomy to content including files and sites.  Being able to quickly say ‘I Like It!’ or ‘Helpful’ can help build buy in, while simultaneously providing administrators and power users feedback on the portal.  This business collaborative tagging also builds a tag cloud that can be accessed via a Tag Cloud web part to further empower your users to find content that is meaningful to them.

Business Process Automation

Business collaboration is often hampered by paper intensive processes.  How do you track down a paper form, contract or AFE?  Unless you are tagging it with and RFID tag, you have to hope it’s on the last desk you left it or do the old door to door routine.  The data in these forms is just as hard to find as is the paper it’s written on.  By moving away from these archaic and inefficient processes we can take our business collaboration to the next level.  Data in InfoPath forms is captured in a SQL database where it is available for reporting and dashboards.  Workflows driving what used to be a paper process allows us to keep track of where in the process an item is without going desk to desk and gives greater insight into where bottlenecks or inefficiencies are occurring.  Instead of just trying to accomplish a task, with business process automation we can spend more time improving and collaborating on our deliverables.

Business Intelligence

Where, oh where is all the data I need to make an informed decision!?!?  Chances are its spread across multiple lines of business systems.  Our Information Workers and Executives spend large amounts of time looking for the data they need, not because it isn’t there, but because it isn’t easy to get to.  Think about the number of user names and passwords your staff need to do their jobs effectively.  I’ve personally worked at a facility where I maintained no less than twenty user names and passwords to access the data and systems to complete my assignments. It’s common to hear the complaint from users that they do not have access to all systems they wish/need to make informed decisions.  In this scenario instead of having access to the primary source of data, they are forced to rely on reports run by other users, which we have to admit is no replacement for up to the moment data.  Business intelligence brings that data to a central location with single sign on, and it’s another of our tools in the SharePoint toolbox.

In SharePoint 2010 business intelligence is expanded upon with Dashboards, decomposition tree and Visio services.  Dashboards can provide us up to the minute data, aggregated from multiple sources and display it in a web browser as a table, chart or graphical interface where your users can collaborate and interact with it in real time, drilling down into information that raise questions and allowing them to quickly define key opportunities and trends.  In the Houston area we see this feature used by numerous Oil & Gas firms.  Their multiple business units and the executives all operate more efficiently when they can go to a single screen and see data points coming out of multiple systems.  These data points typically include accounting information such as sales data, production data, and forecasting data.  The decomposition tree in SharePoint 2010 allows you to perform root cause analyses on mission critical data via powerful analytics only showing you the most important and pertinent information.

SharePoint Best Practices

Remember: any tool worth having is worth knowing how to use.  When considering SharePoint as a solution for your business collaboration needs, keep in mind while it is highly intuitive and user friendly a little bit of marketing and training for your end users will go a long way towards gaining user acceptance and buy in.  Marketing should focus on the why – all the ways this new tool will make your users’ work lives easier and all the possibilities that come with it.  While training should focus on the how – starting small and building on the basics as your user base becomes more savvy and advanced in their SharePoint skills.  Now, let’s go out there and collaborate!

SharePoint’s Return on Investment; How to calculate your SharePoint ROI

Carol, SharePoint Team Lead
for Entrance Software
2-10-2012

 

SharePoint’s ROI: It’s not always straight forward, so make sure to check under the cushions on your couch!

I hang my spurs in Houston, Texas and around here, people tend to love ‘one stop shopping’ for the sake of saving time and let’s face it MONEY.  Our big super stores allow us to get in, find what we need quickly, get everything from an oil change to bread and then get us back on our way.  SharePoint is that one stop shop, so keep that in mind when putting together your ROI.

Difficult to calculate ROI

Consolidated Overhead: Consolidating multiple solutions into one platform means you are going to do more with less just like our local Super Store.  Combing your needs be it intranet redesign, extranet capabilities, collaboration, document management, business process automation and/or business intelligence it into one tool means less, hardware, less infrastructure and less support staff needed to maintain a well-designed and governed SharePoint Solution.  This all in one allows you to eliminate legacy systems and empowers your end users to manage their own content and security meaning fewer support tickets.

Search & Collaboration:  We all know SharePoint and its benefits of delivering the right information quickly and easily and fostering collaboration amongst our information workers, but assigning hard dollar signs to these productivity enhancements can be challenging.

Get your Calculators Out

Business Process Improvement:  Think about your business and all the processes involved in keeping it moving and more importantly making it profitable.  Every organization is unique, but of all the industries I’ve worked in business process improvement projects are the easiest to calculate and show ROI.  Processes like contract lifecycle management, yearly employee performance assessments, new hire onboarding or help desk ticketing can see dramatic improvements when processes are well defined, automated and made visible to decrease inefficiencies and improve compliance.  I’ve designed multiple contract management solutions in SharePoint 2007 and 2010 and I must admit it is one of my favorite solutions to work on because the benefits are so quickly realized.  With a paper intensive processes the complaints are various but the top 3 are:

1. It takes too long to move from contract request to contract execution.
2. I cannot tell where my contracts are during the approval/execution process.
3. I have no visibility into how many contracts are being executed, rejected or when they are expiring without significant efforts to maintain contract tracking spreadsheets.

Number one is by far the easiest to calculate.  If you know it is taking 3 – 6 months to turn around a contract following processes in place today because you are pushing around a word document through email and then printing it for manually routing it for signature, then you know this process is prone to inconsistencies and errors.  These operational inefficiencies lead to lower profit margins and increased legal and regulatory business risks.  I’ve seen organizations already started working projects without having contracts in place because these processes are so drawn out.  With SharePoint content type templates for contract creation, automated workflows for approvals, notifications and reminders, and digital signatures you can turn this process into a well-oiled machine.  Moving quickly through contract creation in a template controlled by the powers that be, routing based on a number of parameters defined specifically for your organization, alerts to get the process moving again when it gets stuck can all help you execute contracts in weeks instead of months.

Example of how to calculate Contract BPA ROI:

1. Assumed facts for estimating: 200 AFEs which require new Contracts per year, with the average time for execution equaling 3 months or 480 hours
2. The lost time waiting for execution is 96,000 total hrs. or 4000 total days of lost productivity
3. If we take the total days times 8 hours in a work day that’s 32,000 lost productive work hours waiting for contract execution
4. Multiple 32,000 times the average employee hourly rate (let’s estimate $50/hr) that’s $1,600,000!!!

Two & Three may be a little less easy to put a dollar sign on, but trust me contract administrators, managers and executives love to go into a dashboard so they can quickly see where in the process their contracts are, how many are executed/rejected within a specific time frame and who their most productive team mates are.  Another added benefit is being able to monitor ever green or auto renewing agreements and contract expiration.  Creating a calendar view of your library with these files can empower your contract administrators to quickly see which previously executed contracts need their attention.  This risk management should not be discounted and can be calculated if you survey how many of these contracts were neglected in a previous period.

Performance reviews and ticketing systems benefit in a similar fashion to contracts.  Turning around the tickets/reviews quicker and more efficiently with data capture allows for managers to look into the process like never before and do data analyses to reduce inefficiencies and/or better align their team and ultimately their organization to be that well-oiled fighting machine.

Know it? Prove it! Use SharePoint Drill Downs:

Reliable, accurate, verifiable Business Intelligence is key to making good decisions as a business.  Ideally at the strategic level, the information you live and breathe on is lower-level data rolled-up into an at-a-glance format that can be quickly interpreted and consumed by the decision maker.  But even with the best team, the most eye-catching charts, and a perfect presentation, a trust issue often arises between the decision maker and the source of the intelligence.  A trust-but-verify mentality will (and should) prevail.

So how do you establish Business Intelligence trust?  Enable the decision maker to delve further into the building blocks of data that make up his information.  By drilling down into the individual line-items of data you validate your claim made at the broader, strategic level.  Seeing the components of rolled-up information gives decision makers the necessary trust to remove roadblocks and continue toward an informed decision.  The faster this process becomes, the more agile your business will become.

SharePoint dashboards are great at giving both the overview at-a-glance and the granularity on demand you need to get to the point faster.  Imagine you have a gauge illustrating your budget vs. actual spending, it shows you are 10% over budget.  Your CEO will almost certainly ask, “Where are the numbers coming from and where are we going over budget?”  To answer his question, you smoothly click on the gauge to drill-down into a table showing expenses that have exceeded the allocated budget.  Showing this detail both confirms that the data is accurate, and provides the information necessary to take action.

Soon after the meeting, your business can reign in the overspending at exactly the place necessary. Then your profits skyrocket, and you become a hero and local celebrity! Or maybe you just decrease time spent digging through reports by half… Or maybe you find out the problem isn’t in expenses, but in lack of sales – so you can go to your sales department with numbers. The possibilities are endless, but the result is always smarter faster reactions to what’s happening in your business.

InfoPath + SharePoint = Professional, Clean Data Management

InfoPath is key to getting clean, useful information from users into SharePoint. Your valuable information can easily be gathered at a granular level with InfoPath forms, and SharePoint can then extract data you care about to create relevant, useful information for decision makers. Basically, InfoPath translates inputs from user information into data points, preparing SharePoint with good data to produce actionable information – ideally customized for specific users.  Because of it’s ability to control data input, InfoPath is the tool to use with SharePoint in order to gather and validate data, which can then be sorted and sourced by SharePoint’s document management system. So what exactly is InfoPath then?

InfoPath is a platform for developing, distributing, filling and submitting forms. The InfoPath desktop software exists in two forms; a design mode (for developers) to create the form and a filler mode for data entry. A well-made form would contain rules to format and validate all data entered into the form preventing any malformed or invalid data from polluting your system.

InfoPath can pull data from XML files, SQL databases, web services, and SharePoint lists; this data can be used to populate dropdown lists and grids to expedite data entry. When a form is complete and there are no invalid fields it is time to submit the form. Forms can be submitted in a variety of ways: via Email, to a web service, or a SharePoint form library.

Since an InfoPath form is nothing more than a XML document, it lends itself very well to SharePoint’s document management system. InfoPath also offers a SharePoint web part that can be used to view and fill out forms within a SharePoint site while in the browser (platform independent data entry).

In most companies there is a process in which employees can ask for new hardware or software; usually involving emails, phone calls, and verbal discussions. This can turn into a long and frustrating process (typically leaving very few records), so let’s replace this with a SharePoint managed InfoPath form.

1. You open the “Request for Hardware” form within SharePoint. InfoPath uses Active Directory to populate your First/Last name, phone number, and department into the form.
2. InfoPath retrieves the available purchase types from a SharePoint list and displays them to you in a dropdown list. In this case you select “Computer” as your purchase type, and fill out the product name, model, and comment in the fields provided.
3. You review your request and submit the form to a SharePoint form library. It is common for companies to have some level of oversight over what employees purchase. To manage this, a workflow is triggered within SharePoint that requires 2 managers to approve your purchase request.
4. The managers receive a notification via a SharePoint alert that they have a pending purchase request; let’s assume they both approve the purchase.
5. The form is moved from the Pending Purchase Request library to the IT department’s Purchase Request library. The folks at the IT department will get a notification similar to the approval request notification that was sent to the managers.
6. When this form is opened by someone in the IT department, they will be looking at a slightly different view of the form. All of the information you entered into the form will be read-only, and a new section will be visible for the purchaser to log all the purchase details (supplier, tax, and actual cost).

From here there are numerous paths the form could take from logging the shipping information (allowing SharePoint to display tracking details) to assigning the hardware to the end user within SharePoint.

SharePoint Dashboards – Keep your eyes on the road, not an (old) excel sheet!

Kyle, SharePoint Consultant
for Entrance Software
1-16-2012

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