Sharepoint Use Cases

Stan emailed me with few questions about setting up SharePoint Development Environment. I am posting edited version of that conversation here. The post is general and it applies to any SharePoint environment e.g. testing, educational… you might have in your company.

In your article “Team-Based Development in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 – Part 2 – Building a development lab” you say that developer has 64-bit Server on the machine and VPC and develops in VPC. Why do you need VPC? The max RAM I can get out of my VPC is 2.3GB, while you can have 3.3 on the server. Can you explain?

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After a number of events in USA, SharePoint Saturday (free community driven event) is flying across oceans (both Atlantic and Pacific). In August it will debut in Europe: Copenhagen, Denmark.

I am happy to announce that I will be speaking at SharePoint Saturday, Copenhagen, organized by Isaac Stith (@MrIsaac) and Jens Nørgaard (@SharePointDK). If you are reading this blog and plan to visit the event I would be happy to see you there.

Session

Your organization has deployed SharePoint as the ultimate collaboration platform that will solve all your problems in a blink of an eye. However you, as the content owner, are still struggling with end users and all the SharePoint features. In this session we are going to discuss tools you have at hand and simple and effective scenarios you can implement on your portal. These will help end-users to perform day-to-day operations with ease and to boost the overall SharePoint adoption.

Language: English
Session Level: Intermediate
Target audience: (Power) End User

Learn more

• SharePoint Saturday Copenhagen
• SharePoint Saturday Copenhagen on Twitter
• SharePoint Saturday Copenhagen Twitter Channel
• SharePoint Saturday

A few weeks ago Duncun commented on one of my posts: “Still hunting for the holy grail of a solution that ONLY allows users to view or edit documents they have created themselves.”

The problem

As you probably know, there is an item-level permissions feature that can be a solution to this problem BUT it’s only available for lists, not Document Libraries. Please remember this before you make a promise you cannot deliver.

Figure 1. – Item level permissions on custom list

The solution

The proper way to solve this problem is to set permissions on the item level. Since you cannot use the feature I mentioned above, the only way to do it is to create server side code which configures it. In this case I am going to use a custom workflow solution (an event handler might also do). The wrong approach for solving this problem might be using JQuery or something similar, because malicious user can easily trick the system and still see and edit the document he is not allowed to.

• Read entire post
• Download this SharePoint feature at CodePlex

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. Read more…

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. Read more…

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.

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. Learn more…