Catch 22 for Approval Workflow in SharePoint Designer
Today 02/09 I began blogging on this, and found someone else's blogpost from Dec 2010 who also blogged on this exact topic. Though I never saw his blog post prior to writing this, credit to Lars Nielson.
I ran into an interesting dilemma while working on my most recent project. The project involved a number of document libraries that required content approval as well as versioning.
The scope of work greatly limited the amount of customizations that could be made to SharePoint (i.e. building workflows in Visual Studio).
This introduced an interesting problem based on our initial game plan. The workflow is basically a document goes through a change process and committee approvals before it is published. End Users cannot see changes until an approved document is published.
The change process was the complicated piece to this because the organization had a number of variables within the process, so the only solution was to require each step in the workflow to be manually kicked off.
When I made it to the approval stage, we initially had content approval on in the libraries. And here is where the catch 22 comes in, trying to set content approval status to Approved in a document library that requires a document to be checked out and content approval is on.
To set the content approval status from Designer, ok easy enough, there is an action for that....uh oh, the document must first be checked out. ok, check out document, set approval status....uh oh, I get an error that says content approval status cannot be set while a document is checked out.
Catch 22. Basically to set content approval status in designer, the document must be checked out, but content approval status cannot be changed while a document is checked out.
Possible work-around - We did not go this route, we basically turned off content approval, and used a workflow to notify approvals, and once approval was granted, a user would publish a major version of the document. This was acceptable for this engagement.
I was going to explain the workaround here, but I ran across a blog post while getting my info together of someone who already documented it. So in the spirit of giving credit where credit is due, Lars gets credit for this solution. Lars Nielson blogged on this exact topic in late 2010. http://discoverlars.wordpress.com/2010/12/28/update-the-approval-status-in-a-sharepoint-designer-workflow/
The bottom line in this is that for highly complex workflows, you really need Visual Studio.
Reminder emails a day before for a Calendar Event
Today 11/19/2010 Friday, one of the Users requested that if they can get alerts or notifications for the upcoming calendar events and that they would like to get the notifications the day before the event.
To accomplish the above:
Add a custom field to the calendar called "Alert - 1 day". Make it a calculated field with the calculation [StartTime]-1. Make sure it is a date type. I also specified date and time so the alert goes out exactly one day before, to the minute.
Then also add a custom field to the calendar called "Reminder Recipients". Make it a people picker control and choose to show Email addresses and probably allow multiple selections too.
Next, open your site in SharePoint designer and create a workflow (New > Workflow) for the calendar. Set the workflow to automatically start when the event is created/changed. I also created a workflow variable called "Recipients" of type string. Then my workflow went like this:
If Alert - 1 day is greater than Today
Pause until Calendar:Alert - 1 day
then Set Variable: Recipients to Calendar:Reminder Recipients
then Email Variable: Recipients
Please see the screenshots below
Sharepoint Administrative Tasks
I have been asked many a times what is the role of Sharepoint Administrator. In my opinion the Sharepoint Administrator primary job would be to monitor and check the Sharepoint Servers and Sharepoint Access, Build up the Physical Architecture, Logical Architecture and creation of SIte Collections and Sites and Management of Content Databases as per the best practices suggested by Microsoft.
- Some of the Routine SharePoint administrative tasks would be:
- Daily checks to test and monitor the SharePoint Status, health, and the Performance (SharePoint sites Response time, status of host server, SharePoint Server and the IIS Server)
- Daily check of Front-end and Back-end backups for business continuity.(Check the last date of your backups)
- Daily Check of the profile import.
- Daily check of the Search and Indexing features.
- Daily check and installation of Security Updates.
- Daily check the SharePoint Site Access
- Daily Monitoring and Reporting of SharePoint Sites.
- Daily Monitor and analyze SharePoint usage and activity.
- Daily Monitor and analyze SharePoint content and storage.
- Daily Monitor SharePoint Trends and Governance Violations.
- Daily monitor event logs for any errors or warnings. Make sure the number of warnings and errors were minimum and health check of the Sharepoint environment.
New features in SharePoint Server 2010
Moss 2010 is coming up with lots of new features and functionality that will help a system engineer to work more efficiently. In our sneak preview we found Microsoft has improved the MOSS-2010 on its technical part rather than changing the user appearance in 2010 in comparison to MOSS 2007. So you will see most of the things similar to MOSS 2007, but with more features and ease of use.
Microsoft really worked on it and luckily this time SharePoint 2010 seeks to facilitate each of aforesaid challenges. Now SharePoint 2010 supports:
• Latest .NET 3.5 platform enhancements (such as WCF and LINQ)
• Silverlight 3.0
• The Business Data Catalog (BDC) has become Business Connectivity Services (BCS)
• BCS now supports full read/write capabilities
• SharePoint Designer 2010 receives a major upgrade. It now supports creating more complex workflows that are more re-usable.
• Visual Studio 2010 will come with SharePoint 2010 tools that far exceed the extensions available for Visual Studio 2005/2008.
• Web Parts and other SharePoint pages can be built with graphical editors and debugged without leaving the Visual Studio environment.
• The experience will be much more like that of ASP.NET web applications.
The points mentioned above are couple of new add-on/support features that have been added to SharePoint 2010. Based on the features, we categorized them in three main categories as below
SharePoint 2010 Application Layers
SharePoint 2010 Platform Improvements
SharePoint 2010 Development Tools Improvements
Click on each link above to read more about the SharePoint 2010 new features.
Sharepoint Alternatives
SharePoint Alternatives
We all know they were a bunch of other collaboration tools which compete SharePoint.
Box Net, Documentum and File net and Open Text.... the list goes on...
It depends on what your users were looking for and what functionality you want to leverage out of that tool is more important than the tool itself.
Content Awaited
Free SharePoint Templates
Microsoft
Application Templates for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0
Microsoft SharePoint site provide 20 free Site Admin templates for download, they are easy to use and one can plug the template without requiring server Admin access. All you need to do is just plug the template to your site, for more information you can click here and read more about application template.
Here is the list for all of the templates:
To download all of the templates in one file you can click here
fpweb.net
This site provides a wide variety of free templates as well as paid template.
there are several categories which gives you option to select your desired one like:
- Sales & Marketing SharePoint Templates
- Manufacturing Industry SharePoint Templates
- Healthcare Industry SharePoint Templates
- Government SharePoint Templates
- Legal SharePoint Templates
Click here to download the templates
Here is another website which provide free templates
Click here to download the templates