The SharePoint Business Application Specialists
IT decision makers are under pressure to deliver more with fewer resources. At the same time, many are struggling to cope with a backlog of applications awaiting delivery. A strategic approach to the delivery of business applications is therefore required to help decision makers achieve their goals. This paper from PointBeyond explains why SharePoint 2010 should be seriously considered when defining an application strategy.
Download your free copy from the PointBeyond website here
For an initial deployment of SharePoint 2010 how about saying:
“We will not do anything that involves custom code. We will restrict ourselves to what we can do with out-of-the-box SharePoint and associated tools”
This is somewhat controversial. I can already hear rumblings of discontent from distant IT strategists. IT strategy should be derived from business strategy, right? An IT strategy should put in place systems and practices that support the business in achieving its objectives. If we say “we won’t do any custom code” this is surely a classic case of tail (technology) wagging dog (business). Why should the constraints of a technology be used to tell the business what they can and can’t have?
That is perfectly true. But, and it’s a big but, SharePoint also gives us the following to consider:
I should make it clear that I am not advocating that custom code should never be used. If for example you have a requirement with a compelling business case that can only be delivered with custom code, then make the case and go for it! However if you are looking at SharePoint, and have numerous possible projects under consideration, then an initial no code approach will allow you to derive some quick benefits at low cost and low risk. You can then revisit your strategy later once users have got used to the system. At this point you’ll probably find that business requirements have changed anyway, as once people have started using and benefitting from SharePoint, their thoughts about where they need additional functionality almost inevitably change. So when you decide it is time to crack open Visual Studio and start custom coding, the chances are you’ll end up with a better custom coded solution than you would have had if you’d done the custom work up front.
Comments welcome as always!
Ian
I’m looking forward to talking about quickly delivering business applications on SharePoint 2010 at The International SharePoint Conference London 2012 in April. I’ll be co presenting with one of our customers.
When the tools available in SharePoint 2010 are used appropriately, it can be phenomenally productive. In my session, we take a look at how it was possible to build a fully featured business application, with forms, workflow and reporting in a matter of days – and without writing any code. Using Purchase Order management as an example, I’ll review the business requirements and explain why SharePoint was chosen for the application, before getting hands on with some demos and looking at how SharePoint capabilities were leveraged to quickly deliver the application at an engineering company.
Full agenda of speakers can be found here. It’s shaping up to be another excellent event!
Click here to regsiter: http://www.internationalsharepointconference.com/Pages/Register.aspx
I’ve been speaking with IT directors/CTOs at two different large organisations in the past week. Both are in similar positions in that they are considering moving to SharePoint 2010, and need to decide whether or not to go for Standard or Enterprise edition.
One of the big challenges that they both faced was knowing the capabilities of each product. One of them was seriously considering purchasing an expensive BI solution even though they have quite modest BI needs. They and their teams were simply unaware that there is BI capability within SharePoint 2010.
The second challenge was around the departmental versus organisational view of the world. What do I mean by that? In both organisations, departments were commissioning their own business applications. Most of the time these applications were custom coded, and although they sometimes integrated with SharePoint, the integration only meant display of the custom application within a SharePoint site. There are several problems with this approach:
In this situation a decision to move to SharePoint 2010 standard would have been a bad strategic decision. It would have resulted in business applications being delivered more slowly, at higher risk and cost, and with less consistency and integration with each other.
So when making the decision between Standard and Enterprise it is essential to have all the facts to hand. In particular:
If more investigation is needed, it is worth knowing that a 180 day evaluation copy of SharePoint 2010 Enterprise can be downloaded from the Microsoft web site. This can be used for a pilot before committing to licence purchase. We have helped several organisations with this low risk approach.
Companies are increasingly looking for efficiency gains with New Product Development and yet struggle to find a tool that can accommodate their supporting business processes. This is because each company’s culture is different and only a set of tools that can quickly adapt to support their unique Business Processes and ways of working can add benefit.
New Product Development is the art and science of bringing products to market, from idea generation through to prototyping and the first production run, and can be considered from two viewpoints – Strategic and Tactical. Project Server which is built on the SharePoint Enterprise platform is an ideal choice for meeting both the Strategic and Tactical requirements of a New Product Development system
Strategic:
The strategic viewpoint looks at the selection and approval process to ensure that products with the best potential are brought to market as efficiently as possible.
Project Server is ideally suited for the development of a Strategic New Product Development Framework offering the following features out of the box:
Tactical
The Tactical viewpoint concerns the day to day practicalities of introducing a new product to market, and includes activities such as packaging /design workflows and the set up of design workshops.
For the tactical activities, SharePoint (which is part of a Project Server installation) has many features which enable the rapid creation of a New Product Management System including:
PointBeyond are proud to announce our latest whitepaper The Business Applications Deficit is now available for download.
Research led and technology neutral, the whitepaper makes compelling reading for both IT and business leaders and is supported by headline facts such as 66% of organisations surveyed believe that technology is constraining their growth and profits, and 52% regret the decision to select at least one application and are now living with the consequences.
In September 2011, over 200 IT decision makers from large organisations were invited to participate in PointBeyond’s Business Application Strategy Survey, answering a series of detailed questions on the issues impacting the delivery of business applications in their organisations.
Based on the survey responses, The Business Applications Deficit, provides expert analysis and commentary on the results. It introduces the new concept of the Business Applications Deficit – the gap between the applications businesses need to be successful and competitive and the reality they are facing in today’s challenging environment.
Applications are essential to running a successful business and in the whitepaper PointBeyond provides further guidance and information on:
Organisations have never been so spoilt for the choice of tools with which to deliver their applications. However, in the absence of an application strategy and without being able to measure the ROI of application projects, PointBeyond suggest that many organisations are compromising their ability to succeed. By contrast, organisations that think and act strategically will engage more effectively with new technologies and be able to deliver better applications more quickly and at lower cost.
You can download your copy of The Business Applications Deficit here.
This is a robust way to implement cascading (sometimes called nested) dropdowns in InfoPath 2010, that also works with InfoPath Forms Services in SharePoint 2010. The approach in this article expands upon the demo that I gave at SharePoint Saturday UK on 12 November 2011.
There are numerous other blog articles out there explaining how to achieve cascading dropdowns in InfoPath, and I have had varying degrees of success with them. Some work okay but are complex, others seem to be a bit buggy. So the approach I take here will (hopefully!) provide a good solution – but comments welcome as always!
Objective: On an InfoPath form I wish to have an arbitrary number of dropdowns. Selecting an item in the first dropdown determines the items available in the second, selecting an item in the second dropdown determines the items in the third, and so on. A user should be able to go back to a previous dropdown and make a change. Users should be forced to select in order, so that until an item in the first dropdown is chosen, the second dropdown is disabled, and so forth.
Preparing the Data Source
For the example below our data source for the dropdown items is SharePoint lists. However the method could be modified to use other data sources such as a database or a web service. In the dropdowns users will select a region, then an office, then a team.
I have created three lists for the example and will create three dropdowns.
The “Regions” list is a custom list with no extra columns added. It is populated as follows:
The “Offices” list is a custom list with one extra column added, which is a lookup to “Regions”. It is populated as follows:
The “Teams” list is a custom list with one extra column added, which is a lookup to “Offices”. It is populated as follows:
Designing the InfoPath 2010 Form
Launch InfoPath 2010 and create a new blank form (or open the form to which you wish to add your dropdowns).
Add three text fields as follows:
Repeat for “Office” and “Team”.
Now drag-and-drop each field onto the form.
Without any formatting your form will look like this:
Right-click each textbox and choose “Change Control > Drop-Down List Box”.
The form will now look like this:
Now we need to create three data sources, one for each dropdown.
Click on the “Data” menu at the top of the window, and then “From SharePoint List”.
We’ll do “Region” first.
Enter the location of the SharePoint site. Note that the lists can be on a different site to the site that our form is going to end up in.
Click “Next”. Select the “Regions” list.
Click “Next”. Select “Title” and change the sort order to “Title”.
Click “Next”. Click “Next” again on the offline option page.
Accept the options on the final page.
Click “Finish”.
Now repeat this process for Offices and Teams, but with the following two changes:
First, include the related column in the fields to select from. So for Offices the wizard will look as follows:
Teams will look similar, but with the “Office” column selected.
Second, uncheck the “Automatically retrieve data when the form is opened” option. For all but the first dropdown, we won’t be getting the data until the previous dropdown is changed.
Ok now we need to hook up our dropdowns to our data sources. Right click the “Region” dropdown and choose “Drop-Down List Box Properties”. In the “List box choices” section choose “Get choices from an external data source”. Make sure the data source is “Regions” and amend the “Display name” field to Title (using the button on to its right) so that the form looks as follows:
Click “OK” and repeat for the “Office” and “Team” dropdowns, choosing the appropriate data source in each case. Make sure the “Value” and “Display name” fields are always correct. So for “Office” the form looks as follows:
If you preview your form at this point then the “Region” dropdown should be populated but the other two should not.
Finally we need some rules to make it all work.
Select the “Region” dropdown, then on the “Home” tab at the top, choose “Manage Rules”.
On the “Region” dropdown we will add a single rule. Choose “New, Action”.
Change the “Details for” to read “Populate Offices”.
Now choose “Add, Set a field’s value”.
The field we will set is the “Region” field on the “Offices” data connection. This will act as a filter on the list of offices, only displaying those that have the correct region.
Click the button to the right of “Field”. Change the dropdown at the top to “Offices (Secondary)” and expand “queryFields” to select “Region”.
Click “OK”. Now click the “fx” button to the right of the “Value” field. Click “Insert Field or Group…”
Choose “Region”.
Click “OK”. The formula shows as follows:
Click “OK”.
Now add another action to the rule, again to “Set a field’s value”. This rule will simply set the “Office” field to blank, to clear out any old values.
Now add an action to “Query for data”.
Set the data connection to “Offices”. Click “OK”.
If you preview your form now you should be able to select a region and see the correct list of offices populated.
Now we set up the rules on the Offices dropdown. Select the dropdown and click on “Manage Rules”.
Add a new formatting rule:
Change the details to “Disable if Region Blank”. Click on “None” under “Condition. Set the condition as follows:
Select “Disable this control”.
Next add a new action rule.
Call this rule “Populate Teams”.
Add an action to set a field’s value.
Pick the Teams/Office query field.
Set the value equal to “Office”.
Add another action to set “Team” to blank.
Add a final action to query the teams data connection.
Finally add a formatting rule to the “Teams” dropdown. This rule will disable the control if “Office” is blank.
Now preview your form and check everything works!
Provided all is okay you can publish your form. If you want to use InfoPath Forms Services within SharePoint 2010, it should work fine.
When SharePoint was first released, the idea of a web site where users could upload documents, and manage their own lists, calendars, etc was quite novel to many people. It was, as we all know, a runaway success and SharePoint has been widely adopted across many organisations. Many other software vendors, as well as Microsoft, also provide collaboration platforms.
Now more and more collaboration platforms are becoming available, with cloud offerings such as Box.net, Huddle, Google Docs and many others being added to the mix.
One of the differentiators of SharePoint 2010 is that you can use it as a platform for the delivery of business applications, as well as for straightforward collaboration. Even the entry level SharePoint 2010 Foundation gives you:
Once you move up the licencing scale to SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise, you get the “Composites” functionality that adds significantly to the toolset available for building applications. This includes
This rich toolset for quickly delivering business applications sets SharePoint apart from many collaboration platforms, and it should be a major consideration for many organisations when choosing a collaboration platform.
Our technology neutral white paper, “The Business Applications Deficit” looks at the drivers behind the need for business applications, and the challenges faced by organisations in implementing applications. To receive your complimentary copy please click here.
With the research completed and the results currently being processed in preparation for the inaugural PointBeyond Business Applications Survey, we have our first quick poll question to allow you to contribute directly to the research.
PointBeyond has already secured valuable input from over 200 senior IT decision makers responding to our September 2011 survey focused on business application strategy.
We are now busy interpreting the results and are confident that the research is going to provide a unique snapshot into how a significant number of businesses are approaching the selection and delivery of their application portfolios. Headline making trends are already emerging in the data relating to areas such as:
Company Director and business application specialist, Dr Ian Woodgate, will highlight the important findings from the survey and share his expert opinion on the subject in a live webinar on November 16th. Please click here to find out more and to register. Everyone registering will also receive a preview copy of our research whitepaper.
Suppose that you are in New York and you want to come to my house. You could look at a map of the world that has New York and my house marked on it. Looking at the map you can see that London Heathrow airport is pretty close to my house. So you think, hey that’s cool I’ll fly over. You pay for your flight, tell me what time you are arriving, and tell your wife/husband/partner how much it costs. Sorted. Easy.
So you jump on the plane and all goes well for a few hours. You arrive at Heathrow and walk out of the airport. Now, Ian’s house is somewhere nearby isn’t it? Actually you’ve got still got 94 miles to go and although you have completed 97% of your journey you aren’t at my house. You’ve no UK currency and your mobile phone is flat (and you can’t plug your charger in because of our rather cool power socket design J). So you are stuck.
Let’s compare this to the case of building a SharePoint business application using tools such as InfoPath, SharePoint Designer, Excel Services and Access Services. It’s all too easy to get started with these tools without an absolutely clear idea of how your end solution will work. The tools allow you to do a lot very quickly. So you pull your application together and it almost meets your requirements. But then you hit a problem: the last little bit requires something that the tools don’t let you do. You are faced with having to resort to another tool, possibly some custom code, or even having to rework what you have already done. Also chances are you need to go back to the business and tell them that you need more time and/or money.
The conclusions to this are really as follows:
Enjoy your journey!
