Download your free copy from the PointBeyond website here

“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:

• The number of things that SharePoint can potentially do for a mid-size to large organisation is pretty large. It encompasses collaboration, intranet, document and content management, social features, search, business intelligence, and business application delivery. Deciding where to start can be a challenge.
• As soon as you start custom coding within SharePoint (or anything else), the cost and risk both go up considerably.
• For almost all organisations there are some real “quick wins” that can be delivered without custom code. For example, we often build one or two form and workflow driven business applications. These can be delivered in a matter of days and provide tangible value. The appropriate use of third party products such as Nintex and K2 can also facilitate the delivery of more complex workflows without custom code.
• Users and stakeholders want to see something. Custom coding projects can take months. A no code approach gives them rapid visibility of where all that money they spent on licencing has gone.

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

Free Strategy Paper Download  – Delivering Maximum Business Value With A SharePoint Based Application Strategy

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

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:

• Independently implemented applications leads to siloes of information, inconsistencies in functionality/look and feel, and a larger training requirement
• Areas of common functionality were being “reinvented from scratch” each time
• There is always risk involved in any custom development project
• Perhaps most critically of all: In most cases the applications in question could be quickly delivered using the composites capability of SharePoint 2010 Enterprise. The cost of a single departmental level application was typically less than the cost of implementing SharePoint 2010 Enterprise. However, taken together the cost of implementing all of the applications together was significantly more than the cost of the Enterprise licences.

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:

• What are our business requirements and priorities?
• What are the capabilities of the different editions, and which of these capabilities aligns with our requirements?
• What is going on within business units, departments, or teams? In particular would putting in a platform to facilitate quick delivery of applications with little or no custom coding be cheaper in the medium to long term than custom code or purchase of individual solutions? With the people I was speaking to, a back of the envelope calculation indicated a payback time of 6 to 12 months.

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.

Back to the PointBeyond web site.

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:

• A  Stage gate approval model – used to ensure that the right products are passed through for development. An example five phase workflow is provided or workflows can be configured using Visual Studio or third party products such as Nintex Project Server Workflows.
• Portfolio Analysis – Set strategic drivers and objective criteria, which assist in scoring each product proposal, and help determine a mix of new products that is most aligned with company strategy
• Create product focussed projects – assign resources (people and materials) to these projects and view resource commitments across a portfolio of projects / new products. Avoid resource bottlenecks
• Use Project Plan schedule templates to set up predefined high level plans for new products. Develop your own best practice templates through your company’s experience and create effective development pipelines
• Manage Assumptions, Risks and Issues across all product developments
• Reporting – Harness the capabilities of Project Server and SharePoint Business Intelligence with powerful tools such as
  • Reporting Services for database reports,
  • Excel Services for dynamic charts and data grids or OLAP reporting
  • Visio Services for colourful dynamic data driven diagrams
  • Performance Point Services for the creation of Scorecards and Dashboards with multi-dimensional “slice and dice” data analytics

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:

• Create collaborative workspaces for product based teams to share and develop ideas
• Utilise the integration between SharePoint and Project Server to raise issues and risks at a local level for visibility and review by senior portfolio managers
• Create document approval workflows for key documents such as specifications
• Create record centres for key documents with features such as version and archive control
• Create wikis to capture and develop team generated ideas or use team blogs to update others on progress
• Create custom list templates and custom electronic forms either Out of the box or through enhanced toolsets such as SharePoint Designer or InfoPath and set validation rules or attach the forms data to a workflow

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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:

• Getting business application delivery right first time
• The issues facing IT decision makers in large organisations
• The importance of having an application strategy
• Improving the success rate of business application projects
• Delivering applications efficiently and cost effectively

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.

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.

Back to PointBeyond web site.

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:

• Out of the box and custom lists and views. These lists can be linked to deliver simple data driven applications
• Built in security model. You can set permissions to control who can see and do what
• Ability to build workflows using SharePoint Designer
• Forms that use the InfoPath client (part of some editions of Microsoft Office)
• Core Business Connectivity Services functionality, for interacting with data in other systems
• An open platform for enhancement through custom development and integration with other systems
• Possibility to use SQL Server Reporting Services in SharePoint integrated mode to build reports and dashboards

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

• Excel Services, for interacting with and publishing parts of Excel spreadsheets through the browser
• InfoPath Forms Services, that takes InfoPath forms and renders them in the browser
• Visio Services, for publishing data driven diagrams
• Access Services, for converting Access Databases to SharePoint lists and forms, and allowing browser based interaction
• Enhanced Business Connectivity Services
• Various web parts and out-of-the-box workflows

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.

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:

• Application strategy drivers – what is new and what has changed?
• What is the impact of getting it wrong?
• The current and projected effect of the cloud on business applications
• Today to mid 2012 – how will drivers change over the coming months?

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.

Back to the PointBeyond website

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:

• Before you embark on delivering a business application using SharePoint composites, be absolutely clear about what the end solution will be (where are you going)
• Be clear about how the tools available will deliver all of the required functionality (what is the means of transport for each stage of the journey). If you do a proof of concept then make sure you tackle the difficult bits of functionality up front. Don’t just do the easy bits so that you can show the business users something nice! It may make them happy in the short term but they won’t like it when you have to go back telling them you need more time and money.

Enjoy your journey!

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