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
One of the most useful features of InfoPath, is the ability to easily set up and use data connections from so many sources. Using data connections to web services, InfoPath can be used to create a form that passes data onto a third party website where the data is acted upon in some way and a response passed back to the end user.
A simple, yet practical example of this is this simple text translator. This was built on the back of a customer request to have forms available in multiple languages. No code is used in this development, but we do make use of the “Rules” functionality by which Business Logic and in-form workflow can be built.
While the result of some InfoPath experimentation presented here will not be putting any multi-lingual technical translating staff out of business I’m sure you can think of other applications which could benefit from a Web Service interface such as this.
Ok – so how do you go about creating a translation form? It’s as simple as baking a loaf of bread, so let’s start by looking at the ingredients we will need!
3.Now from the list of Services select Translate
4. On the next screen you will see a list of Parameters that are used by the web service – Enter your Bing Application ID here by using the Set Value button (You do have an app id don’t you? If not, sign up at http://www.bing.com/toolbox/bingdeveloper/) In the content type and category parameters set the values to ‘text/plain’ and ‘general’ respectively
5. The next screen should be skipped – hit the Next button
6. Now we are on the final screen for our data connection set up. Deselect the “Automatically retrieve data when form is opened” check box – Best practice for forms is to only use data connections when needed, and we will only be calling this service when a button is clicked
7. After you have finished your data connection you will have two data references in your InfoPath project – Main and the Translate service you just created will be labelled a secondary connection…
You will see from the view above that the data connection is in two parts “query fields” and “data fields”. Put simply, the query fields enable you to pass information through the data connection and the data fields represent what you get back!
8. Enter text labels in the left hand column of the table you created in step 1 and drag the text field and the TranslateResult fields from the fields pane on the right into the form layout
9. Now switch to the Main Data view in the fields pane and add two dropdown list controls and label LanguageFrom and LanguageTo… This will create two extra field references in the Myfields folder of the Main view of the Fields pane as in the screenshot below. These two fields will be used to provide data to the “From” and “To” query fields of the Translate data connection
10. Enter the values as in the screenshot below to the Drop Down List Box properties for the LanguageFrom field
11. And enter the values as in the screenshot below to set up the LanguageTo Dropdown List Box properties: Yes, pretty much identical to the LanguageFrom field!
For this example I have only added five languages and their associated codes , but you can add additional languages to these controls if they are supported by the Microsoft Translate API.
12. Now finally we just need to add a button to our form and attach some logic to the button so that when pressed the following will happen:
This is achieved simply by adding a button from the Controls section of the Home ribbon and adding a Rule with three actions as below:
The three actions are
Well, that’s all there is to it! Test the form in preview mode and add some simple sentences and combinations of From and To languages. If you have been successful, you will appreciate how InfoPath can be used to address some fairly complex Business scenarios in a straightforward manner with NO CODE REQUIRED!
J
Do you have any similar examples of code free web service based InfoPath development – we’d love to hear from you!
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.
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.
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!
There are different approaches to building Business applications in SharePoint. Here we take a look at the pros and cons of each to help decide which is right for you.
There are out of the box lists, web parts and templates in SharePoint 2010 that can be used to create simple applications such as task trackers, calendars, charts and more. The user can choose their tool from the menu on their site and then configure it directly in the browser. They can also combine lists with workflows to automate processes such as approval and feedback.
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Composites are one of the six key capabilities of SharePoint 2010. These are tools provided to help you connect to data and reuse it through your applications, creating a solution through a ‘composition’ of the strengths of the individual tools available. This enables you to develop business applications in a stable environment and deploy these solutions to selected audiences.
The following are the tools currently available for creating composite applications:
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There are a variety of products on the market that can be used to extend SharePoint. They can generally be split into three groups:
Components are products you can plug into your existing SharePoint system to help you achieve a solution. These are the building blocks which enable you to extend SharePoint’s out of the box capabilities. Examples are: image viewers, bulk editing tools, reporting tools, group chat consoles and social media applications.
Workflow Applications give you the tools and capabilities to go beyond the out of the box SharePoint workflows and automate processes to meet your organisation’s needs. K2 and Nintex are great example of these, giving you drag and drop user interfaces to help build your workflow logic and rules.
Complete applications are products that you can buy, install and with some configuration, start to use straight away. They normally focus on one business solution delivering enhanced tools and ready to go processes that provide a complete solution in one area e.g. CRM, HR Management, Document management etc.
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Both SharePoint Designer and Visual Studio can be used to customise SharePoint to create powerful business applications. However, developing an application on the SharePoint platform with custom code requires sound development and coding skills as well as an understanding of the SharePoint Framework. Custom coding is useful if the application you need is particularly complex or needs to do something that can’t be achieved by other means. A common pitfall to be aware of are the problems custom code can cause later down the line when you come to upgrade. Working with experienced SharePoint developers will help to ensure that any that future changes won’t be problematic and that migration and scalability factors are taken into consideration.
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Thought I would consolidate the posts I have made over the last few months into a single index. The topics are quite varied as they comprise issues I have encountered while working on real world projects.
InfoPath web form not loading in SharePoint 2010
Error viewing reports in Access Services
Unable to open the file for an unknown reason in Excel Services
Document IDs and the managed metadata service
No content types have been subscribed error message
Here’s a common issue when trying to view a report in Access Services on SharePoint 2010.
You’ve published your database to SharePoint, and your forms work fine. However viewing a report results in the following error: This report failed to load because session state is not turned on. Contact your SharePoint farm administrator.
At first I thought this a little odd since in Central administration/Manage service applications I do have a State Service Application:
However the above application is used only internally. What Access Services actually wants is an ASP.net session state database.
A SharePoint Powershell cmdlet makes it easy to set this up. Start the SharePoint 2010 Management Shell and type
Enable-SPSessionStateService –DatabaseName YourChosenDBName
Note that is possible to specify –DefaultProvision as a parameter instead of explicitly specifying a database name, but if you use this parameter you will end up with a database name containing a GUID – yuk! With the approach shown above you instead get a nice database name:
Note also here that you can see the database we have just created as well as the State Service database used internally by SharePoint.
The article referenced below also mentions editing web.config but I have not found this to be necessary. Also as detailed in some of the comments on that article, it is important to consider the performance impact of ASP.net session state – fine for a low volume internal site, but more care needed on high volume sites. ASP.net session state is scoped to the web application so this could be a consideration when determining your web applications as part of your information architecture.
This detailed article by Mark Arend gives more information on setting up ASP.net session state.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/markarend/archive/2010/05/27/using-session-state-in-sharepoint-2010.aspx
