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Featured Articles and Screencasts

The family and I are headed for some down time in Black Mountain, N.C., so the site’s going to be a little slow with new content for the next week. No worries… we’ll be back at it again next Monday, July 6, with a fresh batch of ideas, articles and screencasts.

Please have a safe and fun filled 4th of July.

Regards,
Mark

Guest Author: Eric Alexander, Moderator, Stump the Panel

This article comes about from a question from illegal operation in Stump the Panel.  He writes:

I’ve been expermenting with workflows, and have one almost working the way I want. Basically what I want to do is this.

The list in question has these fields.

Staff Contact
Renewal Date

The worksflow starts when the item is created, then pauses until the renewal date. On the renewal date, it sends out an email to the staff contact reminding them that it’s due, and to update their subscription infomation.

So far I have it almost working, it pauses until the renewal date, and then sends the email. Then if the person goes back and updates the item, it then goes back to pausing until the new renewal date.

But…

If a person goes in before it expires and updates the renewal date, the workflow doesn’t reflect the new date. For example, say it was to expire on 6/15 the users already knows this and goes in and updates their information today 6/12. They enter their new renewal date of 7/12. The workflow is still only paused til 6/12, and will send the email out too early.

So I need to add something to my workflow to always update that pause duration. Here is how my workflow is setup now. It’s set to automatically start when new item created, and start when item is changed.

Condition

If renweal date is greater then today
Pause until Subscription Data Renewal Date
Then send email Staff Contact.

What can I add to make it update the workflow when items are changed before they are due?

Jim Bob offered a possible solution with dual workflows on the list.  I thought of another solution using Information Policy Settings and a work flow.  The idea for this came from a screencast I saw that used document expiration policies to serve as a publishing mechanism for Announcements.  I thought information management could be a good candidate to solve this problem.  After some testing, it will work but there are some caveats to this solution:

1. This is a MOSS only option.  WSS users will have to find another way.
2. The timer job that handles expiration policy on the server runs only once per day.  It cannot be altered to run more frequently. 

If you can live with these caveats, let’s begin.

Read more

As those of you who follow EndUserSharePoint.com know, I have a high regard for the work being done by Christophe Humbert at Path to SharePoint. Over the weekend, he announced what he will be working on over the next few weeks, and some of this stuff looks VERY interesting.

From Christophe Humbert:
Just a quick heads-up on what you can expect on my blog and demo site in the weeks to come:

• Image rotator
• Easy Tabs
• Calendars
• jQuery
• HTML calculated column
• iframes
• Guest posts

All of Christophe’s solutions are no assembly, meaning there is no developer code and deployment on the server needed. Any power user with site manager permission will be able to implement his solutions.

Definitely worth following. — Mark

Resources:
Path to SharePoint
What I’m Working on

Today, at 1:00pm EST, I’ll be moderating a live online workshop on how to Create a Dashboard in WSS. This is a hands-on session. We give you your own SharePoint sandbox where you can implement nine dashboard type solutions in WSS. Watch the screencast below to see the Visual Status solution and then read about the other solutions.

I look forward to seeing you there. — Mark

Just something to lighten my day:

I have been working on a cross-cultural project with Ayman El-Hattab from the Egypt SharePoint User Group over the past month. He has put together a series of screencasts, in Arabic, regarding SharePoint Content Types. Ayman sent me a note, saying screencasts, a slidedeck and images from the most recent Egypt SharePoint User Group are available for download.

I’m really happy to be presenting these. SharePoint is a world-wide community of users and this content proves it. Thanks, Ayman. Your work is appreciated.

Regards,
Mark

Description of the resources:
“Content types are incredibly cool and fundamental to how SharePoint works with Data and Information. Is this session we’ll explore the power of custom content types development and see how we can use them for customizing the visual appearance, introducing new behaviors and much MORE !”

About Ayman El-Hattab:
Ayman M. El-Hattab works at ITWorx since October 2008, and since then has been working on building solutions using Microsoft Office, SharePoint 2007, .NET Framework 2.0/3.0/3.5, Microsoft SQL Server, C#, XML,ASP.NET and others.

One of the recommendations I give in all of my SharePoint Site Administration Workshops is for every site to have contact information for the site manager in the top, right corner of the entrance page to every site. In this screencast, I show how to use LyteBox functionality to open a support contact page without losing the context of the underlying page.

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Access to support pages, the use of LyteBox, and other techniques for creating dashboards in WSS, are included in the Tuesday, June 30 live online workshop, Case Studies in SharePoint WSS Dashboards. The workshop is a three hour, live online, hands on session where you are given your own SharePoint sandbox to practice implementing the dashboard solutions.