Fun With Announcements – Part 1
A note from Mark Miller: About a month ago, Laura Rogers slipped into the Stump the Panel forum without much fanfare and started answering End User questions with nicely thought out responses. As I watch, I realized her style and thoughts would be much appreciated by the Information Workers following the site, so I asked her to write for the site. This four part series is Laura’s first contribution to the main site. Thanks, Laura, we look forward to many more. — Mark
The ideas for this set of articles comes from user questions on Stump the Panel regarding customizations and optimizations to announcements lists on SharePoint sites. I will cover the following customizations:
- Create a Publish Date feature for announcements
- Create alerts based on announcement categories
- Modify the default “Current View” of the announcements Web Parts
- Create a “More” link to view the details of each announcement
Create a Publish Date functionality for Announcements
Here’s how to create a publish date for each of your announcements, where the announcement will automatically be “published” when the date arrives.
- Turn on content approval on your announcements list like this:
In the list’s settings, go to Versioning settings.
Change “Require content approval for submitted items?” to Yes
- Create a new Date and Time column in your announcements list called “Publish Date”, and make it a required column. You can even make it default to today’s date if you’d like.
- In SharePoint Designer, create a workflow like this: Open SharePoint Designer, and click <File> and <Open Site>. Paste in the URL of the site where you’d like to create the workflow, and open it. Click <File>, then <New…>, then <Workflow…>
- Name this workflow “Create Announcement”
- Pick your Announcements list from the drop-down list. Only check the box “Automatically start this workflow when a new item is created”.
- Add the first condition to “Compare Announcements field”. If the field Publish Date is less than or equal to (then, click on value, and choose the little parameter builder button)
Then, choose Current Date, and click OK.
- In the Actions section, choose Set Content Approval Status. Set content approval status to “Approved”, and add comments such as “item automatically approved on publish date”
- But, if the announcement is supposed to be published on a future date, we need the workflow to wait. Click to Add ‘Else If’ Conditional Branch. In the new branch’s Action section, choose Pause Until Date. Click on this time, and click the function button to display the data binding menu
With the Source as Current Item, choose Publish Date as the field. Click OK.
- The second action will be the same as the action on the previous branch.
Set content approval status to “Approved”, and add comments such as “item automatically approved on publish date”
Here’s what your workflow screen will look like:
We used “is less than or equal to Today” as the condition (instead of is equal to today) because it’s possible that a user could enter in a past date as the publish date. A condition is not needed in the second branch because it knows that if the condition in the first branch is not met, then otherwise do this.
Tomorrow we’ll look at creating alerts based on announcement categories.
Author: Laura Rogers, Birmingham, AL
http://spinsiders.com/laurar
http://twitter.com/wonderlaura
Laura Rogers is currently a SharePoint Administrator at HealthSouth Corporation in Birmingham, Alabama. She has ten years of experience with Microsoft’s messaging and collaboration systems. This includes four years in SharePoint implementation, training, and customization. Laura has been a MCSE since 1999, with her most recent certifications being MCSE 2003 + Messaging, MCTS in MOSS and MCTS in WSS 3.0 Configuration. She also wrote a chapter in the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Administrator’s Companion by Bill English.
- Fun With Announcements - Part 1
- Fun With Announcements - Part 2
- Fun With Announcements - Part 3
- Fun With Announcements - Part 4
Thanks for this post! This exact feature became a requirement for a project I am working on.
By the way, shouldn’t the title of the post be “Fun with Announcements”, not “Attachements”?
Very nicely done! I’d love to be able to use this concept. Problem is that I don’t have Designer. Is there a way to implement this without designer? This is something that users have asked for.
This looks very handy indeed. I haven’t yet got too stuck into workflows, but this sort of tutorial is great to get my brain thinking about the possibilities.
I’d second Shannon’s question about ways of doing this without Designer. That’d be a great help.
The SPD screenshots are greatly appreciated; they really help when trying to understand, learn and create/implement workflows.
In response to your questions…
No, there isn’t a way that I know of doing this without workflows in SPD.
Also, as a reference, I learned everything I know about workflows here:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointdesigner/HA102564171033.aspx?pid=CH100667661033
Laura
Yes you can create a solution similar to this without Designer – try this solution that I created for a project in our company:
1. From an Announcement list, create a new column called ‘Publishing Date’ using a date format
2. Create an ‘Approved’ column using a ‘Yes’ check box format and an ‘Approved By’ column using a name format
3. To view approved announcements, customise the view of an Announcements list web part or created a filtered Announcements list view where:
‘Publishing Date’ is >/ to ‘today’
and
Approved = Yes
and
Scheduling End Date is </ to ‘today’
Hope this helps.
Thanks for that info Judy!
To solve others’ headaches, here’s what I’ve discovered – be warned when using “Pause until date” type strategies in workflows…
Q.What happens if you delete the list item before the workflow publish date?
A.You’re left with an orphaned workflow instance and there is no way to terminate it without terminating *all* running instances.
Q. What happens if you change the publish date after the item is created?
A. The item still publishes at the original date. The date value is early-bound to the workflow at instance creation time. Wah-wah!
Nice post, but isn’t there a way to have the user click on users or groups and have it filter by group in AD?
Hi! Thank you for sharing… It was realy helpful.
Do you know if it is possible to add new announcements to a specific site or subsite using a single form with dropdown SITE selection?
Let say i have main (root) site and two more subsites, each of them has their own announcements list, i don’t want to open each site to add announcements. I want to have a single add newItem form where i can select to which site the announcement will be added. I can now view all announcement from each subsites on the main website, using content query web part. Is there something similar to CQWP, just to add new announcement to different
sitecollactions with in a single form?. Do you think it is possible? any help is very much appreciated.
Is it possible to clone ( i.e. move) workflow created with SPD2007 between sites.
E.g. I have 21 site collections with announcements on home page that would need that kind of workflow.