Workflow

Content Type Book Corrections

David Gerhardt — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 19:22:56 GMT

I would like to thank everyone who has purchased our book Building Content Type Solutions in SharePoint 2007 (all three of you ☺). In a previous lifetime, I was a copy editor at a daily newspaper. That experience helped me to notice a few things that were slightly "off" when re-reading my own work. So, in an effort to bring you the highest quality of reading material, I want to point out the following corrections in the first printing:

Page 48, first paragraph, ninth line - It should read "The New Site Column page allows you to define a site column...". The "to" is missing. I know that is a picky catch, but I am a picky person.
Page 55, second line of the note - The name of the Office Word 2007 document template that is available at http://www.courseptr.com/downloads is Performance_Appraisal.docx. Note the "_" character between "Performance" and "Appraisal".
Page 89, first paragraph, fourth line - It should read "...which will be displayed in the date picker content control...". The AppraisalDate column is mapped to a date picker content control, not a plain text content control.
Page 122, first paragraph, third line - It should read "...can contain a hard-coded link to the appraiser document library...". In the email message body, we provide a link to the library, not the appraisal document.

Hopefully, these and other minor errors will be cleaned up in subsequent book printings.

Modifying Date Formats in SharePoint Designer Workflows

David Gerhardt — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 23:58:13 GMT

You may have noticed that you cannot modify date formats with out-of-the-box SharePoint Designer workflow functionality. As a result, when you look up a date field in the message body of a Send an Email action, the date will get displayed as "1/28/2009 12:00:00 AM" in the message that is sent to the user.

If the workflow is attached to a form library, there is a codeless workaround that you could implement from within the InfoPath form designer. Just add a rule for your dateTime node (or date node) that re-formats the value to a string node. Use one of the declarative substring functions to modify the format accordingly. In the case of a dateTime node, you may want to use the substring-before function to capture everything that precedes the "T", as shown in the following figure.

When publishing the form template back to the library, be sure to promote the string node that contains the modified date format. Then, in the SharePoint Designer workflow, you can perform a lookup for the string node.

SharePoint Connections Session Decks

David Gerhardt — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 20:02:40 GMT

A few people who did not attend SharePoint Connections last month have asked how to get the decks I used in my presentations. The quickest and easiest way: download them here.

In the Can

David Gerhardt — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 17:54:51 GMT

No, I am not in the bathroom (or potty, as my kids like to say). The book that Kevin Martin and I have been working on, Building Content Type Solutions in SharePoint 2007, is in the can (i.e., it shipped yesterday). So, if you have ever created or thought about creating document-centric SharePoint solutions, you might want to add this book to your holiday shopping list. If anything, it should be a great bedtime read for young ones. :-)

I am grateful to everyone who helped or offered to help with this project. I especially want to thank Jen Blaney (our editorial assistant at Charles River Media), Marta Justak (our project editor), and Stacia Misner (our technical editor). Without them, none of this would have been possible.

Update on the Content Types Book

David Gerhardt — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 20:29:24 GMT

Last month I provided a teaser about the book I am writing with Kevin Martin (a 3Sharp colleague) titled Building Content Type Solutions in SharePoint 2007. We are in the final editing stages now and should be completely done in the next few weeks. If all goes well, I will have a flier to pass out at SharePoint Connections for those interested. The chapter titles (which may be subject to change) are as follows:

What Is a Content Type?
Included Content Types
Site Columns
Document Template
Document Information Panel
Workflows
Information Management Policies and Document Conversions
Out-of-the-Box Solution Walkthrough
Automating the Performance Appraisal Solution
Completing and Deploying the Appraisal Process

The last mile is always the most difficult...

Integrating Lotus Notes with the 2007 Release

David Gerhardt — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 19:58:08 GMT

Last year we worked with Gary Devendorf to create a two-day training course about 2007 Microsoft Office system interoperability with Lotus Notes 7. The course was geared toward Notes developers and had sessions about Visual Studio 2005 and Domino Web services, ASP.NET, the Open XML Formats, InfoPath, Access, and Excel, to name a few.

For the next month or so we will be working with Gary again to upgrade the materials. The new training course will still use Lotus Notes 7, but we will convert the Visual Studio 2005 projects to Visual Studio 2008 and add new content for subjects such as the Business Data Catalog, InfoPath Forms Services, custom workflows, and mobile development activities. Gary will be providing training updates on his blog. For more interoperability information, check out the InteropTips Community Site for developers of .NET and Lotus Notes applications.

SharePoint Connections Fall 2008

David Gerhardt — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 15:42:33 GMT

The fall event for SharePoint Connections 2008 is a little more than a month away from now (November 10–13 in Las Vegas). Once again, I am lucky enough to be one of the speakers, and my sessions are as follows:

Developing InfoPath Client-Only Forms for SharePoint — This session explores many of the form designer capabilities for InfoPath client-only solutions.
Developing InfoPath Browser Forms for SharePoint — This session explains some of the limitations in working with InfoPath Forms Services and discusses ways to optimize browser forms using out-of-the-box and managed code techniques.
Adding Codeless Workflows to InfoPath Form Solutions — This session identifies how you can integrate codeless workflows into SharePoint form solutions.

It should be a great event, and I look forward to meeting many of you there.

Building Content Type Solutions in SharePoint

David Gerhardt — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 16:20:00 GMT

For the past few months Kevin Martin (a 3Sharp colleague) and I have been writing a book titled Building Content Type Solutions in SharePoint 2007. The book is a step-by-step walkthrough for building a performance appraisal solution with a SharePoint content type. It takes an approach similar to the one I used last year when writing about the time-off request solution, but with much more detail and a couple of chapters devoted to programmatic enhancements. The book is scheduled to be published later this year by Charles River Media. I will be providing more details on this site in the next month or so as we put the finishing touches on the book. Stay tuned...

Creating Custom Workflows with SharePoint Designer 2007

David Gerhardt — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 17:11:30 GMT

Microsoft just published another Visual How To, Creating a Custom Approval Workflow for SharePoint Server 2007 Using SharePoint Designer 2007, written by yours truly. This Visual How To explains how to build a SharePoint Designer approval workflow for the sample expense report form template that comes with InfoPath 2007. The article and video show how to modify and then publish the form template to a SharePoint document library, define a new workflow and attach it to that document library, and add conditional logic within the workflow designer. This codeless approach to building an expense report workflow is an alternative to working in Visual Studio 2008, which fellow 3Sharp developer Mike Rand describes in the Visual How To titled Building an Expense Report Approval Workflow for SharePoint Server 2007 Using Visual Studio 2008.

SharePoint Workflow: Error Updating a List Item

David Gerhardt — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 22:34:00 GMT

If you have ever encountered the "Error updating a list item: Document checked out" issue in a SharePoint workflow, it appears that there is a resolution...