What's The (Share)Point?

Author: David Petersen

  • Undercover Boss: How SharePoint Can Help Management

    After the Superbowl, where the “Who Dat Nation” conquered the Indianapolis Colts, CBS previewed a new program called Undercover Boss.  It is an intriguing concept.  Take the CEO/President of a company and have them work undercover for their own company.   I DVR’d it and had the opportunity to watch the first episode last night.  In this episode, the President/COO of Waste Management worked at five different locations doing different jobs, from recycling, to port-a-potty cleaning, to riding a trash truck, to picking up trash in a land fill.  Along the way, he got to experience how his decisions and policies as an Executive affected the front-line employees in his company.  He was even “fired” by one person for not picking up trash fast enough.  The one thing that he kept saying was, “I didn’t know”.  He didn’t realize that the cost cutting measures they instituted created a situation where one lady was actually doing the work of three to four individuals, but getting paid as admin staff.  He found out that lady truck drivers had to pee in a coffee can because of the production quotas they had implemented.  He found out that some employees were being docked two minutes of pay for each minute they were late.  He also found out that he had some real good and loyal employees.  Employees who needed recognition.  Employees who had good attitudes and ideas.  Employees who were the face of his company to their customers.

    So – how does this relate to SharePoint?  One thing I love about SharePoint is that it is a social computing platform.  It enables team building.  It encourages collaboration.  It enables the flow of information to flow efficiently in many directions.  Used effectively, C-Level Executives don’t have to say – “I didn’t know.”

    Here are some ideas on how Management can leverage SharePoint in their company.

    1. Executive blogs.  I don’t care what company you work for, all employees are interested in what the Executive Team is doing to make sure that they have jobs in the future.  It doesn’t take much time for a CEO or President to  jot down a few notes about the direction of the company.  It is commonly known that successful companies have leaders who are visionary, and communicate that vision to the company.  When employees feel that they play an active part in that vision, they are more productive and loyal.  When employees see the CEO communicating his personal thoughts in a blog, managment becomes more real instead of some faceless entity handing down edicts.
    2. Surveys.  Want to know what people think about a certain subject?  Ask them.  SharePoint has surveys right out of the box! And, they are easy to create.
    3. BI.  SharePoint has some pretty good BI tools.  With Dashboards, LOB data integration, Excel services, and workflow, among others, SharePoint is positioned to be an efficient platform for surfacing BI data.
    4. Search.  How many times have you known a piece of information exists in the company but you can’t find it, so you recreate it.  How many hours do you spend searching for the right piece of information? Sam Goodner has blogged about what CEO’s don’t want to hear.  He also talks about what they do want to hear.   In one of his examples, he documents how it costs $28,125 per year per employee because of poor findability in their company.  Now I don’t know if these are actual numbers but think about it,  can you quantify your informational findability?
    5. Workflow.  Whether you use the OOB workflows or create your own with Designer or Visual Studio, processes can be automated making your business more efficient.
    6. My Sites.  While this is most likely one of the most controversial parts of SharePoint in an organization, if an organization embraces My Sites, you will have realized the 360 degree aspect of social computing.  What happens when I need to know who in my company is an expert on a certain subject?  I can do a People Search to find someone who is an expert on that subject?  I can then visit their site and find papers and such that they have published on the subject.  I can establish a relationship with them and invite them to collaborate something I am working on.  Just think of the possibilities for organizations that have offices throughout the world.

    These are just some ideas.  Look around you.  Social computing has taken hold in our everyday lives. With Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and FourSquare becoming household words, employees are expecting that same type of interactivity and socialization in their company.  Executives that embrace these technologies and actively participate in these technologies, will never again have to say, “I didn’t know…”.

  • A SharePoint Design Question

    Normally, I write solutions to problems.  This time around, I need some suggestions to get ideas on how to design a solution to a problem.

    The credit department where I work accumulates/produces documents to support the credit limit they grant our customers.  We have categorized them as :

    • Financial Statements
    • Agency Reports
    • Parent Guarantees
    • Other

    We have defined a content type for each of these types of documents.  With each of these documents, one common field is the Company Name field that describes the company that the document refers to.

    The Company is unique in it’s structure.  Each Company can be a Parent company or it can be the Parent to other companies.  I created a Company list that had the fields Name and Parent where Parent was a lookup field type to the Company list.  We currently have the list populated by about 4500 company names with the parent relationships defined.

    List: Company

    • Company Name, Text Field (required)
    • Parent, Lookup of Company List (Company Name field) (not required)

    In the document list that contains the four content types, each content type has a Company field that is a lookup to the Company List.

    When we were discussing how to design this “application”, the user talked about how he would like to have a view where he could see all documents that related to a company, whether these documents applied directly to the company or one of it’s subsidiaries.  Another requirement would be that the documents for one particular company would be easy to find/view.

    As for volume, each company (so far at 4500) will have at minimum 1 of each document types but more than likely will contain 10 – 20 documents with a small growth rate.  There is no document disposition being considered.  From their standpoint, once a document goes into the system, it becomes a historical record for that company.  So – we’re looking at about 45,000-90,000 documents initially and it will grow.

    My original thought was that to stay within the 2000 item soft limit per view, I would create a folder in the Document Library for each Company created in the Company list.  I would then have the users save their documents in the folder that corresponded to the company name.  To achieve the view of the data where they could see all documents that applied to the parent and child companies, I would use the relationships defined in the Company list to create a custom view using the DataView Web Part.

    So – here are my questions:

    1. Do I need a separate folder for each company?  Am I limiting myself?
    2. If we just use a Company Name field using the lookup list, would we run into performance problems?
    3. If we do use the folder, is there a way to automate the creation of the folder when I create a new Company in the Company List.
    4. If we do use folders, is there a way to prevent documents from being created outside of the folders?
    5. Can a document inherit a property from it’s parent?  (i.e. could a document get it’s company name by being saved into a specific folder with the right company name?
    6. (If folder) How do I prevent users from saving documents into the document library outside of a folder?

    I’m sure there are more questions that I need to be asking.  It has been so long since I worked in Designer or the Web interface.  I’ve been living in Visual Studio for the last year.  Leave comments / remarks / insults.  Anything is appreciated.

  • SharePoint Saturday – Indianapolis Wrap-Up

    SharePoint Saturday was a huge success.  I had a lot of fun.  To all of the organizers – this was truly one of the best organized conferences I have attended.  The speaker dinner was a blast and the venue was perfect for the creativity that SharePoint encourages! Thank you! If you ever do another one, I hope I am fortunate to present again.

    For all who attended my presentation – I Wish I Knew That (What I Wish I Knew Before I Implemented SharePoint), you can download my slide deck by going to my Presentation Notes page.  If you were one of the lucky few to capture a Happy Mood Dude, take a picture of yourself with it and send it to me.  I’d love to post it on the site.

  • iPhone Saves the Day!

    Every once in a while, you come across a cool story that you wish everyone could learn about.  This is one such story.  It is so cool, I’m going to cross-post this on both of my blogs.

    What would you do if you were caught in an earthquake, injured and sure you were going to die?  View this video below to hear what one man did.  If you can’t see the video, or want to read the story, you can read it here.

    Here’s a thought.  What would you write to your wife/kids/loved-ones if you found yourself in a similar situation?  Leave a comment – let’s see how interesting this becomes!

  • SharePoint Saturday – Indianapolis

    Up and ready for a great SPS-Indy.  The building is a great location for a SharePoint Conference.  My session is scheduled for 2pm so I’ll get to attend some other great sessions.  Here are some pictures I have taken of the venue.  Look for more later!

    Sponsors - Thank You!Meeting room.

  • SharePoint Saturday – Ozarks

    I just saw that they are having SharePoint Saturday – Ozarks again this summer. SPSOzarks was my first SharePoint Saturday experience and I really enjoyed it. The information I learned, and the relationships that I began that Saturday were the impetus for getting more involved in the SharePoint community.  Since that Saturday in Harrison, Arkansas, I have attended Microsoft’s SharePoint Conference 2009 in Las Vegas, gotten more involved in our local SharePoint User Group and started presenting at other SharePoint Saturdays. I hope to work up another presentation for SPSOzarks so I can be a presenter this time instead of a spectator.

  • Apple iPad – I’m a fan!

    OK. I’m a fan. I need to see more actual hands-on reviews but I think I may want one of these.

    https://videopress.com/v/wp-content/plugins/video/flvplayer.swf?ver=1.15

  • Feature and Code Depreciation in SharePoint 2010

    SharePoint Joel (Joel Olesen) has a good post in preparing for Code and Feature Depreciation in SP2010.

    Understanding Feature and Code Depreciation for Upgrade to SharePoint 2010

  • Easy Check If An SPWeb/SPList Exist

    I write a lot of code using the SharePoint object model.  Often times, I want to check to see if a particular Web exists in a Site Collection or a List exists in a Web.  I used to write methods that enumerated through the collection to see if they existed or I wrapped a Try-Catch block around the code in case the object didn’t exist.

    Recently I came across a code snippet that made checking for the existence of a web or list easy.  I can’t remember where I found it so I’ll thank the nameless person who originally wrote the code.  I’m only capturing it here for my own reference and possibly help someone else.

    
        static bool ListExists(SPWeb web, string listName)
        {
            return web.Lists.Cast().Any(list => string.Equals(list.Title, listName));
        }


        static bool WebExists(SPSite site, string webName)
        {
            return site.AllWebs.Cast().Any(web => string.Equals(web.Name, webName));
        }

  • Notes to SharePoint Migration

    The company I work for purchased the Quest Notes Migrator for SharePoint.  Overall, it has saved me lots of time migrating from Lotus Notes.  The main reason is that I have absolutely zero experience with Notes.  Now, the Quest tool allows me to migrate all of the rows into SharePoint pretty painlessly.  I was having one problem.  As I migrated Lotus databases, I was getting SharePoint lists with 50 -100 list items.  Performance lagged when trying to view those items and it made SPDesigner almost unusable.  I set out to find a way for the tool to create folders around a Created date.  My final solution utilized Lotus @Functions.

    In the spirit of trying to save someone else a lot of time, here is what I did. 

    1. I used Quest Notes Migrator for SharePoint Designer.
    2. If you select a folder type in the mapping, Designer will create a folder with the name of the item.  If the item has a forward or backward slash, it will create nested folders.  So, I wanted a nested folder based on a date.
    3. In the Notes data definition, I created a new formula field.
    4. The formula that I used is:  @Text(@Year(@Created)))+”/”+@Text(@Month(@Created)))+”/”+@Text(@Day(@Created)))

      DateString Formula
    5. I created an alias of FolderDateString
    6. Output type is String.
    7. On the DataMapping, map the FolderDateString field to a Folder type. That will tell Designer to automatically create nested folders based on the string.
    8. That’s it!

    Hope this helps someone!

    mapped data
    Final data mapping