Welcome to KeithOHudson.com.  This is a blog about using technology to improve your life.  I hope you’ll find it a friendly place.

If your company uses Sharepoint (Microsoft’s market leading knowledge worker platform) and if you are interested in streamlining your work and getting more done by getting a computer to do more of your work, you can accomplish some phenomenal things without ever learning a single line of code.  You will need to get familiar with the Sharepoint interface, and over time, you’ll need to get familiar with all the features and capabilities of Sharepoint.  Armed with that knowledge and the proper permissions from your Sharepoint Farm Administrator (usually called the Sharepoint Administrator), you can probably accomplish 60 to 70% of what sharepoint dot net developers are usually brought in to do, all without ever coding a single line.

If you’re like me, that will get you excited.  (See my story, here).  I hope to share with you some tips and tricks that will speed up your learning curve on the path to becoming a Sharepoint wizard.

I look forward to getting to know you through your comments on my blog articles.  Welcome to my world.

Keith O. Hudson

When I first started developing in Sharepoint, I read a lot about workflows, but had a very hard time finding anyone who knew how to build workflows in Sharepoint Designer (one developer told me you can’t do math calculations in an SPD workflow. Wrong!) and an even harder time finding out how to do the most basic tasks in SPD, so here are the basics for getting started:

1. Download and install Sharepoint Designer (SPD) (it is available free for either Sharepoint 2007 or Sharepoint 2010).

2.  Launch SPD.

3.  Connect to your site.  (File/Open Site –> then put your site name into the Site Name: text box in the format http://www.mysharepointsite.com/). You will need to provide your credentials. Its a good idea to ask Windows to remember your credentials, as they may be requested several times during a session.

4. Start a new workflow.  File/New/Workflow.  NOTE that if you hover over the NEW menu item, you can select Workflow from the shortcut menu that comes up.  If you click on NEW, you will need to navigate to the Sharepoint Content tab and select Workflow/Blank Workflow.

5.  The Workflow Wizard will start.  Using the Wizard is pretty self-explanatory.  Once you name the workflow and attach it to a list or library, you will be asked to create Step 1 of the Workflow.

6.  You will first set out the conditions which must be met for the action steps to take place.  If there are no conditions, simply click on the Actions button to insert actions.
7. When  you click the Actions button, a list of about 10  possible actions will appear.  Check out the “More Actions” link at the bottom of the list to see all possible actions.

8.  Play with the workflow Wizard to learn how it works. For instance, if you choose the action “Do Calculation” you are given the option of choosing two values, plus the mathematical operator, and assigning the result of the calculation to a variable. You can then use the variable in later steps.

9. In some places in the Wizard, you will see a button that says ‘fx’.  Clicking that button will allow you to select existing data (some call it metadata) from a list or library, or insert data into a field in a list or library. (Sorry, I’m in the habit of using relational database language. A field is a column within a list.) You select the list, then the column you want, then the item you want.

10.  When you have finished your workflow, SPD will attach it to your list.  If you have chosen to allow your workflow to be triggered manually, you will then have a new menu item called “Workflows” in the edit menu and in the toolbar in edit forms. Clicking on the Workflow menu item will take you to a new page where you can launch the workflow.

11.  SPD will also add a new column to your default view for the list, with the name of the workflow.  When a workflow fires and completes, the list will then display “completed” in that column.  You can of course remove that column from your view if you don’t want to see it there.

That should be enough to get you started. I’ll try to post a screencast of the basics of using SPD in the near future.
Keith Hudson
keithohudson.com
groovepointconsulting.com

I’ve been told that the principal source of cleaning in an automatic washing machine is the agitation of the clothes, not the laundry detergent. Apparently, detergent manufacturers are very “generous” when they recommend how much laundry detergent you should add per load, and you can cut it down to 1/2 or even 1/4 of the recommended amount and still have your clothes come out fresh and clean.

For the past several months, I’ve been using 1/4 the amount of laundry detergent I used to, and have not noticed any difference in cleanliness or scent of my clothes.  My wife uses 1/2 her prior amount — she’s not as stingy as I am — and is pleased with the results.

When I began cutting down on laundry detergent, I also started cutting the dryer sheets I use in half.  It only takes a minute to cut the entire stack of dryer sheets in half when I buy a new box, and each box lasts twice as long, again without any noticeable difference in my clothes.

Laundry may not be a big expense, but every little bit of savings adds up.

In Sharepoint 2007 and 2010, a Site Collection is a collection of sites sharing a common set of permissions, content types, and site columns. It was also the case in Sharepoint 2003, but according to this blog, Sharepoint 2003 hid that fact from users so they were actually using Site Collections without knowing it.

A Site Owner can break inheritance and thus manage site permissions individually on subsites, and there are sometimes good reasons to do so.  However, in a test or development environment , I would argue that it is NEVER advisable to break inheritance and have mixed permissions within a Site Collection, unless it is absolutely unavoidable for the solution you are developing.

Here’s why.  Content Type, Site Columns and Permissions are all handled by Sharepoint at the Site Collection level.  If someone working on Subsite A makes a mistake and makes unwanted changes to a Content Type or Site Column within Subsite A, those changes affect all the other subsites within that collection as well.  To return Subsite A to its default state and start over, it would be necessary to delete ALL the subsites, and recreate the entire Site Collection.

If each project is housed within its own Site Collection, such mistakes (very easy to make for someone learning Sharepoint’s out of the box features) are relatively easy to correct.

Of course, a developer who doesn’t know how to use Site Columns and custom Content Types from the Sharepoint GUI may not have this problem, but then, he or she is probably building a solution that will require you to bring a developer back in to fix the solution next time you apply a patch or upgrade to a new version of Sharepoint.

Just my opinion.  What do you think?

Here’s the first blunder for my collection.  While hunting for some hints on customizing Calendar lists, I came across a blog article (opens in new window) in which the author tells how to modify the Event content type in a Calendar list, to allow for different kinds of events (Event, Playgroup and Program, in his case). The initial challenge is that the Event content type is a  hidden content type. The author provides a way to move the Event content type from a hidden list to a visible list by altering the code in a Sharepoint folder on the server.  Yikes!  As a commenter correctly points out, this ability to unhide the content type already exists in Sharepoint out of the box — no behind-the-scenes code work is required. This is good news for site administrators without access to the Sharepoint server wishing to create custom event types for their calendars.

Here’s how to do it without code:

1. For an existing calendar in your site, go to List Settings/Advanced Settings and set “Allow Management of Content Types” to Yes. The Event content type now appears in the list settings.

2. Select the content type by clicking on the word “Event” then select its parent content type (also an Event) by clicking on its name. Now go into “Name, description and group” and change its group to “List Content Types” to make it available in the site’s Content Type Gallery.

Let me know of other Sharepoint Blunders you run into.

For instance, when I joined the Contract Services Group in the IT department, I was able to make some changes to the group’s contract management database to speed up entering contracts, printing out contract profiles, and finding records. We identified areas where the computer could do more work so the work we did was speeded up.

We created a project management database to keep track of our projects, and over time enhanced it with additional features like prioritized task lists and integration with vendor contact information.

However, it is very difficult for an IT organization to support Microsoft Access.  Its complexity makes it difficult to troubleshoot when it does not function as expected.  It would take a veritable army to support Microsoft Access throughout a Fortune 1000 enterprise.

When Sharepoint was introduced into US Airways in 2009, I discovered a tool similar to Access in its capabilities, but much easier to learn, and built in a way that made it much harder to break.  Built in security, automatic email capability, electronic workflows, automatic document versioning and check-in check-out make it a business process automation dream.   I began using it to streamline as many of my processes as possible: contract tracking and renewal reminders, license tracking, training approval and tracking, and contingent staffing processes we are processes that could be handled in less time using an automated Sharepoint system.

The breadth of Sharepoint’s capabilities makes it very powerful indeed, including collaboration, portal, search, content management, business forms, business intelligence, workspaces, central management, security and storage. Its out of the box abilities are truly impressive.

So what can Sharepoint do for your company?  Wherever you have processes involving approvals, or storage of documents, or sharing of ideas, Sharepoint can probably help streamline and speed up the process.

If you already have Sharepoint in your organization, let’s look at your biggest point of pain together and see if we can devise a way to put Sharepoint to work to ease the pain.

“<RANT> Now here comes the part that annoys me the most. If you don’t know most everything SharePoint can do out of box then don’t speak to another customer until you do! Seriously! I can’t tell you what percentage of my business is cleaning up other so called “consultants” but it is a big part. People who walk in the door with their army of .NET developers and start building the functionality the customer is asking for. This would be great except for one small detail. 9 times out of 10 what they are building is already included out of the box. Do you know how many times I see things that are the content query web part recreated? Or they wrote custom navigation because they couldn’t figure out how to use the one that comes with SharePoint? It drives me bonkers. They hard wire in these things and then guess what? You can’t upgrade later or the latest service pack breaks something. Why? Because that is your punishment for reinventing the wheel. This may be a great model for the consulting company but really sucks for the customer footing the bill for the never ending cycle of maintenance. </RANT> “

In short, many Sharepoint consultants don’t know Sharepoint’s full feature set well enough to serve their clients interests rather than their own. One cannot be a good Sharepoint consultant without knowing Sharepoint well enough to use its out of the box capabilities to the fullest before customizing it, and even then, the customization should be done in a way that is sustainable without a consultant going forward if at all possible.  Based on the comments to Shane’s post, there are lots of people out there who know Sharepoint well who agree with Shane.

I would go one step further.  A GREAT Sharepoint consultant not only maximizes the power of Sharepoint out of the box, but also engages in knowledge transfer so that the client’s business users are able to build their own solutions after the consultant leaves.

As a business user who has spent 11 years automating my own business processes (mostly in Access), I know the power of owning your own destiny, of being able to enhance a solution on the fly to save future time and effort.  Sharepoint makes it possible for non-programmers to become owners of their own automated processes, and gives them the ability to tweak them and adapt them quickly to changing business needs.  I think very few companies or Sharepoint consultants understand the true power of Sharepoint as a tool for business end users.

The continual stream of job postings I see for Sharepoint developers with Dot Net and other programming experience tells me that in the two years since Shane wrote his post, virtually no one has really tapped into the true power of Sharepoint yet. If they had, we would be seeing a stream of postings for Sharepoint Solution Specialists: non-programmers who can analyze and re-engineer a business process and design a Sharepoint solution using nothing but Sharepoint’s out of the box capabilities and Sharepoint Designer (plus Infopath forms ONLY if the Sharepoint installation is MOSS Enterprise).

I believe that those companies that catch the vision of Sharepoint as a tool to empower end users to automate their own processes without programmers, and who provide those end users with sufficient training and support so that they can follow good governance practices and good design principles will gain a competitive advantage in their industries

To your prosperity,

Keith O. Hudson

For instance, when I first joined the Contract Services Group in the IT department as a contract analyst, I discovered the administrative assistant spending close to 40 hours laboriously printing paper copies of the contracts kept in the contract management database system one at a time, since the manager of the group didn’t trust electronic backup.  (He didn’t trust a system that was not within his full control. I’m a lot like him.)  After a little research, I found that the database system was written in Microsoft Access, and that I could connect to the tables through a separate Access database, so I built a new front end for the contract management system that shortened the backup printing task from 40 hours to 5 minutes. I made the first screen we saw when the database opened a summary list of all the contracts that you could scroll through or search on, instead of making the user drill down through multiple levels of screens to find the contract she was looking for.

I revamped the method for entering new contract information so that it could all be entered from a single screen, instead of having to go to six separate screens. I estimate that reduced input time by at least 40%.  I built in a module that allowed us to verify the contents of about 1,000 contract records in the database in an orderly fashion without interrupting our other work, in about 6 or 8 weeks time.  I built a project management database to keep track of the dozens of contracts we were working on at any given time, and over time, enhanced it so that with a single mouse click, we could each see our own tasks, organized by priority, with due dates and next steps.

But since MS Access was not supported formally, if I ever got stuck or my application broke, I was on my own. I spent many hours pulling my hair out trying to find or fix a bug, or trying to learn how to accomplish a particular task that would speed up our jobs.  And it didn’t take very much time to streamline some of our processes.  For instance, when sharing Outlook contacts between 3 of us proved fraught with peril (this was back in 2000), I took a few hours and wrote a phone directory database that had all the contact information for our vendors, so we could all access that information from a single source.  Then, later, I added a button to our contract management database so we could see the phone directory for the vendor of a particular contract with a single click.  Still later, I added a button to display the company’s name and address in a pop up form that we could copy quickly when we needed to address an envelope. Later, we wanted to know how fresh the information was, so I added a field that showed the last time the information had been verified, triggered by a single button click.  I hadn’t heard the term “agile development’ back then, but that’s what I was doing.

When I was introduced to Sharepoint in 2009, I was excited because here was MS Access on steroids, officially supported by the IT department, and with a very easy to use GUI.  However, although Sharepoint was formally supported by the IT department, I soon discovered that the sole Sharepoint administrator was a) swamped, b) hard to understand (he had a heavy accent) and c) had difficulty understanding what I really wanted (which was to learn how to design my own Sharepoint solutions, NOT have him tell me why I couldn’t do what I was trying to do).

After working with Sharepoint for only a short time, I instinctively knew that Sharepoint had the power to do everything I had ever done in MS Access and more — I just had to find out how to do it.  The built in security, the connection to Active Directory with automatic email capability, and electronic workflows all promised to make my efforts to automate business processes much easier than it had been in Access, not to mention automatic versioning and check in check out of documents, and the ability to email documents to a document library.

I just needed a little help understanding how to use the features, and especially, someone to show me how to get started building custom workflows.  I looked for someone who knew more about developing working business solutions in Sharepoint than I did to teach me.  Alas, I was unsuccessful.  The Sharepoint administrator didn’t seem to get what I needed.  I found a couple of dot net developers that had worked with Sharepoint to a greater or lesser extent, but the first just looked at me blankly and said “Huh?” when I asked him how to build a custom workflow. The other one immediately said “You can only do that in Visual Studio,” then proceeded over the weekend to build me a custom workflow without ever asking me what my requirements were.

Then I chanced upon an intensive training course teaching the core features of Sharepoint 2007.  While it wasn’t quite what I thought I needed (I would have loved a 4 day lab on building real world solutions using custom workflows), it electrified me, for it taught me Site Columns, Site Collections, Content Types, and so much more that I had not known before.  And finally, I had someone to show me how to create a custom workflow for Sharepoint using the (free) tool called Sharepoint Designer, and how to debug it.  And during the course, it became abundantly clear (especially after the instructor kept telling me so) that I knew far more about the power of Sharepoint to empower end users to automate their own business processes to speed their work (just like I had been doing for years) than anyone else around me in my organization.

At first, I doubted my abilities, until I reflected on the 11 years of preparation I had undergone to become a highly skilled Sharepoint Solutions Designer. No, I haven’t been working with Sharepoint 2007 for very long, but I have been analyzing business processes, designing a computer-based solution, implementing it, getting feedback from the users, and improving the solution on a continuous cycle, since before Y2K.  My gestation was 11 years long, but a Sharepoint Solutions Designer has been born!

Imagine being able to do the kinds of things I used to do in Access, that without having to wade through tons of VBA code!! Now, just about anyone with the desire to do so can become a business automation wizard.  And my mission is to show them how.

To your prosperity,

Keith O. Hudson

If you want to edit the subject line, you simply put your cursor anywhere in the existing subject line, then make whatever additions or deletions you wish to make. Click on File/Save on the top line menu to save your changes. To edit the body of the email, you must first select Edit/Edit Message from the top line menu. After you are done editing, make sure you save your changes.

I’m currently working on a project to download and organize pictures sent to me by email. When I’ve downloaded the pictures from an email, I add the word “DONE” to the subject line so I know I’ve finished saving the pictures from that email to my hard drive. After I have sent a message back to the sender, I add the word “Replied” to the subject line, so I know I have already answered the sender to thank them for their pictures.

I have often edited the body of an email to add a note to myself about action I need to take, or information I’ll need when replying to the sender, etc.

HINT: Make sure if you have edited the subject line or body before replying to the email, that you remove the edits when you reply if you don’t want the sender seeing them.

However, it seems that just when I’ve got things numbered the way I want, I make a change to something in the document (like removing bolding on a word) and the entire numbering system changes. I call it Word Numbering Hell.

After struggling for a couple of hours with numbering a document yesterday, I found an article by Shauna Kelly that showed me how to escape Word Numbering Hell, by using numbered headings.  It takes a little work to set up the first time, but it simplifies numbering immensely and makes it reliable, as well as giving you complete control over your document. Thank you Shauna!