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February 01
Display User Data Fields for a SharePoint List
by  Laura RogersNo presence information  on 2/1/2012 11:31 PM
Category: SSRS

You have all of this data in SharePoint, and you have all of this information about the site users, such as their department names, phone numbers, and much more. Instead of asking for site users to fill out all of their pertinent information every time they fill out a list item, form or survey in SharePoint, wouldn't it be nice to just use the information that is already there?

A while back, I wrote an article on how to report off of this data using Microsoft Access SharePoint: Find out About Site Users within Microsoft Access (Screencast). This method is flawed because once you create the report, there isn't a way to display it back in SharePoint… it's only in Access. I also wrote this post Pass Default Value From a Web Part Page to a New Item, which works okay, but you're really copying all that user data into some fields, which is really inefficient.

This week, I discovered a much better way than those other two, and it entails creating a SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) report. This solution can be used with all versions of SharePoint (not just enterprise). Before getting started, the prerequisites are that SSRS is already installed on a SharePoint web front end server, and it's all set up and integrated with SharePoint. Also, make sure that you are using SQL 2008 R2, or steps 19 and 20 won't work. You'll need the Report Builder Report and the Report Data Source content types added to a document library (I called my library "Reports"). For more information about SSRS, I did a presentation recently: Easy Reporting off of SharePoint Data.

In this example, I'm going to use a regular SharePoint tasks list, and the goal is to display the list of tasks, showing the "Assigned To" column, and also showing more information about each user that has a task assigned to them. (Note that part of these instructions are easier if you are working at the root level of the site collection, as opposed to a sub-site.)
Here's the final result. Those last two columns come directly from the SharePoint user information list:

  1. In your Reports library, click the New button and choose Report Data Source.
  2. Name it TeamSite, data source is Microsoft SharePoint List,and use your own SharePoint site URL as the connection string. Credentials has to be Windows authentication. Click OK.

  3. In the library, click the New button again, and choose Report Builder Report. (If you've never used it before, you will be prompted to install it)
    Note: if you get the error "To use Report Builder, you must install .Net Framework 3.5 on this computer", here is the resolution.
  4. In the wizard, choose New Report. Click Table or Matrix Wizard.

  5. Choose Create a Dataset, and click Next.
  6. Choose to browse to find a data source, and navigate to the current library, which is where you already created the TeamSite data source, which is the one you want to select. Click Next.
  7. Check the box next to your Tasks list on the left. (Note to make sure that there are some items in your list. It just helps to have test data.) Click Next.
  8. Add a few fields to the Values section, by dragging them over. Click Next.

  9. Since I didn't select any grouping on the Arrange Fields screen, on the Choose the Layout screen, all the options are grayed out. Click Next.
  10. Pick a color preference on the Choose a Style screen, and click Finish.
  11. If you'd like to preview your creation so far, click the Run button at the top, then click Design to close the preview. Go ahead and click the Save button at the top left, and drill down to your Reports library. Save this as TaskReport.rdl.
  12. So far, we haven't done anything extraordinary, that's just a pretty report. Now it's time to add those user information columns that I promised you. Right click on Datasets on the left, and choose Add Dataset.
  13. Call this new dataset UserInfo, and choose to use a dataset embedded in the report. Choose your TeamSite data source from the drop-down.

  14. Click the Query Designer Button.
  15. Check the box next to the User Information List on the left, and click OK.
    (Note that only if you do NOT see the user information list, this is because it only exists at the root level of the site collection. You'll have to create a separate data source, call it "TopSite". Repeat steps 1 and 2, using the URL of the root site in your site collection. In the screenshot above, you'll be selecting the other, "TopSite".)
  16. On the Dataset Properties screen, click OK.
  17. A couple of columns can now be added. Again, the goal is to show extra information about each of the "Assigned To" people. Click to select the last column in the report, and choose Insert Column -> Right. Do this twice.

  18. In the first new empty cell (not header), right click and choose Expression.

  19. Paste this formula, click OK, and I'll explain it all in a minute.
    =Lookup(Fields!Assigned_To.Value,Fields!Name.Value,Fields!Department.Value, "UserInfo")
  20. Right click the next empty cell next to that one, pick expression again, and this one will have the job title:
    =Lookup(Fields!Assigned_To.Value,Fields!Name.Value,Fields!Title.Value, "UserInfo")
  21. In the column header cells, type titles for the new columns, "Assignee Department", and "Assignee Title".
  22. Save. Close Report Builder. Now in your reports library, you can click to open this report (RDL file) and see how lovely it is.

Here's how that lookup formula really works…

The Lookup function has four sections, separated by commas:

  • Fields!Assigned_To.Value - This is the field in the current (tasks) dataset that is going to exactly match up to a field in the other (UserInfo) dataset. You can click Fields (DataSet1) (in the screenshot under Category) to pick from the list of all the other fields.
  • Fields!Name.Value - This is the field in the other dataset (UserInfo) that is going to exactly match with the Assigned_To field. In the user information list, the Name field is "Firstname Lastname".
  • Fields!Department.Value - this third part is the name of the field in the other dataset (UserInfo) that you want to display in this cell. To see a list of the names of the fields in that dataset, in the Category section of the above screenshot, you can click Datasets and then click UserInfo.
  • "UserInfo" - This fourth part of the formula is the name of the second dataset that you're looking up to. This is what we named it at step 13.

Anyway, that's it, I hope you have fun with this. I absolutely love SSRS. Don't forget that there's the Report Viewer web part, which will let you display your report on any page in SharePoint. Another side note that I may blog about separately is the fact that you can cache the data in your dataset, so that it doesn't take so long to render the report. It has to be a shared dataset to be able to do that, and we didn't do any shared datasets in these instructions, just for simplicity's sake.

Note, if you got stuck at step 15 and you still don't see the user information list, just paste this in the big white box called Query:

<RSSharePointList xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
<ListName>UserInfo</ListName>
</RSSharePointList>

Here's the reference for the Lookup Function.

 

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January 26
Submit Form to a Secure Location
by  Laura RogersNo presence information  on 1/26/2012 12:06 AM
Category: InfoPath

Forms and security. It is a common requirement to have a form that can be filled out, and when it is submitted, it goes to a location that the form submitter does not have access to. This is tricky because the users need to have contribute access to a list or library in order to create new items in it, but then if they can do that, they can access everything else in the library. There are many variations of this requirement, but in this post, I'll show how it can be done in a pretty simple way.

General overview: This concept can be done with either a list item or a library. (I'll just use the term "list" in this overview, just to get the general point across). Create a content type. Create two lists. Add the content type to both lists. List A "New Items" items can be created by anyone on the site, and List B "Locked List" is locked down so that only managers have permissions to access it. When new items are created in "New Items", a SharePoint Designer workflow runs an impersonation step that copies that item over to the "Locked List", and then deletes it from the original list.

This solution can be done out of the box with SharePoint 2010 (any version), and SharePoint Online with Office 365.

Since InfoPath is the most common thing that I use to create forms, and I get asked about this a lot, I'm going to use an InfoPath form in my example here.

  1. If you don't already have a document library on your site called "Form Templates", go ahead and create it.
  2. When you publish your form to SharePoint, instead of publishing it directly to a form library, publish it as a content type. Note that if your form has been published as an administrative template, that's fine too, but just less common. Click Next.

  3. Choose Create a new Content Type, and click Next.

  4. Name your content type, with whatever the name of the form is. Mine is a Check Request. Click Next.
  5. On the screen where you specify a location for the form template, click Browse. Select the Form Templates library on your site, and give your form a name. I called mine CheckRequest.xsn. Click Next.

  6. Pick your fields that you want to be columns, and click Next. Click Publish. Click Close.
  7. Create two new form libraries. "New Check Requests" and "Locked Check Requests".
  8. Go to the Library Settings screen of New Check Requests, and click Advanced Settings.
  9. Change Allow Management of Content Types to YES. Click OK.
  10. On the Form Library Settings screen, click Add from existing site content types.
  11. Click Check Request (or the name of your own content type from step 4) and click the Add button to move it to the right side. Click OK.
  12. Click the "Form" content type, and click Delete this content type.
  13. Go to the Library settings screen of Locked Check Requests. Repeat steps 8 through 12.
  14. In your InfoPath form, make sure that the Submit data connection is set up to submit the forms to the New Check Requests library.
  15. Open your site n SharePoint Designer, and create a new workflow based on the New Check Requests library.
  16. Name the workflow New Check Request, and click OK.
  17. Put your cursor underneath the Step 1 box, and click the Impersonation Step button in the ribbon, so your screen will look like this:

  18. Delete Step 1. Put your cursor inside of the Impersonation step and add the action called Copy List Item. Then add the action Delete Item below it.
  19. Set up the copy so that it copies from the current list over to the Locked Check Requests. Then make it delete the current item. Like this:

  20. Click Workflow Settings in the ribbon. Under start options, only put a check box next to Start workflow automatically when an item is created.
  21. Publish the workflow.

 

Okay, it's done now. The key here is that the permissions will be set up as so:

  • People who need to be able to fill out the form: Give them Contribute permissions on the New Check Requests Library. Do not give them permissions on the Locked Check Requests library at all.
  • People who need to be able to access the whole list of forms that have been submitted: If they need to be able to *modify the forms that have been submitted, give them Contribute access to the Locked Check Requests library. If you only want them to be able to see the submitted items and not change them, just give them read access.
  • The key here is that when the workflow copies items over from one list to another, it uses the login of the person who published the workflow. The best practice for workflows with impersonation steps is to publish the workflow as the SharePoint admin account, and not someone's personal account. You know, just in case. You wouldn't want someone to leave the company and then none of the workflows function anymore, right?

Again, to reiterate…. This is just the most simple way to accomplish this goal. Of course, with impersonation steps in a workflow, you could change permission on each individual item in the list or library via workflow. It just gets kinda messy and hard to manage when you start delving into individual item permissions. The method in this blog post is simple because you the permissions are set at the library level.

Keep in mind that with some list types in SharePoint, such as a custom list, there is a setting in advanced settings that you can use. Unfortunately, this setting just doesn't exist in libraries.

Note: If people will be modifying the submitted forms after they have been moved to the Locked Check Requests Library, there is one more important consideration… the submit data connection. You'll have to create another submit data connection that submits to Locked Check Requests, because you probably don't want to have a bunch of duplicate files. There just needs to be a condition that looks to see if this is a form that has already been initially submitted. So, for example, you can create a field called "FormStatus". When the submit button is clicked, add an action to set a field's value, where you set the FormStatus to submitted. That way, you can create a condition so that if a form has already been submitted initially, then it gets submitted to the Locked Check Requests.

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January 19
Easy Reporting off of SharePoint Data
by  Laura RogersNo presence information  on 1/19/2012 10:24 AM
Category: SSRS

Yes, it's sometimes tedious installing and setting up SQL Server Reporting Services on your SharePoint server… but that's not what this presentation is about.  In this presentation at the Birmingham SharePoint user group meeting, I showed that once SSRS is in place, it is easy to create reports based off of SharePoint list data.  Here is the list of demos that I do, with all the reports being based off of a SharePoint task list:

  • Create a simple table-style report
  • Create a pie chart report
  • Create a pie chart called "Mine by Priority", which shows the logged in user a chart of only tasks that are assigned to them
  • Create a drill-down pie chart report.  This means that you can click on any piece of the pie to get more details about that part.  It's a pie chart by priority, but when you click on a specific priority, you get another pie chart that's showing all of the "Assigned To" people for that priority.  Then you can drill down into any one of those people and see a pie of theirs by status.
  • Create an email subscription to a report.

This is a presentation that I did (on 1/10/2012). It's an hour and 20 minutes.
The PowerPoint presentation is here.

 

Technorati Tags: SQL Server Reporting Services,SQL,SSRS,SharePoint,Report Builder,Current User Filter,Report Viewer Web Part

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January 10
SPTechCon in February–Sessions & Book Signings
by  Laura RogersNo presence information  on 1/10/2012 5:18 PM
Category: conference

The SharePoint Technology Conference is coming up soon!  I’m looking forward to seeing you all there! 

If you would like a $200 discount, use the code ROGERS when you register for the conference.

Here is a list of my sessions:

Building Business Solutions: InfoPath & Workflows

Sunday, February 26 - Full-Day Workshop (9AM-5PM) - Jennifer Mason and Laura Rogers

Business Processes and forms are everywhere. In your organization, there are always forms to be filled out, and these forms usually entail some type of automation such as a workflow. Microsoft Office InfoPath is a powerful form-creation tool that lets you create highly customized and professional-looking business forms, without writing any code. When you use this product in conjunction with SharePoint and SharePoint Designer, you have all the tools you need to build a no-code automated business solution.

In this all-day session, Laura and Jennifer will teach you everything you need to know about creating a full-blown business process using SharePoint, InfoPath and SharePoint Designer. Some basics will be covered, along with common practices for form-submission approval processes and SharePoint Designer workflows. When you walk away from this session, you will be confident that whatever processes the business throws at you, you will be able to create a solution using the tools and best practices that you learned during this workshop.
Level : Intermediate
Audience : Line of Business Essentials

 

The Power of Content Types

Monday, February 27
This same session will be held TWICE Monday, at 10:00-11:15 and 3:15-4:30

In SharePoint, the concept of content types seems a bit ambiguous to most people. This session will teach you what you need to know about content types to be able to implement them in your company. You may have heard that content types can be used in order to upload document templates so that they display as choices for users on a library’s “New” button. Yes, that can be done, but wait, there’s so much more!
In conjunction with site columns, content types can be utilized to create custom business solutions. Take your lists and libraries to the next level without having to do any custom development. In this session, demonstrations will be done to take you through common scenarios and show how to use the power of content types in SharePoint. Many of these concepts carry over from SharePoint 2007 to 2010, but new 2010 capabilities will be highlighted.
Level : Overview
Audience : Architecture Essentials, Line of Business Essentials

 

InfoPath and SharePoint Designer 2010 Workflow Best Practices

Monday, February 27 1:45-3:00PM

In your organization, forms are everywhere. InfoPath is a program that lets you quickly and easily create forms for business users to fill out and submit. The easy part is creating the form, but the more complicated part is finding out what needs to happen when it gets submitted and how to automate that process. This is where workflows come in. InfoPath forms and SharePoint Designer workflows can be used in conjunction, in order to create a complete business process.
This session will discuss and compare the different ways that forms can be submitted and streamlined, so that the life cycle of the form is efficient and logical. This includes best practices around the form’s data connections, buttons, rules, views, and the workflow that sends the form through an approval process. All of this is done without code; just making the most out of InfoPath and SharePoint Designer out-of-box functionalities.
Level : Advanced
Audience : Architecture Essentials, Line of Business Essentials

 

Book Signings

Monday 1:00 – 1:15 PM

I’ll be signing two different books in this time slot:

- Beginning SharePoint 2010: Building Business Solutions with SharePoint

- Using Microsoft InfoPath 2010 with Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Step by Step

 

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January 09
Two FREE Webinars!
by  Laura RogersNo presence information  on 1/9/2012 12:14 PM
Category: conference

Hi, I just wanted everyone to know about two webinars.  One is coming up this week, and the other has happened in the past and is available as a recording.

This Week - How to Use Content Types in SharePoint

Date: Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Time: 2:00 – 3:00 pm ET

 

 

In SharePoint, the concept of content types seems a bit ambiguous to most people. In this session, I will teach you what you need to know about content types to be able to implement them in your organization. In conjunction with site columns, content types can be utilized to create custom business solutions. Take your lists and libraries to the next level without having to do any custom development. In this session, demonstrations will be done to take you through common scenarios and show how to use the power of content types in SharePoint.

Register at https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/737679697

Past Webinar - Tips for Better Project Management Using SharePoint and harmon.ie

Watch this webinar to learn:

  • the power of content types and how they can be used to implement standard project templates.
  • how files and folders from a file share can be brought together in a document library in a way that people can find relevant content according to metadata.
  • ways to utilize metadata, views, and a few other tricks to work more efficiently, AND improve SharePoint adoption your organization.

Here is the VIRTUAL INTERVIEW that we did prior to the webcast.  It’s me answering questions that they asked me about myself.

 

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January 01
InfoPath “Save Draft” Form Functionality – A Better Way
by  Laura RogersNo presence information  on 1/1/2012 11:28 PM
Category: InfoPath

There are a couple of buttons in InfoPath forms by default called “Save” and “Save As”.  I never ever (ever) like to use these, and immediately disable them.  I don’t like these buttons because it gives the end users the freedom to save the form with any filename at all, which can make a big mess of a form library.

This solution can be done in any version of SharePoint or SharePoint Online with Office 365.

So when I tell people that I always disable these buttons, people’s response is “Wait, but what if we need to give users the ability to save a draft of the form before they submit it?”  My answer is to still use the submit functionality only, and put buttons on the form for “Save” and “Submit”.

The tricky part of this solution, is the fact that a form will inevitably have a few required fields, but they’re not supposed to be required if it’s only a draft.  In this post I’ll show you how to accomplish this.  When users fill out a form, they will have a “save draft” button and a “submit” button, and users will not get an error when a draft is saved and required fields are not filled out.

In this example, I’m going to use a super simple form, with just a few fields.  There are four text fields, called FirstName, LastName, FormName, and FormStatus.

  1. For the FormName, the default value is translate(now(), ":-T", "")
    Be sure to uncheck the box “Refresh value when formula is recalculated”. This is the typical method I use for InfoPath file names.  Each filename will be unique, and it won’t be dependent on any particular fields being filled out.
    Oreilly-15
  2. Go ahead and publish this form to SharePoint.  I usually do this before creating the data connection for submitting. 
    (Note for beginners: For a full tutorial, screenshots and details about publishing and submitting forms, you can read chapter 6 in my book)
  3. In the browser, go to the form library you created when you published the form to SharePoint.  In the address bar, copy the URL to the clipboard.
  4. In the Data tab in your form, click To SharePoint Library.
  5. In the Document Library box, paste the URL to your new form library, the one you copied at step 3.  Remove the /Forms/AllItems.  For the file name, use the function button to select the FormName field in your form.  Check the box to allow overwrite if file exists.
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  6. Click Next.  Click Finish.
  7. This form is very simple, and has first name and last name text boxes.  Place two new buttons at the bottom of the form.
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  8. Select the SECOND button, and click the Properties tab in the ribbon.  In the Action drop-down, choose Submit.
    Oreilly-19
  9. Click the Submit Actions button.  Select Perform custom action using rules.  Click OK.
  10. In the Rules pane on the right, click the Add button, and choose Set a Field’s Value.
  11. For the field, select FormStatus, and for the value, just type the word Submitted.  Click OK.
    Oreilly-20
  12. Move this rule up above the “Submit” rule that was already there.
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  13. Click to select the first of the two buttons on the form, the one that still says “Button”.  If you don’t already see the Rules pane on the right, go to the Home tab, and click Manage Rules.
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  14. Create a new Action rule that will have 3 actions:  Set a field’s value, Submit, then Close.  Note that if you’re not sure how to set a field’s value, refer back to step 11.
    Oreilly-23
  15. With the button still selected, click the Properties tab in the ribbon.  For the Label, type Save as Draft.
  16. Just so that you can see the value of the form status, go ahead and drag the form status field onto the form.  Right click the field, choose Change Control, and choose Calculated Value.  This is a quick way of putting a read only field on the form.
  17. Open the properties of the FormStatus field, and set the default value as New.
  18. On the Data tab, click the Form Load button.  Create a new Action rule.  Name this rule Draft. 
  19. Click the blue text under the word Condition.  The condition is Form Status is equal to Draft.  Click OK.
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  20. Click the Add button, and create an action to set a field’s value.  Set the Form Status value to New.
  21. Now it’s time for the meat of how this solution works.  Click to select the First Name text box.  This is where we create a rule so that this field is not required if the form is in draft state.  In the Rules pane, click to create a new Validation rule.  You can call it “required”.
  22. Create the following as the conditions:
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  23. Type some text in the screen tip box:
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  24. Click the Copy icon at the top of the Rules pane (it’s the first of the 4 little icons at the top).
  25. In the form, click to select the Last Name text box on the form.  In the rules pane, click the Paste icon.  Notice that the rule was smart enough to alter itself to the new field’s name.
  26. Now it’s time to get rid of the Save and Save As buttons.  Click File, click Form Options, and uncheck the Save and the Save As options.  Click OK.
  27. One more thing.  You may want the “Save as Draft” button to go away after the item has been “submitted”, so a rule can be created for this.  Click to select the Save as Draft button.  In the Rules pane, click the New button, and choose Formatting (to create a formatting rule).  The condition needs to be FormStatus is not equal to Draft and FormStatus is not equal to New.  Check the box for Hide this control.  You can call this rule “hidden.
    Oreilly-40
  28. Click the Quick Publish button at the top.

Now go over to SharePoint, to your new form library.  Click to fill out a new form.  Notice that even if you do not fill out the required fields (the ones with red asterisks), you can still click to save the form as a draft.  If you try to Submit the form, though, the required fields must be filled out.  You also may want to go through the publishing wizard again, if you’d like to add the form status as a column in the SharePoint library.

A new form will look like this:

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December 28
My Top 10 Popular SharePoint Posts in 2011
by  Laura RogersNo presence information  on 12/28/2011 3:47 PM

 

To wrap up 2011, here are the most popular posts on my blog site.  These posts were not necessarily written this year, but they are the ones that received the most comments in 2011.  With a total of 865 comments this year, here are the top 10 blog posts:

Display a Sub-Site List on a Top Level Site (56)

Workflow: Reminder Before Due Date – MOSS vs. WSS (52)

Web Part: Sites that I have access to (46)

The Text Filter Web Part – Without Having To Filter Exact Text (39)

Click to Copy List Item to New (33)

List of SharePoint 2010 Web Parts (31)

Displaying SharePoint Fields by Permission Level (29)

SharePoint 2010 – Where’d “My Links” Go? (22)

SharePoint 2010: The “What’s New” Web Part (22)

InfoPath 2010 and Repeating Tables (22)

 

Everyone have a great new year!  I’m looking forward to 2012!

 

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December 27
New InfoPath Book and more!
by  Laura RogersNo presence information  on 12/27/2011 11:06 PM
Category: conference

Last month, our new book hit the shelves!  It is called Using Microsoft InfoPath 2010 with Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Step by Step. 

lrg

The book is geared toward beginners, and has very detailed instructions for all of the walk-through steps in the book.  Even if you’re not a beginner, there are many tips and tricks that you’ll learn along the way.  Here is a photo of Darvish Shadravan and I, at our book signing in the MS Press booth at the SharePoint Conference in Anaheim in October:

LauraDarvishBook

 

But wait, there’s more!

Several of us got together and wrote this book (EUSP):  It’s called SharePoint 2010 at Work
Tricks, Traps, and Bold Opinions: The Best of EndUserSharePoint.com

SharePointAtWork

You can get 40% off by using the code MILLERSP.  I wrote chapter 5, which is about how to create hyperlinks in a data view web part and a list view web part.

 

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December 19
Workflow–How to Set Task Fields
by  Laura RogersNo presence information  on 12/19/2011 2:03 PM
Category: workflows

When assigning tasks in SharePoint workflows, you may have noticed that each task that gets assigned has one field that associates it with the original list or library item where the workflow task came from.  You may have noticed the “Related Content” column in a task list.  It is just a hyperlink field that links you back to that original item.

This post applies to SharePoint enterprise, and SharePoint Online for Office 365 (enterprise version). 

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In my experience, it’s quite challenging to do any kind of filtering and reporting just based off of a hyperlink field.  And web part connections won’t even work with this field, it’s just not very useful except for just as a link to click back to that item. 

What if you want to have a lookup field that goes back to the original item, or other metadata information?

In this post, I’ll show you how to create other task fields and set up the workflow so that it populates those fields when each task gets created.

My document library is called Shared Documents, and the task list is Tasks.  When tasks are assigned for people to approve the documents in the library, I want a field called “LookupSharedDocument” to be populated for each task. 

  1. Create a site column called LookupSharedDocument, as a lookup field.  Make it lookup to that Shared Documents library.  Pick the Title column in the drop-down.  We can also pull info from any other fields in that library, so put a check box next to “modified”.  Click OK.  You can be creative  here, and check the box next to any other fields that you’d like to see listed in the task list.
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  2. Open your site in SharePoint Designer.
  3. Click Workflows on the left, and create a new workflow based on the Shared Documents library.  Name your workflow “test approval”.
  4. Add a single action to your workflow Start Approval Process.
  5. Click on the blue these users.
  6. Since it’s just a test, you can put your own name in the Participants box. In the real world, this would be the name of the person or group who will be assigned the task.
  7. Next to Title, click the little ellipsis […] button.  Type:
    Approve this:
  8. Click the Add or Change Lookup button, and pick the Title field from the current item.  Click OK. I put a “1” next to Duration per task, since I only want each person to have one day to complete their task.
    Oreilly-3
  9. Click OK on all dialog boxes until you’re back at the workflow screen.
  10. Click the blue word Approval.  For the name, change it to Document Approval.
    Oreilly-4
  11. On the right in the Task Form Fields section, click Choose Existing field.  Click OK to the notification message.
  12. IMPORTANT: Be sure and click the Publish button to publish your workflow before doing the next part, because once this lookup field is added to the task form, it won’t re-generate the form, and you’ll get the error at step 15.  This won’t happen with other fields besides lookup fields, though.
  13. Choose the LookupSharedDocument field, and click OK.
    Oreilly-5
  14. Click Change the behavior of a single task.
  15. Put your cursor in the top step called Before a Task is Assigned.  Add the action called Set Task Field.  Note that this is NOT the same as set field in current item, and inside of this task process inside of this one step, you’ll have actions available here that aren’t available in other parts of the workflow.
    Oreilly-7
  16. Click the blue word FIELD.  Choose LookupSharedDocument.
  17. Click the blue word VALUE.  Pick the ID field from the current item.
  18. Click the Publish button at the top, to publish your workflow to SharePoint. 
    Note: I got an error about not being able to generate the task form or something, but I clicked OK, and I was still allowed to publish the workflow.  The error just means that it won’t create the new Lookup field in the task form itself.  But since we don’t want people editing it, we would have removed it anyway.
  19. Open your task list in the browser, and modify the default view to add the two new columns for the Lookup… information.
    Oreilly-10

Now in the drop-down box for a document in Shared Documents, click Workflows, and click your Test Approval workflow.  Click to START the workflow.  A task will immediately be assigned to you.  Take a look over in the task list, and notice that the new columns now have the lookup information in them!

Now go to your Shared Documents library, and click to edit the page (of just the default view).  On the ribbon, click the Insert Related List button in the Web Part Tools (Options) tab.  Notice that it lets you select that tasks list!!

End result:

Oreilly-11

This is a great solution, not just for lookup fields, but for any additional task fields that need to be populated with information from the original list or library.  I just recommend creating them as site columns first.  In this case, we were just looking up the ID of the current item, but there could be a case where you have a field like customer code or something, that’s just a text field in the shared documents library.  You’d need to create it as a site column first, before adding it to the document library.  Then, when you’re at step 11, you’d be choosing that exact same site column to put in your tasks list.

 

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December 07
SharePoint & Office 365: Simple permissions governance
by  Laura RogersNo presence information  on 12/7/2011 11:02 AM
Category: MS Office

In SharePoint and SharePoint Online with Office 365, permissions have always been one of the major pain points when it comes to end users, training and adoption. The user interface on the permissions screens, and the complexity revolving around inheriting or breaking permissions, are in many cases quite challenging to grasp.

In this article for SPTechWeb, I discussed some of my ideas and solutions for permissions:

Click to read the article

 

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