Servé's SharePoint Blog

This is a live blog post from the SharePoint Conference 2009 Las Vegas. Speakers: Roberto Taboada, Darvish Shadravan, MS.

Forms drive business processes. It begins with capturing the data with InfoPath forms. Then information needs to get to the right hands with for instance SharePoint designer workflows. Finally the info should be translated into proper and timely action by building a web part portal to present that info.

Demo: procurement application
The demo that the presenter will be giving is about a procurement application called Blue Yonder. From an end user perspective it means that through an online form the user requests a new desktop. The created by field control shows that the username is already filled in. New here are the picture button controls. By clicking on the images of a desktop the presenter orders a desktop. When that happens a external SharePoint List will be queried to get all the desktops. Several drop downs provide a filtering mechanism to select the right product, brand and model..

From the approvers perspective there is a portal that shows the forms like the approval tasks, the forms with their promoted columns and a third web part that shows KPI’s: how many requests, how many rejected requests and so on. The KPIs are updated as new forms come in automatically! On the bottom there is a Excel web app that shows various graphs about requests like requests per user and so on.
The biggest change here when the approval tasks pops up. The approval workflow task is now a fully customized page instead of the regular workflow task page you are used to compared to SharePoint 2007. After the approval a Word document is generated by taking data out of the form and generating the Word document so that it can be taken as a hardcopy offline.

Key components
The application described above consists of the following components:

• Line of business data: use SharePoint business connectivity services to get data from external SharePoint lists.
• InfoPath form: combine product and user input, create requests in form library
• Approval workflows: create tasks in task list, assemble order form in library.
• Requester and Approval portals

Step 1: connecting to Line of business data
There are a number of external SharePoint lists like product categories, subcategories and the actual list of all the products linked through unique keys. These lists are external content types you need to set up using SharePoint Designer 2010. A external content type has general properties like the display name, permissions, operations like add, edit and delete and a data source. When you finally click the Create lists and forms button you will end up with a SharePoint list that is synced to the data source.

Step 2: creating the InfoPath form
A big change is the way you manage rules. There is now a big Manage Rules button that shows you a task pane on the right side. There are many rule types like a formatting rule that can for instance used to hide or show certain sections.
The people picker is now a control that can be dropped on the form and there is no additional configuration required to make that working! But you can for instance narrow down to certain groups of people through options.
The picture button control is very nice and doesn’t need explanation. When you select a product by clicking on an image you actually start querying the data source. There is no preloading of data.
But what is NEW here is the fact that you can now do browser based filtering. So for instance select brand, and the brand filters down the products.

Step 3: approval workflows
The tools to author workflows with is SharePoint Designer. In addition to that Visual Studio is used to generate a custom reusable action that creates the Word document.
The presenter shows how to create a reusable workflow. The best practice here is to associate site columns with the workflow fields that the reusable workflow needs to be able to operate.
Another great thing is the document ID number. Within the site collection every document gets a unique ID number which is a prefix and a sequential ID. Great for archiving as well.

I cannot describe the whole demo in this post but the take away here is that you can build a complete application with just InfoPath, SharePoint designer en SharePoint 2010 providing a number of services including the Business Data Connectivity service.

Step 4: request and approval portal
The request portal actually contains of a page that has the request button which is an image with a link that has a source parameter so that you will get returned to the right page. The page further contains some conditional formatting so that new form requests are shown in bold so that they really stand out.
The approval portal consists of five web parts. One for the tasks, one as a view on the request forms and several others I described earlier. So what the presenter shows is that the web parts are connected. The approval tasks web part for instance sends the row of details to the request details.