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Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Business Application Blueprints
Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Business Application Blueprints

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Business Application Blueprints: Master SharePoint application development by building exciting SharePoint business solutions with this book and ebook.

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Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Business Application Blueprints

Chapter 2. Building an Out of Office Delegation Solution

For organizations looking to leverage SharePoint to support collaboration and process automation, it is important to be able to provide a more robust Out of Office solution than what is available within messaging systems like Microsoft Exchange. Those solutions do a good job of providing information that aligns with the user's current status, but it is not something that can be used to automate the delegation or assignment of tasks to ensure that processes continue to complete in a timely manner, while the user is unavailable. The lack of timely responses is one of the biggest challenges with most process automation projects, and it is not enough just to know who the task is currently assigned to.

A variation of this solution could also be used to provide a standing long term delegation for cases such as when a manager wants to delegate all tasks to a subordinate. This general process could be used to log the delegation in the log for...

User profile properties


The user profiles available in SharePoint Server provide a robust set of features to centrally store and manage information about users. Custom fields can be easily configured to support your industry, organization, or business processes in the case of the Out of Office delegation solution.

To configure the user profile properties, navigate to the User Profile Service Application within Central Administration, and select the Manage User Properties link under the People group as shown in the following screenshot:

From the Manage User Properties page you can view the listing of all categories and properties as displayed in the following screenshot. The properties can be ordered as desired to provide logical groupings.

Defining the section and properties

For this solution we are going to define a section and three properties to support the Out of Office delegation.

To create a new section:

  1. 1. Click on the New Section menu item.

  2. 2. Provide the Name (internal name) as...

Master Delegation Tracking List


To support compliance and reporting capabilities we will define a custom list that can be used for logging all of the delegation entries in a central list. This list can also be used to show a user what tasks were delegated on their behalf as we will see when we define the View Delegation History page referenced from the Task Delegation Web Part.

Delegation List Definition and List Instance

We will provision a List Definition and List Instance to store the notification content. This will make it easy to reuse the list, if necessary, in cases where you need to manage the notifications separately for sites that target different sets of users or in different farms.

To create the feature:

  1. 1. Open Visual Studio 2010.

  2. 2. Select File, then New Project.

  3. 3. Browse the Installed Templates and select Visual C#, SharePoint 2010, and then List Definition as seen in the following screenshot:

  4. 4. Enter the project details such as Name, Location, and Solution name.

  5. 5. Within the...

Check out of office workflow activity


To support the workflow we will now create a custom workflow activity that can connect to the user profiles and perform a series of actions. Custom workflow activities are a great way to expand the capabilities of a SharePoint workflow allowing you to connect to additional farm services such as the User Profile Service application, Business Connectivity Services, or even managed metadata services. It can also be used to integrate with other systems directly for cases where Business Connectivity Services is not available or is not desirable. Another advantage to building custom workflow activities is that you can group multiple steps together into one reusable activity.

Approach

The CheckOutOfOffice activity will accept a username and perform the following steps:

  1. 1. Check the user's profile to see if they are Out of Office, with a delegate specified.

  2. 2. If they are:

    • Log the delegation decision in the workflow's history

    • Log the task information to the Master...

Creating a Task Delegation Web Part


We will now create a custom Web Part for the task delegations to provide better visibility of the current delegation settings, simplify editing the settings, and also to view the delegation history for the given user. This Web Part can be used on the user profile page, or on any of the sites used to store workflows.

In order to determine the correct user profile to read, the Web Part must be able to check the URL for the accountname variable, and if not found, use the current user's information, which is how the user profile's Person.aspx page operates.

Creating the Web Part project

The Task Delegation Web Part and the referenced application pages will be added to a new project called SPBlueprints.Delegation.

To create the initial project:

  1. 1. Open Visual Studio 2010.

  2. 2. Select File, then New Project.

  3. 3. Browse the Installed Templates and select Visual C# | SharePoint 2010, and then Empty SharePoint Project.

  4. 4. Enter the project details such as Name, Location...

Creating custom application pages


The Task Delegation Web Part includes references to two separate application pages. Custom application pages are ASP.NET pages that can fully utilize the server API, and ASP.NET capabilities to deliver robust visualizations, or a web form with complex business rules. The application pages are deployed to the Layouts directory that are available throughout the system.

Preparing for custom application pages

In order to add application pages or any other object to the Layouts directory, we start by mapping the path to the directory. Since these application pages will be a dependency for the Task Delegation Web Part, we will add these pages to the existing project. To do this, right-click on the project name and select Add, then SharePoint "Layouts" Mapped Folder. This will create a new folder called Layouts in your project.

View Delegation History page

Logging the delegations is important to keep a central tracking list, but we will also want to provide an easy...

Summary


This section leveraged both the Server and Client OMs to create packaged solutions in order to deliver the Out of Office delegation solution. The customizations are grouped as follows:

  • Visual Studio 2010:

    • List Definition

    • List Instance

    • Web Part

    • Action group definition

    • Actions definition

    • Application page

These solutions provide examples of how to extend the user profiles and create customizations that can be used to support business processes, and also how to add additional Web Parts to the user profile page. This can be used as the basis to support robust reusable business processes, and also be used to enhance the value of the user profile pages.

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Key benefits

  • Instant SharePoint ñ Build nine exciting SharePoint business solutions
  • Expand your knowledge of the SharePoint platform so that you can tailor the sample solutions to your requirements
  • Learn how the different development techniques can be used in various situations to support both client side and server side development to solve different problems in different environments

Description

SharePoint is an incredibly powerful platform that can support a wide variety of business scenarios. In many cases it needs to be configured or extended in order to deliver fully featured business solutions. While some books merely talk about the capabilities of SharePoint in general and leave you to figure out how they apply to your situation, this book takes a different approach. Each chapter provides easy-to-understand, step-by-step instructions along with screenshots to help build exciting SharePoint business solutions that extend the platform. By the end of this book the reader will be a SharePoint developer to be reckoned with. This book will dive into a diverse set of real-world scenarios to deliver sample business solutions that can serve as the foundation for your own solutions. This book draws from the author's extensive experience with SharePoint to leverage the platforms underlying services to provide solutions that can support Social Collaboration, Content and Document Management, as well as project collaboration. Each chapter represents a new business solution that builds on the overall platform to deliver more complex solutions and more advanced techniques. By the end of the book the reader will understand how to leverage the SharePoint platform to build their own business solutions.

Who is this book for?

This book is for SharePoint developers, consultants, and administrators who want to build a range of SharePoint solutions that extend the SharePoint platform, and see how to apply the many available SharePoint features in different scenarios.

What you will learn

  • You will see how to build the following SharePoint projects:
  • An Effective Intranet Site for your organization that maximizes the site s ability to aggregate content and is highly effective at communicating important messages
  • A Workflow Out of Office Solution that allows users to manage their out of office dates and automate task assignments to a delegated resource
  • A Company Forms Site with the definition of form content types and organizing the forms into a usable interface
  • An Engaging Community Site including custom features that can be used to enhance collaboration and provide an information sharing system
  • A Site Request and Provisioning System to help governance and compliance activities
  • A Project Site Template to support project initiatives and track Issues, Tasks, and Contacts
  • A Project Management Main Site that can aggregate the key metrics and status information from the project management sites previously created
  • A Task Rollup solution that can aggregate tasks from the specified sites
  • A dynamic Site Directory solution that leverages Search

Product Details

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Publication date, Length, Edition, Language, ISBN-13
Publication date : Jun 25, 2012
Length: 282 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781849683616
Vendor :
Microsoft
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Product Details

Publication date : Jun 25, 2012
Length: 282 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781849683616
Vendor :
Microsoft
Category :

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Table of Contents

9 Chapters
Building an Effective Intranet Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Building an Out of Office Delegation Solution Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Building an Enterprise Content Management Solution Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Building an Engaging Community Site Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Building a Site Request and Provisioning System Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Building a Project Site Template Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Building a Project Management Main Site Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Building a Task Rollup Solution Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Building a Site Directory with SharePoint Search Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

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Venkatesh Sep 28, 2012
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
To describe it in simple terms, "Awesome book". Very useful book. Everyone should buy this book read it. Clearly written[...]
Amazon Verified review Amazon
webdes03 Aug 14, 2012
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
This book illustrates practical examples of solutions built on SharePoint's social features, content and document management, as well as day-to-day team collaboration. While the solutions in the book are useful on their own, they also illustrate best practices for solution design and implementation and educate the reader on the methods of working with core SharePoint components. The book begins with core SharePoint components such as features, layouts, sites, templates, etc., but by the time you're in the middle of the book, you're combining features and writing code and script to customize those features and tailor them to your business needs. Cover to cover, this book will help you to understand the evolution of a solution from start to finish, and teach you the best practices for those solutions along the way. This book is a great read whether you're a developer, administrator, or just looking to learn more about how to build business applications within SharePoint.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Michael Hinckley Jun 29, 2012
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
Many times SharePoint projects can be daunting. Where do I begin, what features do I use, what business goals do I need to achieve? We tend to read so much about SharePoint and prepare for it that when we come to actually kicking off a project that helpful guidance to get you past the blank site is much in need. This book provides just that. It lays out the hands on steps based on business cases that can be easily translated to your organization. Many times people are told to "go and play" without much "business need" guidance. This book provides both and will defiantly help you as with SharePoint skills as much as with organizational drive.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Ofer Gal Sep 24, 2012
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It is a chuck full of good usages of SharePoint 2010 in a business environment with detailed explanations how to achieve such usage.I tried some of the source code and it worked as expected. It also helped me get started on few subjects. Sometime it is not so obvious.This book is a good investment for SharePoint developers.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Supriyo B. Chatterjee Aug 21, 2012
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This book consists of 9 practical use cases that you may encounter in enterprise situations (see Table of Contents for list). Some of these are major projects - Intranet, ECM, Community, Site Searches & Project Management. The other projects are of lesser complexity but with significant uses. The book takes each use case and provides details with a practical solution (right down to the code level). The code can be downloaded from the Packt Publishing site - here [...] . The book's solutions can help jumpstart your enterprise project and help save time - applying one solution alone can more than save you the cost of this book. It can also serve as an example in documenting your project's solution.
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