Sharepoint & InfoPath

[Evan F]

I work for a Home Health Care company and I do pretty much everything from network admin, sharepoint admin and designer, help desk you name it if it has something to do with IT I am the one handling it across 7 offices. This week I pulled off some pretty amazing InfoPath forms one of which is an office supply ordering form which covers everything down to toilet paper. The cool thing about this form is when the person selects the corresponding office the form will get fired off to that manager for ordering. The next form I created was a workbook for a team building video. What makes this form unique it needed to be anonymous and hidden from colleagues . Out of the box InfoPath and SharePoint can not allow for item level permission. I had to deploy customer code in the SharePoint farm to add features to SharePoint Designer Workflows. By adding these features it gave me Delete List Item Permission Assignment and Grant Permission on Item this allowed me to make a custom workflow, when the form is submitted it strips the current permission set from the library and grants permission only to "created by" and lets say a reviewer. This was huge so now when people visit the document library only their form will be there. The next form I created was very dynamic one for a meeting discussion. This form has a lot of auto populating fields pulling data from different sources. So as you can see I am pretty happy with myself for accomplishing all this being I am brand new to InfoPath. Thanks for listening.:banana:

 

[Ed C]

How does SharePoint help businesses integrate applications, and what are the advantages and disadvantages of using SharePoint?

 

[James Kerr]

Yeah tell us more about sharepoint then. I been wondering about it myself. I'm tired of my lusers using email as a file storage and transport.

 

[Thomas Rogers]

SharePoint is great. Microsoft did what Microsoft does right, wait for a product like Lotus Notes to mature (notes was and is more than just email, really more of a collaborative, doc and info management portal), and then found a company that had a good, competitive product that aligns with their products and BOUGHT THEM and branded the software as theirs.



Ever since they have been doing a good job getting companies to adopt it.



If your company shares a lot of documents, needs good search ability on those documents, needs the documents to be shared, go under revisions, and have some level of workflow (reviewing, etc), then SharePoint is a good product. Of course, it's more than just doc managment, it's also collaboration management (forms, etc).



It's a good product. Companies of most any size can benefit from it.



TJR

 

[James Kerr]

I do need to implement sharepoint. Perhaps next year I will have the time to take on that project. Lucky for us software from MS is very cheap as we are a not for profit org but time is my limiting factor, lots of projects going on right now..

 

[Evan F]

Here is a good way to get a better understanding of SharePoint.



Can't wait Monday evening we are deploying 2010

 

[Steven D]

We just implemented SharePoint at the company I work for. I am not the IT guy, but the end user (field Project manager) and from a user point of view, I very much enjoy using sharepoint.



Very user friendly and the fact that I can access it from any internet, this keeps me from having to remote connect to my desktop on the server which was very slow.

 

[Richard L]

My company (corporate office) went to SharePoint about 3 years ago and it works great. The only tricky part was to access Sharepoint users had to have Office 2007. Most of our users were on Office 2003, but we were able to switch the SharePoint user over Office 2007 right away and about a year ago switch everyone else over.



A friend who still works at the insurance company I once worked at said they tried a different software that took two weeks to install and they still could not get it to work right. The decided to try SharePoint and it was instatlled and running prefectly in about 15 minutes!



SharePoint is a Very Good product.



...Rich

 

[Jeffrey Travis]

Evan - I am sure most just read blah, blah, blah, - I, as the Product Manger for the Enterprise Portal at Macy's (we use MOSS), actually knew what you were mentioning with item level security and feel your pain and admire your fix (might I see it on codeplex or is it too custom? - we have been wondering if/when we would attack this oversite). This is a big miss by Microsoft and it is not even addressed in 2010. Which from what I have heard from my team is a big jump from MOSS.



SharePoint 2003 to MOSS was a big jump but the added functionality in 2010 is huge.



Biggest issue at Macy's........Office 2000 - restricts what user's can do but it is the $10-15 million dollar question when you get ready to move everybody forward.



I use WSS outside of work for a some baseball sites. It is good but has some holes - can't do some things I did in Excel. Since it is WSS and not MOSS not all functionality is available but it's only $20/month.



I do love showing people how easy it is - call it 30 minute APPS - when you can create a list, an input form and a view (MS calls this an app) all in 30 minutes and you do not need to hit up a developer to create a form, the DB team for a DB and then a Crystal report specialist to create a report life is good.



JT#14