My latest article is up at www.sharepointbriefing.com.  Here’s a teaser:

Read the whole thing here: http://sharepointbriefing.com/features/article.php/3874226/Content-Query-Web-Part-SharePoints-Swiss-Army-Knife.htm

See it in use a real public web site here by following these steps:

1. Go to this web page: http://cdi-its.com/Pages/Customer_Support.aspx (This is the customer support page for CDI).
2. Click on “Case Studies” in the left hand navigation.

It will jump to the “Customer Support” section of the case studies listing.

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One of my clients worked with a previous contractor to build out a small but useful HR application for the enterprise.  That contractor used SharePoint Designer to implement the workflow portion of the solution.  It’s a bit of a mess.  For instance, there are nine SPD workflows in support of a single logical workflow process and up to five of them may fire simultaneously at any given time given the right conditions.  It’s not easy to debug 🙂

My customer has a number of still-outstanding requirements, one of which is to generally provide more context when the system sends out email alerts – both in the email itself as well as associated task forms.  As SPD workflow implementers know, the “collect data from user” SPD action actually creates a task with a custom content type.  When we use that action, we don’t get to specify much.  We can prompt for some values (e.g. “approve” or “deny”) and we can specify a hard coded value in the title and description.  That’s about it.

My customer’s requirement is two fold:

1. When SharePoint sends an email about a task assignment, include a lot of information about the task in the email body.
2. More importantly, by far – when the user clicks on the task link in the email, the task form should have all the information the approver needs in order to make his/her approve or deny decision.  Right now, the manager needs to click on the item link itself to drill down into the underlying details and no one likes that.  You have to click in the email.  Then you need to click a sort of obscure link on the task item.  Then you can look at the underlying data (an InfoPath form in this case).  Then you click back/back, etc.  Everyone hates it.

I’ve inherited this somewhat messy technical solution and I want to make changes in the least intrusive way possible.

The approach I’m taking right now is to create a custom alert template.  You can read about that here.  The flow works like this:

• SPD workflow runs.
• At some point, it assigns a task to a manager.
• SharePoint system automatically sends out an alert to that manager.  This is not part of the SPD workflow but rather “what SharePoint does.”  (The SharePoint timer service, I believe).
• A custom alert handler is invoked in favor of the standard alert process (following magic rules as described in the above referenced article).
• When my custom alert handler runs, it generates a beautiful email.  More importantly, since it has the task in hand, it also decorates the actual task with all the context information necessary to meet the business requirement.
• The user gets the email and it’s full of useful context information.
• User clicks on the task link and the task itself is full of useful context information.
• Everyone goes home to have watermelon and ice cream.

I did a quick POC and it works well in a lab environment.  I get my custom email alert as expected.  I also get to update the task description and title itself.

The only tricky bit, so far, is to avoid a situation where the alert updates the item, triggering another alert.  This doesn’t worry me.

Looks promising so far…

The great thing about this is that I don’t need to muck about with any of the existing SPD workflows.  They are blissfully unaware that an alert handler is “IIZ RUNNIN IN DA BAKGROUND, DECORATIN TEH TASK LIST WIF MOAR CONTEXT”.

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[Note: I want to straight away say that I have a financial interest in the desired outcome of this demonstration, which I mention in the interest of full disclosure, etc.  This is actually the first time I’ve ever blogged about an event where I stand to benefit personally in this way.]

This web demonstration takes place Thursday, 06/04 at 12:30 EDT, ending at 1:30PM EDT.

In cooperation with my excellent business partner, Integrated Systems and Services Group (ISSG), I have been working to develop a vertical business application using SharePoint as the platform.  In this case, we’re building an application that serves the needs of manufacturers that make customized product for their customers.  In these cases, a great deal of collaboration needs to take place between the customer and the manufacturer.  There’s also a great deal of collaboration required between different groups within the manufacturer, including sales, engineering, research and development, legal and other groups.

The demo is going to show an application that facilitates that kind of collaboration, along with a discussion on how all of those collaboration bits need to integrate with a backend ERP system.

Lastly, this isn’t going to be a SharePoint demo.  This is a demonstration of a solution for a specific niche problem that happens to use SharePoint as the platform.

So, why would you bother to sign up and see this demo?  I don’t expect too many readers of my blog to be all that interested in a solution for make-to-order manufacturers 🙂  Your take-away would be the concept itself – using SharePoint purely to deliver a business solution without regard to SharePoint itself.

If you’re interested, please sign up here(https://www323.livemeeting.com/lrs/8000043750/Registration.aspx?pageName=skmqfwbr5smmlx20).

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My latest article is up at www.EndUserSharePoint.com.  I wrote about SharePoint Designer, End Users and the outline of a strategy that End Users might try and follow in order to demonstrate competence and build trust around this tool.

The comments are more interesting than the article itself.

Check it out.

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On my current project, some of the users will travel around the world and when they arrive at different destinations, use whatever machine is handy at the time.   Those guest machines will be running Windows and installed and configured for the local locale.  (I’ve just realized that the guest machines may not have the right language packs… probably won’t, in fact… I’m parking that one for now).

SharePoint needs to provide a mechanism whereby the user can pick their preferred language and then have MOSS honor that language regardless of how the user accesses MOSS.  In other words, disregard whatever the browser tells IIS/MOSS and instead look up that preferred language and use it. 

We’re going to investigate two approaches:

1. HTTP Handler: A custom HTTP handler installed on IIS will look up the user’s MOSS profile, figure out the preferred language and then switch the HTTP header around as needed before passing control to MOSS.
2. global.asax: Modify global.asax to do the same thing.  We may modify something else, but the idea is that we find some place where we can insert our locale-switching logic. 

The other complicating factor is that we need to support 60k users, about 1,000 of which may be simultaneously accessing MOSS at peak load.

The HTTP handler seems pretty drastic, but possibly the best place to put the code since it’s at the IIS level and all-knowing.  It’s a good single point of work.

We’re leaning toward a global.asax type approach, mainly because we believe we’ll have more options for caching data at that point.

I’ll be blogging more on this subject as I learn more.

If you have know anything about this, please post a comment 🙂

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