Laura Rogers @WonderLaura: Posts

Speaking at SharePoint Saturday Atlanta!

Laura Rogers — Wed, 15 May 2013 14:41:05 GMT

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On June 8, 2013, SharePoint Saturday will be held in Atlanta at Georgia State University. I’m really looking forward to it! My session will be:

InfoPath and SharePoint Designer Workflows Together

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… the more complicated part is finding out what needs to happen when it gets submitted, and automating 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. In this session, Laura Rogers 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 with no code needed, just making the most of the InfoPath and SharePoint Designer out-of-box functionalities. The concepts in this session can be applied in any version of SharePoint.

Book Signing

I’ll be giving away free copies of my new book, Beginning SharePoint 2013: Building Business Solutions, at our Rackspace booth. Come get your free copy!

Registration is now open, so I’ll see you all there!

Technorati Tags: SharePoint,SPSATL,InfoPath,workflows

Category: conference

Published: 5/15/2013 9:41 AM

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Hack: Data View Web Parts in SharePoint 2013

laura — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 21:43:49 GMT

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If you noticed that the design view doesn’t exist anymore in SharePoint Designer 2013, here is a hack that I figured out, which lets you create data view web parts for your SharePoint 2013 site.

Note that this is most likely NOT supported by Microsoft. This is just one way that I figured out, so if you really need to create data view web parts, and you’re not a developer, you may want to try this as a very funky workaround.

Create an empty document library in your SharePoint 2013 site, which will be the temporary holding place for web part creation. I just called mine “Web Part Pages”.
Open your SharePoint 2013 site in SharePoint Designer 2010.
Click the little pin icon next to All Files on the left. That will put a tree view of the site on the left.
Right click on your new library, and choose New –> ASPX.
Give your file a name, like test.aspx. Double click the file to open it, and click Edit File.
Yes, open the page in advanced mode.
On the Insert tab, choose Web part zone. Then, on the Insert tab, choose the Data View drop-down and choose Empty data view.
Click on Click here to select a data source (in the middle of the page), and choose your list, library or whatever. I’ll choose Tasks. Click OK.
On the right, in the data source details pane, select the fields you need, and click Insert Fields as, and choose Multiple Item View.
There, now you can do whatever you need to do with your data view web part, etc, and get it how you want it. This is the page that you will go back to in order to make any needed changes.
On the Web Part tab in the ribbon, click To File. Save this .webpart file to your computer, and just remember where.
Open your site in the browser, and go to the page on which you would like to place your web part. With the page in edit mode, click the Page tab, and the Insert tab. Click Web Part.
On the left side, under the web part categories, click the Browse… button under Upload a web part. Browse to that .webpart file you saved at step 11. Click Upload.
Now you’ll have to click to insert a web part again, and this time you’ll see it in the Imported Web Parts category. Click Add to add the web part to your page.

Now that this is done, again, any changes you make will have to be in that temporary aspx page that you created. IT’S ALL ABOUT THE MASTER PAGE. The key is that I did not attach a master page to my blank aspx page. I tried to find a way to edit existing views, by attaching the v4.master page and trying to make changes before re-attaching the v15.master. That did not work out. Anyway, let me know what you guys think. I know it takes a few extra clicks, but at least DVWPs are doable.

Also, check out my Data View Web Part Screencasts for more info and cool stuff you can do with the DVWP.

UPDATE 5/3:

Thanks for all of your comments below. You’re right, apparently they locked it down:

Technorati Tags: SharePoint,data view web part,web parts,SharePoint Designer,design view,SP2013

Category: Web Parts

Published: 8/9/2012 5:15 PM

InfoPath–”Save and New” button

Laura Rogers — Wed, 01 May 2013 18:04:48 GMT

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Do you want people to be able to quickly fill in a form on your site, over and over again? One option for this has always been datasheet view, but sometimes you have a more complex form. In this post, I’ll show how you can create a button that will save the current record and immediately go to a new blank form.

In this example, I’ll just use a simple announcements list.

Go to your announcements list. On the List tab, click the button Customize Form.
Put your cursor at the bottom of the form where you want to put your buttons. From the list of Controls in the ribbon, add two buttons to the form.
On the Data tab, click the Submit Options button. Click the Advanced button.
Next to After submit, choose Open a new form. Click OK.
Double-click to select the first button, and in the ribbon, click Manage Rules.
In the Rules pane on the right, click the New button and choose Action.
In the Details for box, type Submit. Click the Add button and choose Submit Data. Select your data connection to submit to. This example is a SharePoint list, so it automatically has the one called “Main Data Connection”. Click OK.
Click Add again, and choose Close the form. Click OK.
In the Properties tab of the ribbon, label this button as SAVE.
Double-click to select the second button still labeled “Button”. Find the Action drop-down box in the ribbon. Change the action to Submit.
Change the button label to say Save & New.
Publish the form and close InfoPath.

Done! Now, if you want to make it look pretty and professional, use picture buttons instead of those old gray ones. I like to use PowerPoint to create buttons and make them PNG files.

ONE NEGATIVE to this solution:

If you’re using a SharePoint list form customized with InfoPath, you’ll still have the save button in the ribbon. That Save button will do the “save and new” functionality, and there is not a way to change this without messing up this solution. One option you have is to remove the ribbon altogether. Click File and click the Form Options button. On the Web Browser tab, uncheck the box next to Show InfoPath commands in Ribbon or toolbar. Unfortunately, when you do this, there won’t be an edit button there on the form either, and the only way people can get to the edit screen will be to use the drop-down box on that item when in the list view, or use the ribbon when in list view.

Technorati Tags: InfoPath,SharePoint,Office 365,buttons,Submit form

Category: Office 365 Grid; InfoPath

Published: 5/1/2013 1:04 PM

Back in the Office!

Laura Rogers — Wed, 01 May 2013 15:31:35 GMT

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Hi everyone! Hi SharePoint community! I kinda missed you. I just had a new baby (that makes three) in January. So, I’ve been out on maternity leave for the past three months. I haven’t been doing any SharePointing lately, but I’m excited about catching up and getting back into blogging!

As I go through all of the questions that you’ve asked here on my blog, it looks like my next couple of blog posts are going to be highlighting some questions with detailed step-by-step explanations. There are some answers I just can’t fit in that little comment box.

Published: 5/1/2013 10:31 AM

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Getting PerformancePoint up and running

Laura Rogers — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 21:54:00 GMT

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Thought I’d kick the tires on PerformancePoint in SharePoint 2013 today, and share with you the steps I had to take to make it usable.

In Central Administration, in the list of service applications, click on the PerformancePoint Service application. (assuming you already installed this service app)
Click PerformancePoint Service Application Settings – type your unattended service account, in my case on my VM it’s just “contoso\administrator”. Click OK.
Create a new site using the Business Intelligence Center template.
In Internet Explorer security settings, add your SharePoint URL to at least one of the following zones: Local, Intranet, or Trusted. (if it’s not already in there)
Click Site Contents on the left.
Click the name of the PerformancePoint content list.
Click NEW ITEM. This will bring up the Dashboard Designer, and you may be prompted to install it the first time, so click Run.
(There is also a PerformancePoint tab in the ribbon, which gives you additional buttons to export and import content)
In Dashboard Designer, click the File menu and click Designer Options.
Go to the Server tab. Type your SharePoint site URL, and this has to be a site that has the PerformancePoint features enabled. (PerformancePoint services site collection features, and PerformancePoint Services Site Features)
Click Connect, click OK.

NOW that you are all set up and connected to your SharePoint site, you can start creating data sources and other PerformancePoint content. In Dashboard Designer, you have to select the “Data Connections” folder on the left, and then use the Create tab at the top to create your data sources in there. In this screenshot, I want to report on data that lives in a SharePoint list.

Then, on the left, you have to click PerformancePoint Content, so that all the other stuff on the Create tab lights up.

Keep in mind that PerformancePoint is best used when your back end data is in a cube, such as SQL Server Analysis Services. When your data is just a flat table or list like a SharePoint list, the only thing you’ll be able to create in here is a Scorecard, KPI, Filter or Indicator.

Creating a “Dashboard” in here really just means that you’re creating a web part page and arranging all these other objects on the page. Once you create a dashboard and place objects on it, you can use the File menu and “Deploy” your dashboard to SharePoint.

Anyway, this post was really just to get you started so that you can try PerformancePoint out. There is much more reading about this in other places, such as:

Create dashboard pages by using Dashboard Designer (SharePoint Server 2013) on TechNet

Creating dashboards by using PerformancePoint Dashboard Designer on Office.com (for end users)

Introducing PerformancePoint Services 2013

2010 links that are still pretty good:

Video: Touring PerformancePoint Dashboard Designer

How to navigate PerformancePoint dashboards and explore data

Create a basic PerformancePoint dashboard

Up to Speed with PerformancePoint Dashboard Designer (with 6 videos!)

Technorati Tags: PerformancePoint,SharePoint 2013,BI

Category: BI

Published: 1/16/2013 3:53 PM

Per Location Views in SharePoint 2007

Laura Rogers — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 16:57:49 GMT

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In SharePoint, there is a little known capability, called “per location views”. This means that you can create views that are only accessible from certain locations. In this context, “location” refers to a folder in a document library. Even though we (in the SharePoint community) keep saying “don’t use folders, don’t use folders”, I’m going to show you how this works… you know, just in case you happen to have folders in some of your document libraries. I really want to call this post “Folder Magic”

This example is of a company who owns and manages many different buildings, like apartments, office buildings, etc. Each building is represented by a folder in a document library (“Buildings”), and each building folder contains a standard set of categories, with a set of documents pertaining to each category. The categories in each building folder are: Field notes, Contracts, Photos, Reports, Budget. So, a column called “Category” has been created in the library, with these values.

What’s the goal? The goal is for a grouped view of categories to only be available after you’ve drilled down into the folder for a single building. Here are the steps, and you’ll get a better picture once you see the screenshots:

In the “Buildings” document library, go to the document library settings, and click Advanced Settings. Change Allow management of content types to YES.
Once you’ve done step one, go ahead and create a new standard view in your list and take a look at something. You’ll notice that in the “Folders” section of the view, there’s now an additional option to “Show this view” and pick where to show the view. That’s the gist of this blog post.
That third option, to show the view “in folders of content type” by default only shows the one “Folder” content type. Next, we’ll be creating a new, custom content type to pick from. Go to Site Settings and Site Content Types.
Click Create. I’m calling this content type “Building Folder” because a new folder will be created each time there is a new building that this company manages. The parent content type is Folder Content Types, and Folder.
Next, I’m going to add a description field, so that each time a new folder is created, there can be a description associated with the folder. On the Site Content type screen for this new content type, under Columns, click Add from new site column. Call it “Folder Description”, as a Single Line of Text, and click OK.
Go back to the “Buildings” document library, and to the document library settings. In the Content Types section, click Add from existing site content types.
Add the “Building Folder” content type that was created at step 4.
Now, since we’re using this custom folder content type, we don’t need that default one. Go back into the document library’s advanced settings, and change “display new folder…” to NO. Click OK.
In the library, when I click the New drop-down box, I can now choose the “Building Folder” to create each folder:
You can then modify the All Documents view, to add the “Folder Description” column. I went ahead and renamed it “All Folders” and set it to display only the Type, Name, and Folder Description columns.
Create a new view. Call it “By Category”. Pick relevant columns, such as Name, Modified, Modified By, Checked Out To. In the Group By section, group it by the Category field mentioned at the beginning of this post. HERE’S THE MAGIC: In the Folders section, do this:

Setting up the view this way means that it will only show in the Views drop-down box when you’ve already drilled down into a building folder.
This is what your grouped by view will look like:
Another bonus regarding integration. Now, when I’m working on documents for one of these buildings while on the road, I can connect JUST THAT FOLDER to Outlook for work offline. Back at that top level in the library, click the drop-down box on a folder name:

This is very handy to be able to synchronize just one folder, instead of the whole library!
BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE! There is also the ability to control what options are available in the drop-down menu within each folder. Click the drop-down on a folder, see the screenshot above, and click Change New Button Order.
Check it out, you can simply UNCHECK the folder content type! This way, users don’t have the ability to create any more sub folders under this folder. Awesome. It’s a pet peeve of mine when you have to drill down through multiple levels of folders in libraries.
Also, you can set it up so that users can only create folders at the top level, and not documents. Go to the library’s settings page again. In the Content Types section, click Change new button order and content type. Uncheck all except the “Building Folder”. Click OK.

Think about it, you can even take this one step further. If each of these files for each building are pretty standard, you can create a content type for each type of file, so that they’re available on the NEW drop-down box. Then in scenarios (not this one) where you’d have files of each content type in each folder, you can select for ONLY that content type to be available in that folder. Have fun!

In SharePoint 2010, there is the concept of “Per Location Views” also, but the user interface is different, and the functionality is much improved. Jennifer Mason has blogged about it here: SharePoint 2010: Per Location View Settings

Technorati Tags: SharePoint,folders,views,content types

Category: Views

Published: 4/7/2010 11:57 AM

Web Part Connections – Improved in SharePoint 2010

Laura Rogers — Fri, 28 May 2010 03:42:35 GMT

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In SharePoint 2010, when you put a list view web part on a page, go to the web part tool pane, and switch the Selected View in the drop-down box, the following message pops up:

The part about disabling web part connections isn’t true anymore. Back in SharePoint 2007, when you created web part connections you had to make sure that the columns being filtered were actually displayed as columns. The connection configuration only let you choose from those visible columns. You can get around this by creating these lists as data view web parts in SharePoint 2007, which allows all columns to be available for filtering.

Anyway, in SharePoint 2010 this message isn’t valid anymore because ALL COLUMNS in the list are ALWAYS available when creating web part connections. So… don’t worry about it, and click OK. That’s all.

Technorati Tags: sharepoint 2010,sp2010,web parts,data view,web part connections

Category: Web Parts

Published: 5/27/2010 10:42 PM

See You All at the Big SharePoint Conference!

laura — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 20:45:54 GMT

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Hi everyone, this is an exciting week, getting ready for the big Microsoft SharePoint conference in Las Vegas next week (which will be even more exciting)! I think there are about 10,000 people registered!

There is so much going on, and some of the scheduling is just now falling into place, so here is my calendar of what I’ll be doing during the week at SPC. In general, I’ll be at the Rackspace booth (704) a lot, and at all of the evening events.

Also, here is the direct link to my calendar in SharePoint, so you can connect it to your Outlook, export events or whatever you’d like. I’ve written the Pacific time for each event in the location field.

Book Signing: Using Microsoft InfoPath 2010 with SharePoint 2010, Step by Step

Here is the full list of other Microsoft Press (O’Reilly) authors and their book signings at that booth.

Where: O’Reilly booth
When: Monday at 3:15 PM

Working in the Rackspace Booth

Where: Rackspace booth 704

When: Tuesday 1:45 to 3:00 PM

Book Signing:
Beginning SharePoint 2010, Building Business Solutions with SharePoint
AND
Using Microsoft InfoPath 2010 with SharePoint 2010, Step by Step

Where: Rackspace booth 704

When: Tuesday 4 to 5 PM

Understanding 2013 tools and best practices for creating enterprise forms in SharePoint 2013 - Darvish Shadravan session #SPC239

I’ll be up on stage at this session, handing out a bunch of swag and hanging out tweeting and stuff.

Where: Banyan ABCD

When: Wednesday 1:45 to 3

SharePoint Express session: Document Trafficking: Now safer than ever with External Users in SharePoint Online

Co-presenter is Jennifer Mason

Where: Expo Hall Pavilion in the center

When: Wednesday 6:45 to 7PM

SharePoint Express session: From Zero to SharePoint Hero: 5 Easy Steps for bringing Business Value to Collaboration Solutions

Co-presenter is Jennifer Mason

Where: Expo Hall Pavilion in the center

When: Wednesday 7:10 to 7:25

Category: Office 365 Grid; conference

Published: 11/6/2012 2:45 PM

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SharePoint Tuesday 10/16! Come visit me online!

laura — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 18:24:23 GMT

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Every first and third Tuesday, Rackspace hosts a FREE virtual question and answer session. Each of us on the SharePoint team have been taking turns. On October 16th, 2012, it’s time for John Ross and I to have a turn!

This will be from 2 to 3 Central time, and you can REGISTER HERE to attend.

This is going to be a great interactive session, and I’m really looking forward to seeing you all there! My areas of expertise are workflows, InfoPath, and data view web parts, but you probably already know that if you read my blog.

October 16th, 2-3 central, FREE

Technorati Tags: SharePoint,FREE,Rackspace,questions

Category: conference

Published: 9/12/2012 1:24 PM

Obtaining a List's Views

John Ross — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 22:28:21 GMT

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This is another post of a solution related to Microsoft's SharePoint Employee Training template, but this solution can be used on any list on your site. Here's the story...

We use this employee training template to set up various training series at work. For example, if there's some diversity training coming up, there will be a lot of different appointments for this training, and employees can pick a time that's convenient for them, and sign up for one of them. For each of these series, I've created a view in the Courses SharePoint calendar that filters by the name of that training course, and I've trained the other appointment creators to do the same each time they have a new series. This makes it easy for them to send out an email, announcing the new training. They put a link to the filtered view for that training, right in the email.

If users simply went to a list of all courses, they may be overwhelmed, because their are so many different and varying courses in the calendar. They only need to see the list of that one pertinent course at that time. The payroll department may have a training series on how to use the new financials system, and the HR department may have some courses on diversity, and the community relations department may have some related to upcoming charity events. So, VIEWS on the calendar allow users to see a list of the one type of training they're looking for, which usually has eight to 10 different date/times that you can pick from to attend.

Anyway, so that's pretty simple... views. Well, I wanted to take it a step further. I want the users to be able to go to the main event registration site, and immediately see a list of the types of training that they can register for, which is really just a list of the filtered views on the calendar. Guess what... there's a web service for that!! There's a built in web service called views.asmx, and we can tap into it.

First of all, here's my 5 minute screencast, that teaches you how to connect to a web service from within SharePoint Designer. In the screencast, I demonstrated how to connect to sitedata.asmx, and I also wrote a previous blog entry called "I Love the SiteData.asmx Web Service".

In the example today, though, we'll be connecting to the Views web service instead. In the Service Description Location box, put in the URL of your site, and at the end of it, put /_vti_bin/views.asmx
For example, here's what it would look like http://webapp/sites/sitenamehere/_vti_bin/views.asmx. Click to <Connect>

For Operation, choose "GetViewCollection".
Double-click on the ListName parameter, and type the name of your list. In this example, it's the Courses calendar.
On the Login tab, set it to Windows authentication. Click OK.
When you click the name of the new web service source and choose "Get Data", you will see the Data Source Details Pane.

As you will have already seen in my screencast, the data can then be placed on the page as a data view web part. The Field that I displayed in mine is the "DisplayName", and I used the "URL" field as the hyperlink. Once you have created this web part on a regular web part page, you can then export it out, and then import it onto any page in your site. For this example, I put this data view on the main welcome page of the events registration site.

End result? When the calendar owner adds a new series of events to the calendar, she has been instructed to create a view for that set of events, just using a filter by the title field in the view. Once they have created this view, it will automatically be displayed in the new web part on the event home page! Therefore, end users can now easily see the types of training available, and click to see the list for that particular type of training, and register for the time that is convenient for them.

Category: Web Parts

Published: 8/18/2009 7:26 AM

BlogTitleForUrl: obtaining-a-lists-views

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Free SharePoint 2013 Webinars!

laura — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 13:18:33 GMT

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Next week, starting on 8/27, we will be doing free SharePoint 2013 webcasts all week, ten in all!

Mine is going to be all about the social networking features for the enterprise, and yes they will all be recorded.

UPDATE 9/12: HERE IS THE LINK TO THE RECORDING

SharePoint 2013: A More Social Enterprise with Laura Rogers, Monday, Aug. 27 at 2 p.m.
In SharePoint 2013, it is more natural than ever to get the enterprise involved socially with SharePoint. In this 30-minute session, Laura Rogers will give you a glimpse of several of the new and the improved features of SharePoint…socially. We will take a look at community portals and sites, with the improved discussion boards, tagging, activity feeds and the ability to follow content and people. The new My Site will also be demonstrated, along with all of the different and new functionality, such as the rollup of a user’s tasks from anywhere in SharePoint. Laura will not only demonstrate these features, but show an example of a day in the life of an information worker, and how natural it will be to make social participation a part of their daily activities.
Register: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/363330569

ALL WEBINARS

CLICK HERE to read about (and sign up for) all of the other nine webinars done by my awesome co-workers.

CMS Wire

Also, speaking of social stuff, check out the article that I wrote this week for CMS wire:

SharePoint 2013: Improved Social Networking and Workflows

Technorati Tags: SharePoint,social,webinars,SP2013

Category: conference

Published: 8/24/2012 8:51 AM

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9 Minute Video: SharePoint 2013 Workflow

laura — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 18:46:03 GMT

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Last week I recorded a new video all about the task process designer in the new SharePoint 2013 (preview) workflows. This 9 minute video also demonstrates a bit of how to get around in the interface, and the new Visual Designer.

Technorati Tags: SharePoint,SharePoint Designer,workflows,visual designer

Category: workflows

Published: 9/10/2012 1:46 PM

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SharePoint 2013 Web Part: Content Search

laura — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 20:00:51 GMT

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**NEW VIDEO to go with this post

The new content search web part in the SharePoint 2013 preview (enterprise) is just awesome, awesome, awesome.

Remember quite a while back when I wrote a post about how to utilize the search results web part to show the logged in user a list of sites that they have access to? Well now in this new SharePoint, this web part is used all over the place, and you can also insert it anywhere you want. For example, when you are on your My Site and you see a list of all of the tasks assigned to you, THAT is this web part rolling up that content from all over the farm. Also, on the Community Portal (site collection template), you see a list of all community sites rolled up in one list. THAT is also this web part. There are many other examples, but let me go ahead and show you the coolness:

When I click the Change Query button, it brings up this interface with TONS of options, and as you change options your live results show in the search results preview on the right:

Basics

You can select from Documents, content types, tags, videos and more, and then pick the scope, such as a certain site or site collection, or unrestricted (whole farm).

Refiners

There a many refiners (filters) you can choose from. In this case, SharePoint recognizes that I created a column called “Department” in a document library, so it shows as a refiner. There are dates, file types, creator, editor, content types, size, and more.

Settings

On the settings tab, you can even change the performance of your web part on the page! Wow, this is much better than that old content query web part which could be a real hog.

Test

The test tab shows you the actual query text that is used behind the scenes to create that query.

After I click OK at the bottom of this query page, there are still more settings available in the web part properties.

Number of Items to show

You can set up the default number of items to show in the web part. The default is 3.

Display Templates

The control drop-down box lets you choose from list, list with paging, and slideshow.

The Item drop-down box has selections such as “picture on left”, 2 lines, large picture.

Property Mappings

Depending on what you select in the Item drop-down box, you have different choices in the Property mappings.

Since I chose two lines, I get to customize what those 2 lines are if I want to. Right now, line 2 is empty, but I can pick another property to display on that second line, like the last modified by person, or a description or something.

Settings

The Result Table drop-down lets you pick from Relevant Results, Personal Favorite Results, Refinement Results, and Special Term results.

In summary:

Remember that for search results to be accurate, you have to actually have your search crawls / indexing set up and on a schedule. If your search only indexes the content once a day, then the results in this web part could be a day old. If you set up your index say, every 20 minutes, you’re going to have much more accurate and current results displayed.

Technorati Tags: SharePoint,SharePoint 2013,web parts,search

Category: Web Parts

Published: 7/17/2012 3:30 PM

SharePoint 2010 Related Lists (Part 4 of 4)

Laura Rogers — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 21:36:06 GMT

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Yes, the title of this post is a little confusing, especially if you read the other 3 part, but let me explain. The first three parts of this series were all about the Query String URL Filter, and how to create mashups that display multiple related lists on one page. Lists have a lot more relational capabilities now, which is seen everywhere from lookup columns to workflows. So, since we’re talking about mashups and related lists, I thought I’d show you the Related Lists button in SharePoint 2010, which lets you quickly throw a few web parts on a page, and automatically connects them. So, another title for this blog could be “how to do the stuff from the other 3 posts… in SharePoint 2010”

In this example in SharePoint 2010, there is a main projects list with several lists with related items that lookup to the projects list. Let’s create some simple ones quickly, just to try it out.

Custom list on the site called Projects. To try it out, all you need is a Title field.
Create a new Issues list on the site. Create a new required lookup column in the list, called ProjectID, and make it look up to the Project’s Title field.
Create a new Project Tasks list, and also add a required ProjectID field that looks up to the Project list’s Title field.
Create a few items in each list, with some tasks and some issues associated with each project name.
Go back to the Projects list. Click to create a new view, name it Mashup.
On the new view, click Site Actions and choose Edit Page.
CHECK IT OUT!!! There’s a button in here to Insert Related List!!!
Click the Insert Related List button, and the drop-down will show the Project Tasks list and the Issues list. Insert each one on the page.
On the Page tab in the ribbon, click Stop Editing. This is what the page looks like now:

DONE. WOW, it’s going to be so easy now for end users to be able to create their own related list views, without even having to know how to create the web part connections!

How did it work? Since the Issues and Project Task lists contained Lookup columns to the Project list, SharePoint automatically knew to consider them “related lists”. If a list has no other lists that look up TO IT, then the related lists button will be grayed out.

One more thing… yes, the Related Lists button does exist in SharePoint Designer 2010 also, and not just in the browser.

Here are the previous parts in this series:

Technorati Tags: SharePoint 2010,web parts,web part connections,related lists,projects,SharePoint Designer

Category: Web Parts

Published: 6/25/2010 4:36 PM

Attachments: http://www.wonderlaura.com/Lists/Posts/Attachments/74/image_3_2157634F.png
http://www.wonderlaura.com/Lists/Posts/Attachments/74/image_4a6dbdbe51424622a5b76b09af66f6b7_2157634F.png
http://www.wonderlaura.com/Lists/Posts/Attachments/74/image_thumb_2157634F.png

The Query String URL & Data View Web Parts (Part 3 of 4)

Laura Rogers — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 23:34:20 GMT

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In the last two posts of this series, I showed you how to use the MOSS Enterprise out of box web part called the Query String (URL) Filter. This post will show you how to accomplish the same thing, but without MOSS. This entails using the data view web part. I’ll use the same example of a project details page. The query string will be used to pass the project ID to each of the data view web parts on a page.

Even if you DO have MOSS, another good reason to use data view web parts for mash-ups, is that redundant column that you’re connecting to. You know how when you’re creating web part connections, the only columns available for the connection are the ones that are being displayed in the web part? When data view web parts are used, ALL list fields are available in the connection, not just the displayed ones!

Here’s how to configure each web part in SharePoint Designer, to use a Query String:

Create a blank web part page, and open it in SharePoint Designer. Insert a data view web part, we’ll just start with the issues list. Again, this is using the same project details example, so please read my last post about it.
In the Data View menu in the toolbar, click Parameters.
There will already be one parameter. Add a new Query String parameter, called “ProjParam”, like this:
In the Data View menu in the toolbar, click Filter.
Create a filter where the ProjID field is equal to the new parameter [ProjParam]:
Save the page. Make sure there are a couple of items in the list, each with a ProjID associated with them. Open the web part page in the browser and test the query string.

The trick is that now you use the URL in order to pass the project number to this web part. This is supposed to be a project mash-up, so add all of the associated lists to the page as data view web parts, and repeat steps two through five on each one.

The URL to the page will now end with the page name.aspx?Project=2

That red number is unique to each project. In my previous post, I showed how to create the workflow that generates that project details URL for each new project. This screenshot shows that this list is automatically filtered by issues that have a ProjID field equal to one, because of the URL.

In summary, here’s a brief comparison:

Query String (URL) Filter Web Part

Out of box web part
No SharePoint Designer needed
MOSS Enterprise version needed

Data View Web Part With Query String

SharePoint Designer data view web part creation needed
More complex setup
Can be done in just WSS, without MOSS

Note that you can still create all data view web parts, and still use the Query String URL Filter Web Part. This combination method will let you get rid of all of the redundant columns, in this case the ProjID… with the ease of use of the out of box query string URL filter web part.

Here are the other parts in this series:

Technorati Tags: SharePoint Designer,MOSS,Web Parts,data view web parts,Query string url

Category: Web Parts

Published: 6/12/2010 6:34 PM

Attachments: http://www.wonderlaura.com/Lists/Posts/Attachments/73/ch710_470E3B9A.png
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Query String URLs are Magical (Part 2 of 4)

Laura Rogers — Sat, 22 May 2010 18:39:35 GMT

Body:

In my last post, I showed you what query string URLs are, and a simple example of what can be done with the MOSS Enterprise Query String URL Filter Web Part. In this post, I’ll get more into a really cool example of what can be accomplished with query strings, and taking it to the next level.

In this example, we have a site with

Project List
Tasks
Issues
Change History
Status Reports

The point is that all of these lists have something in common… the project. The main project list can have multiple items associated with it, from each of the other lists. We want to display all of these items on the same page in SharePoint. So, we create a “Project ID” field, which will be used as the common thread. We’ll start with the built in ID field in the main project list, and in each of the other lists, create a number field called “ProjID”.

I usually use workflows heavily in a solution like this, but this post isn’t really about that part. For now, I just want to show you how to create the “Project Details” page that shows all of the associated info for any given project, in which all associated lists have one common field.

Create a blank web part page, which will be used as the project details page. Use the method that I showed here, create a blank ASPX page called ProjectDetails.aspx, and save it somewhere like the root of the site.
A workflow step needs to be created on the main project list, so that each time a new project is created, a special URL is created for that project, for the details page. So first, in the main project list, create a new hyperlink field, and call it Detail Link.
Open the site in SharePoint Designer. Create a new workflow, and associate it with the main Project list, so that it runs when a new item is created.
The workflow has no conditions. For the first action, choose Build Dynamic String. Click the blue words “dynamic string”. Type in the URL to the new ProjectDetails.aspx page that you created at step one (this can be a relative URL, if you’d like). At the end of the aspx, type ?Project=

Then click the Add Lookup button, and choose the ID field from the current list. At the end, it’s important to put the comma space “Project Details”, exactly like in the screenshot above.

So, WHY are we doing all this? What does it mean? Well, this is the bread and butter of how your query string URL works. In my previous post, I explained query strings. We’re going to create a “query” called Project, and we’re going to use the ID as the unique identifier for the project. This is going to be the same number that is tied back to all those other lists related to this project, that will exist as the ProjID. The word “Project” above in the URL.. we’re just making it up for now (it doesn’t come from anywhere else at this point, and isn’t yet related to any fields or anything we’ve done so far). The reason for the comma space and Project Details, is that this is how you form the hyperlink, so that Project Details will be the actual words that users click on to get to that detail page.
Name this variable ProjDetailURL (instead of the default word “variable”)
The next action of the workflow is Set Field in Current Item. Click the blue word “field”, and select the Detail Link field that you created at step two.
In the blue “value” box, click the little function button, and select Workflow Data as the source, and pick the ProjDetailURL variable that you created at step five.
Click Finish to complete the workflow.
In the browser, go to the ProjectDetails.aspx page, so you can start populating it with web parts. In Edit Mode, click to add a web part, and add all of the associated lists, which in this example would be all of those bullet points at the beginning.
Also add the Query String URL Filter web part to the top of the page.
Edit the views of each of the list web parts on the page, and add the ProjID field to the current view for each.
Go to the web part properties of the Query String URL filter web part. For the Query String Parameter Name, type “Project”, like this screenshot below. This word “Project” ties back to step four. Use the same word here that you used there. Click OK in the web part tool pane.
Time to create all of the web part connections from the Query String URL, to each of the other web parts on the page. We’ll start with the Project List.
With the page in edit mode, click the Edit button at the top right corner of the Query String (URL) Filter Web Part.
Click Connections –> Send Filter Values To –> Project List. Choose the ID field, and click Finish.
On the Query String filter web part again, click Connections –> Send Filter Values To –> Tasks. Choose ProjID as the consumer field name, and click Finish. (This is why we did step eleven. If the field is not showing in the view, you can’t create a connection to it.
Repeat step fifteen, creating connections from the Query String URL filter web part to every single other web part on the page. After all the connections have been created, the web part will look like this:
Then Exit Edit Mode. All done!

Time to try it out. Put a query string in the URL, and you’ll see that it will automatically filter all the web parts by that one project ID. Notice the browser URL, the fact that the Query String URL filter web part is hidden, and that all of the web parts show the filter symbol in the appropriate column. Click the picture below to zoom in.

To finish it out, try creating a new Project in the main project list, the one we associated the workflow with in step three. Check out the resulting URL that the workflow creates, and you’ll see that it takes you to the project details page for that project.

Yes, I agree that displaying the ProjID on all of those web parts is quite redundant. You can make any or all of those web parts as Data View Web Parts, and you don’t have to display the ProjID as a column. It will then let you create connections to the web parts using any fields in the list, not just displayed ones.

Obviously this is not a complete solution, but a piece of a puzzle. The rest of the solution would entail workflows that automatically create tasks at certain phases of the project, and form pages that let you click to create a new issue or status report for that project. Maybe this series of blog posts will be more than four parts. ;-)

Here's my associated screencast:
MOSS Enterprise – Query String URL Filter Web Parts – Ramping It Up (Screencast)

Here are the other parts to this series:

Technorati Tags: query string url,sharepoint,web parts

Category: Web Parts

Published: 5/22/2010 1:39 PM

Query String URLs are like, SO Useful! (Part 1 of 4)

Laura Rogers — Thu, 20 May 2010 10:54:55 GMT

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In this blog post, I’ll not only explain what Query String URL Filter web parts are, but what the whole concept is behind query strings, and some ways to make use of them in SharePoint. First of all, what is a query string? Basically, it’s a part of a URL that contains a filter, to send filter information to the page that you’re viewing. These are used all over the place on the web, not just in SharePoint. The basic syntax consists of a question mark followed by a word, and the “equals” something. So, if you are looking at a web page that consists of information pertaining to the marketing department, your URL could end with this query string:

?Department=Marketing

In SharePoint, if you have MOSS Enterprise, there’s an out-of-box web part called the Query String URL Filter. But, as I will show you later, you can still do query string filtering if you don’t have MOSS Enterprise.

So begins the love story between me and query strings…

The first time I used them was when I created a policy management system in SharePoint. Picture this, a library of policies, with a Department column in the library, and each policy was associated with a department name. To create a list of policies for each department, you could create multiple views on the library, with each view just being filtered by the Department column being equal to ___ (each department name). Well, I didn’t want to do this, because I didn’t want to have to go back and modify 30 different views if the business owner decided that a column needed to be added or something. So, instead, I did this:

Go to the default view URL:
http://contoso/policies/PolicyList/Forms/AllItems.aspx
Click Site Actions and Edit Page.
Insert the Query String URL Filter web part on this AllItems.aspx page, above the document library.
Go into the filter web part’s properties, shown in this screenshot.
In the Query String Parameter Name, put a word that describes the field you’ll be filtering by. The Filter Name can optionally be changed, but it doesn’t really matter.
Click OK in the web part tool pane.
Connect the Query String URL Filter web part to the list or library web part that you’d like to filter. In this case, it’s a list of company policies, in which I’m going to create a filter for policies related to each department name. At the top right corner of the filter web part, click the Edit button and choose Connections –> Send Filter Values To –> and choose the name of the library, in this case it is the Policy List, as shown in this screenshot:
On the Configure Connection screen, pick the Consumer field. The consumer web part is the one you’re sending the filter to. The Policy List here. I’m filtering by the Policy Department, so that’s what I pick in the drop-down box.

Note that whatever field you filter by needs to be displayed as a column in the web part in order for it to be listed in the drop-down box on this screen. If you’d like to filter by a column and NOT display it in the web part, that consumer web part needs to be a data view web part.
Click Finish and Exit Edit Mode.
Manually create a link to each department’s list of policies. Put these in a links list or in the Quick Launch or wherever. Here’s an example of what the filtered list of IT policies looks like:

Notice a couple of things. See that the Policy Department field shows that little filter icon, and it shows only the IT policies. Also notice the URL. It is:

http://moss:16071/policies/PolicyList/Forms/AllItems.aspx?department=it

Note: If you insert this web part on your default view, just remember that when new views are created, they will be based on this default view (by default) and they will also include this extra web part, which you may need to remove from new views.

I’ve demonstrated a very basic way that the Query String URL filter can be used. Once you understand the basic functionality, there are many more things you can do with it. Part 2 of this 4 part series will cover a more advanced, elaborate solution.

Technorati Tags: SharePoint,web parts

Category: Web Parts

Published: 5/20/2010 5:54 AM

InfoPath 2010: Pre-populate the People Picker

laura — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 03:01:59 GMT

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In business forms, a common requirement is to pre-populate a people picker control, such as to default to the name of the currently logged in user, which would then allow them to pick someone else if needed. For example, a secretary could fill out a travel request for her boss, and in the “Traveler” people picker, she could pick his name instead of her own.

This solution can be done with any version of SharePoint 2010 or SharePoint Online with Office 365.

If you have Foundation, use my method in this other post in order to get the current user information, instead of the user profile service data connection: http://www.wonderlaura.com/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=172

Here’s a little bit of background on how the people picker is structured:

It is structured as a repeating table, and the “group” can be renamed. No other fields can be renamed

• DisplayName = Laura Rogers
This is the first name and last name of the user, which is going to be equivalent to the value of the PreferredName field in the user profile service.

• AccountId = contoso\laura
This is domain\username

• AccountType = User
This is User or Group.

Here are the steps to prepopulate the people picker:

On the Data tab, click Data Connections. Click Add..
Choose Receive data and click Next. Choose SOAP web service, and click Next.
Type the URL of your site, and after the site, type /_vti_bin/userprofileservice.asmx
Click Next.
Choose GetUserProfileByName. Click Next. Click Next. Click Next. Click Finish.
All we’ve done so far is create a connection to the user profile service web service, so that we can get some additional information about the logged in user. Since we only want the people picker to get pre-populated when it’s a new form, we’re going to create a form load rule that does this.
If you haven’t already placed a people picker control on your InfoPath 2010 form, go ahead and do that.
On the Data tab, click Form Load.
In the form load rule pane on the right, click New and choose Action.
We only want this to happen if there’s no name in the people picker yet, so we’ll create a condition first. Under the word “Condition”, click the blue word None – …
Creating the condition: In the first drop-down box (myFields), click Select a Field or Group. Navigate down to your people picker control group and expand it. Select the AccountId and click OK.
On the condition’s second drop-down, choose Is Blank. Click OK.
Back in the form load rule pane, click Add and choose Set a Field’s Value.
For the Field box, select the DisplayName field inside your people picker form (that DisplayName field you see in the screenshot at step 9). Click OK.
Click the fx (function) button next to the Value box. Click Insert Field or Group… In the Fields drop-down box, choose GetUserProfileByName.
Drill all the way in the DataFields until you get to Value.
Click the Filter Data button. Click the Add button.
In the first drop-down box that says Value, choose Select a field or group. Select the Name field. Click OK.
Leave the middle drop-down to say Is equal to. In the third drop-down box, choose Type text. Type the word PreferredName
It will automatically put the quotes around it for you, you don’t need to type those. (this is case sensitive, so you have to type it exactly right) Click OK.
On the Filter Data screen, click OK. On the select a field or group screen, click OK. On the insert formula screen, click OK.
This is what your Rule Detail screen will look like. Click OK.
Back over in the form load rule pane on the right, click the Add button again, and choose Set a field’s value.
For the Field, drill down to your form’s people picker, and select the AccountId field, as seen in step 9. Click OK.
Repeat steps 13-16.
Leave the middle drop-down to say Is equal to. In the third drop-down box, choose Type text. Type the word AccountName
Click OK.
This is what your Rule Detail screen will look like. Click OK.
In the Rule pane on the right, click the Add button yet again. Choose set a field’s value.
For the Field, pick the AccountType field within your people picker. You can see what this field looks like back in step 9. Click OK.
In the Value box, just type the word User
This is what your Rule Details screen will look like. Click OK.
Done. Publish your form and try it out. When you fill out a new form, your own name will be populated in the people picker.

If you need to do this solution in SharePoint 2007, follow Lori Gowin’s 2 part blog series that starts here.

Technorati Tags: SharePoint,InfoPath,User Profiles,web services,Office 365

Category: Office 365 Grid; InfoPath

Published: 6/27/2012 10:30 PM

Report Viewer: Create a Hyperlink to SharePoint

laura — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 21:18:31 GMT

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If you’re not aware yet, the upcoming version of SharePoint (2013) does not include a design view in SharePoint Designer anymore, which means no more no-code data view web parts.

SSRS reports are a great replacement for the data view web part in many cases. In this post, I’ll show you how to create a conditionally formatted list of tasks using Report Builder 3.0, and link each task back to that SharePoint list item. This will be displayed in the report viewer web part on the homepage. Also note that you can create reports on one site that show data that’s in another site!

For a little background on what SSRS is and some basic steps on creating reports in Report Builder 3.0, refer to my blog post: Easy Reporting off of SharePoint Data, which also includes a video presentation and PowerPoint.

So, once you’ve gotten to the point where you’ve got your report created as a table, from your list of SharePoint tasks, here are the steps to create some conditional formatting and add that hyperlink. My table is a task list, and I’m showing the Title, Priority, Assigned To, Due Date, and Task Status.

My first goal is to show the priority as red and bold if it’s high priority. Remember that in task lists, the value for high priority is (1) High. Right click on the Priority cell (the white one, not the table header). Choose Text Box Properties.
Click Font on the left side, and this is what you’ll see. Notice that each option has a little function button next to it. This function button is what can be used in order to create conditions. Also, if you click around the other areas such as border and fill, you’ll notice many other options for formatting.
Click the Function (fx) button next to the Color box.
Clear out what’s already in the expression box. We’re going to create an IF statement, which is a similar concept to what you’ve seen in SharePoint calculated columns, in Excel, and in Access.
For those of you who are advanced, here is the end result expression:
=IIf(Fields!Priority.Value = "(1) High","Red","Black")
To go though the actual steps of creating the function, continue…
You can find the IIF statement (and syntax) in the Program Flow group under Common Functions.
Click on Fields (Project Tasks is the name of my SharePoint list). Double click on Priority.
Just type the text in, for the value = (1) High, and then click the Constants category on the left.
Then, since we want high to be red, click the red color on the right, which will put the word “Red” in the formula. Otherwise, if it’s not red, we just want it to be black. Here’s the full syntax:
Click OK, click OK. Then, in Report Builder, click the Run button to preview it.
Click the Design button at the top. The next thing we’ll do is make the status field have a yellow background if it’s not completed yet. Right click on the Status cell (not the column heading), and choose Text box properties.
Click Fill on the left. If we wanted to show an actual image according to different conditions, this is where we would do it, but we’re just going to do the color. Click the Function (fx) button next to the Fill Color box.
Clear out the expression box and put in the following:
=IIf(Fields!Task_Status.Value <> "Completed","Yellow","Transparent")
Basically, if the task status is not equal to <> the word completed, then it’s yellow, otherwise, it’s transparent (no color). Click OK, click OK. Run.
Okay, now what good is a list of important tasks, if you don’t have a way to actually open them up? Time to make the title into a hyperlink. Back in Design view, right click on the Title field (the white, not the green header), and choose Text Box Properties.
Click Action on the left, and choose Go to URL.
Click the Function (fx) button next to the Select URL box. You’ll need to know the URL to get to the display form for a specific task. Mine is:
http://team.contoso.com/Lists/ProjectTasks/dispform.aspx?ID=__
(to read more about how hyperlinks are structured in SharePoint, read my post here)
The __ at the end is what needs to display the ID of whatever item I click on.
It’s not as easy as just concatenating together your URL and your item’s ID. There’s a bug. If you just do that, then your query string (ID) will end up showing twice at the end of the url when using this report in the report viewer web part, which will not allow your item to open property. You have do to this extra funkiness with JavaScript.
="javascript:window.navigate('http://team.contoso.com/Lists/ProjectTasks/dispform.aspx?ID=" & Fields!ID.value & "');"
Click OK, click OK. Notice that your title still doesn’t look like a hyperlink. Well, it is, but it’s not going to be obvious to anyone.
With your Title cell still selected, just click the little underline button in the ribbon, just like you would in MS Word. Then, use the font color next to it, to change the font to blue. Click Run. Click Save, save it to your library where you keep reports, and close Report Builder.
Go to your site’s home page, or any other page, really, in the browser, and Edit Page. Click to add/insert a web part. In the SQL Server Reporting category, insert the SQL Server Reporting Services Report Viewer.
Open the web part toolpane. In the Report box, navigate to your report in the library you just saved it in. Click OK. Stop editing the page and/or save it.

This is what the final result looks like in the browser:

Note that there are many more options in the web part settings, which allow you to control what shows on the toolbar, etc. You can also change the setting that determines what window that links will come up in, so you can use _blank if you want the task to open up in a new window. This is even pretty, printable, and exportable.

Technorati Tags: SharePoint,SSRS,SQL Server Reporting Services,conditional formatting,web parts

Category: SSRS; Web Parts

Published: 8/2/2012 4:49 PM

SharePoint 2013 Social: Community Sites

laura — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 03:00:20 GMT

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A community site is a new site template that is available in SharePoint 2013, and it is also available as a feature that you can enable, called the Community Site Feature. This type of site is truly like a forum. Remember the old discussion boards in previous versions of SharePoint? This is a dramatically improved discussion board! The idea is that, just like any interactive forum, you have concepts like “Likes”, ratings, badges and reputation scores. Top contributors are rewarded with higher points, which equate to badges.

Here is some information about the features you can look forward to on your community sites:

Discussions (Conversations)

You can start a new conversation, similar to the way you did it in old SharePoint versions (with a subject and body), but you have an extra check box to indicate whether your conversation is a question or not. Pick a category also.
Site admins can also mark any conversation as “featured”, which puts it at the top of the list in that category, indicating that it is featured.

Replies

Reply to any conversation, by clicking the Reply button.
Site admins can mark a reply as “Best Reply”, which will then be listed directly under the question, indicating that it’s the best reply. Also, when you’re looking at the list of all conversations, the ones that have a best reply will say so.
Notice several things in this screenshot. Todd started a conversation. A couple of people “Like” it, and the reply by me was marked as the best reply. Also notice the little blue bars next to our pictures. Those are our points / reputation.

Likes and Ratings

You can click the “Like” button next to any conversation and/or any of the replies
There is a setting where site admins can choose whether to use the “Like / Unlike” or a rating scale 1 to 5.

Your Reputation

Your reputation score is affected by the member achievements point system, which can be set up by the site admin on each community site. This score does not carry across to multiple community sites.
Assign a certain number of points for creating a new post, replying to a post, get likes or 4-5 star ratings on your posts, and points for getting marked as the best reply to a post.

Community Members

The members screen shows the top contributors by default, and can be switched to the “new members” or to the
A-Z view.
See your own reputation score on the right.

Community Portal Site

There is a site collection template that you can use called a “Community Portal Site”.
A community portal site is not meant for having each community site as a sub-site.
Instead, the community portal site, AUTOMATICALLY shows a roll-up of all community sites in the environment, in other site collections and web apps.

Technorati Tags: SharePoint 2013,social,communities

Category: MS Office

Published: 7/16/2012 10:30 PM

SPTechCon Boston 2012 in July!

laura — Thu, 31 May 2012 17:37:28 GMT

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The upcoming SharePoint Technology conference is July 22-25 in Boston, and I’m very excited because I’ll be doing three brand new sessions this time! Jennifer Mason and I will be doing the full day workshop which we’ve presented before, but all of my other sessions will be new.

You can register with the code ROGERS to receive $200 off of your cost!

First, here's a LINK TO MY CALENDAR.

Here’s the breakdown:

Using Report Builder for List Views and Charting

With SharePoint lists and libraries, views are used as different ways of looking at the data. Sometimes the out of box view settings are not sufficient for what needs to be accomplished, when it comes to how the information appears on the page. In many cases, SharePoint Designer is used in order to customize those views or create data view Web parts. When SQL Server Reporting services (SQL 2008 R2) is installed on your server, it opens up a whole new way of creating list views, which is Report Builder 3.0.
In this session, you will learn an entirely different approach to list views. You will learn how quick and easy it is to create pretty and professional reports based on SharePoint list data, and even cross-site data. Reports, charts, and even maps can be created and displayed in a Web part on any SharePoint page. Not only are these reports printable and exportable, but they can be put together on your site to create your own dashboards.

Level : Intermediate
Topic Areas : Architecture Essentials, Business User Essentials

Creating a Forms Portal

Does your organization currently have or plan to have multiple InfoPath forms that will be filled out by end users? Create a single portal for your organization’s forms, so that hunting around for forms is not necessary. In this session, you will learn how to create a forms portal in SharePoint or SharePoint Online with Office 365.
Form best practices and considerations will be covered, such as the use of site columns and content types. There is also standardization that can be done across multiple forms, such as the use of universal data connections and form templates and template parts. You will also learn how to create a user interface that is easy to navigate. Form administration dashboards will be created, so that the business users who are in charge of each form will have a location where their forms are available to them.
Also attend the class InfoPath and SharePoint Designer 2010 Workflow Best Practices for the InfoPath deep dive. In conjunction, the two classes take you through form development and the full user interface creation.

Level : Intermediate
Topic Areas : Architecture Essentials, Business User Essentials

InfoPath and SharePoint Designer 2010 Workflows Together

(I’ll be presenting this session twice since it’s so popular)

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. The more complicated part is
finding out what needs to happen when it gets submitted, and automating that process. This is where workflows come in. InfoPath forms and SharePoint Designer workflows can be used in conjunction to create a complete business process.
In this session, we 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, making the most out of the InfoPath and SharePoint Designer out-of-box functionalities. Also attend the class Creating a Forms Portal. In conjunction, the two classes take you through form development and the full user interface creation.
on.

Level : Advanced
Topic Areas : Architecture Essentials, Business User Essentials

FULL DAY WORKSHOP

Building Business Solutions: InfoPath & Workflows

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
Topic Areas : Line of Business Essentials

Book Signings – NEW!

Beginning SharePoint 2010: Building Business Solutions with SharePoint
When: Tuesday, July 24th, 11:30 AM
Where: Rackspace booth
Using Microsoft InfoPath 2010 with Microsoft SharePoint 2010: Step by Step
When: Tuesday, July 24th, 3:00 PM
Where: Rackspace booth
SharePoint 2010 at Work
When: Tuesday, July 24th, 5:15 PM
Where: O’Reilly booth
Using Microsoft InfoPath 2010 with Microsoft SharePoint 2010: Step by Step
When: Wednesday, July 25th, 11:00 AM
Where: O’Reilly booth

Technorati Tags: SharePoint,InfoPath,SPTechCon,Workflows,conference,SSRS,SQL Server Reporting Services

Category: conference

Published: 5/31/2012 12:37 PM

InfoPath– Getting the “Signature”

laura — Thu, 12 Jul 2012 22:24:52 GMT

Body:

You can add real digital certificates to your InfoPath forms, but there are a few problems with them:

They are not compatible with browser-based forms
They don’t collect any real data that you can do anything with.

So, for most clients I work with, they don’t need to have “real” certificates involved, and simply need to capture a person’s name and the date that they are signing a form.

Here’s my solution, which I use some variation of in every single form I create:

In your InfoPath form, in the Fields on the right, right click on myFields and choose Add…
For the Name, type SignatureGroup. For Type, select Group. Click OK.
Right-click on SignatureGroup, and click Add…
For the Name, type SignatureCheck. Click OK.
Just like in steps 3/4, create another field called SignatureName
Right-click on SignatureGroup one more time, and click Add…
Name this one SignatureDate, and for data type, select Date. If you need date and time, you can choose DateTime. Click OK.
You can right click on any field on the right, and pick what type of control it needs to be. Insert SignatureCheck as a check box, and insert SignatureName and SignatureDate as calculated values. Type “I agree” next to the check box. You can add any kind of extra verbiage that you need, such as “by signing this form, I agree to this… blah blah” Your company’s lawyers can probably provide you with that part.

(Note: inserting those fields as calculated values is pretty much the same as inserting them as text boxes and then setting them to read only. The point is that we don’t want people to be able to edit it.)
Click to select the check box. Open the check box properties. Notice that by default, the value when cleared is no, and value when checked is yes. These are important to remember, even the proper capitalization (all lowercase). Close the properties, and open the rules pane on the right.
With the check box still selected, Click the New button in the rules pane. Choose Action.
In the Details for box, type checked. The condition needs to be that SignatureCheck is equal to yes. Click OK.
Next to Run these actions, click the Add button. Choose Set a field’s value.
For the Field, choose SignatureName, and for the value, click the Function button and use the expression userName() Click OK.
Click the Add button again, and this time the field is SignatureDate, and the function is today()
(If you used DateTime at step 7, you need to use the now() function instead)
Next, we can add another rule, so that if the box is UNchecked, it clears the values out. Select the “checked” rule, and click the little Copy icon at the top of the rule pane. Click the Paste icon.
Call this next rule “Uncheck”, and change the condition so that SignatureCheck is not equal to yes.
Click the first action, and just delete the function out of the Value box so it’s blank. Do the same for the other action, so that we’re basically clearing out both SignatureName and SignatureDate so they’re blank.
Now test this out by clicking the Preview icon at the top. Obviously you can make this prettier, but that part is up to you and your creativity.
One more thing, is that you can disable the submit button if they do not check the box. Click to select your Submit button. Click the New button in the rules pane, and choose Formatting.
Call this rule “disabled”. The condition is if SignatureCheck is not equal to yes. Click OK.
Still in the rule pane, check the Disable this control box at the bottom of your new rule.

All done. Now, if you don’t “sign” the document, you can’t submit it. One thing to watch out for is the default submit button in the toolbar in InfoPath. If you have this enabled, then people will be able to submit your form whether they signed it or not. You can click the Data tab at the top, click Submit Options, and UNcheck the box for allow users to submit this form. Now there will be no submit button in the toolbar. You can also go to form options and remove the toolbar altogether if you want.

You’ll notice that when it captures your signature, it only gets your NT login name. If you want to get all fancy and show a First Name, Last Name (which isn’t unique like the username), you could use the user profile service for that. You can take a look at a recent post of mine to see how to obtain that information.

Technorati Tags: SharePoint,InfoPath,signature,rules,submit form

Category: Office 365 Grid; InfoPath

Published: 7/12/2012 5:54 PM

SharePoint Permissions Video Series

laura — Thu, 12 Jul 2012 16:22:14 GMT

Body:

Jennifer Mason and I created a series of videos for beginners, to explain permissions in SharePoint. Now that the series is complete, here are all of the links to our posts.

Understanding Permissions in Office 365: The Basics – by Jennifer

Video 1: An Overview Of Permissions
Video 2: Creating New Users And Granting Them Access
Video 3: Introduction To The Pages used To Manage Permissions

SharePoint Permissions: A More Detailed Look – by Me

Video 1: Create a new permission level in SharePoint Online
Video 2: Selective Permission Granting
Video 3: Office 365 Security Groups versus SharePoint Groups

Understanding Permissions In Office 365: Inheritance And Limited Access – by Jennifer

Video 1: Inheritance
Video 2: Limited Access

SharePoint Permissions: Custom Scenarios – by Me

Video 1: SharePoint Site Level Permissions
Video 2: SharePoint List and Library Level Permissions
Video 3: SharePoint Item (and Folder) Level Permissions

Understanding Permissions In Office 365: Tips & Tricks – by Jennifer

Video 1: Basic Troubleshooting
Video 2: Look Up A User’s Permission

We hope you enjoy all of our videos!

Technorati Tags: SharePoint,Office 365,permissions

Category: Office 365 Grid

Published: 7/12/2012 11:22 AM

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Permissions Web Part: List of Site Owners

laura — Mon, 09 Jul 2012 14:43:28 GMT

Body:

How would you like to have a nice pretty web part on the home page of each of your sites, showing a dynamic list of the people who are in the owners group for that site? This is a great idea, because it gives the site users a quick reference list so that they know who to contact if they have questions about that site.

This solution is applicable in any version of SharePoint 2010 or 2007.

First, you need to double-check your group settings. If you want to be able to display it in a web part, the membership needs to be visible to everyone. In Site Settings –> People and Groups, go to your group, and click Settings in the toolbar and Group Settings. On that page, Who can view the membership of this group needs to be Everyone.
Open your site in SharePoint Designer.
In SharePoint Designer 2010, click Data Sources on the left. (If you have SharePoint 2007, here is my screencast on how to do web services in SPD 2007)
Click the SOAP Service Connection button at the top.
Go to the Login tab, and choose Use Windows Authentication.
Go back to the Source tab.
Type or paste in your site’s URL in the Service description location box, with /_vti_bin/usergroup.asmx at the end of it. So mine looks like this:
http://laurarogers.sharepoint.com/_vti_bin/usergroup.asmx
(This can just be the root of your site collection. All of the sub-sites will have the same list of users and groups, so this URL won’t have to be changed for each different sub-site that you use this web part on)
Click the Connect button.
For the Port, I usually pick UserGroupSoap12, but I’m not sure if it matters which one you pick.
In the Operation drop-down box, choose GetUserCollectionFromGroup.
In the Parameters section, double-click groupName. Type the name of your SharePoint group in the Value box. Also, be sure to check the box The value of this parameter…
Click OK.
Your screen should look something like this.
On the General tab, type the Name Site Owners. Click OK.
Create a blank (temporary) web part page in order to create a new data view web part. (one way: in the browser, click Site Actions –> More Options… –> choose Web Part Page, and click Create. This will let you name the file and put it in any library)
In SharePoint Designer, open the new page you created. (You can click the little pushpin icon next to All Files on the left, and drill down to the library you put this new page in. Open your new page and click Edit File.)
Those blue rectangles on the page are web part zones. Put your cursor in one of them.
Click the Insert tab at the top, click the Data View button in the ribbon, and click the name of your new Site Owners data connection in that list. You may have to scroll down in the drop-down to see it.
Alright, there’s your list of site owners, but it’s a bit messy. We don’t need all that stuff. Click the Add/Remove Columns button in the ribbon. Remove everything except the Name and email columns, and click OK.
We’re going to make the email column a hyperlink to send each person an email. You can alternately just remove the email column and leave just the name, and make the name a hyperlink instead. Click to select the first person’s email address. On the Insert tab, click Hyperlink. In the Link To column on the left, click Email address. In the Email address box, type mailto:{@Email}
You can also type in a subject if you’d like, such as “Question about Team Site”. Click OK.
Save the page. With your cursor in the web part you just created, click the Web Part tab in the ribbon. Click the To File button. Save this .WEBPART file off to your desktop or wherever.
Go to your home page, and upload and insert this new web part onto your page. There’s your list of site admins!
Now, you can STILL use this same web part on all the other sites in this site collection, without having to go back into SharePoint Designer. In my example, I have a site called Project A, and the name of the owners group is Project A Owners. Go to the Project A home page, and Upload and insert that same web part.
Open the web part toolpane (Edit Web Part) of the new web part you just inserted. Click the Parameters Editor button.
Find the parameter that says Name=”groupName”, and you’ll see that the default value says “Team Site Owners” (from step 11). Change the text of Team Site Owners to say “Project A Owners” instead. (Note that if you didn’t check the box in step 11, you won’t see your parameter here).
Click Save. Click OK in the web part toolpane on the right side of the browser.
Once you stop editing the page, and refresh the browser, you’ll see your new list of people, you just won’t see it immediately. Done!

Note that I couldn’t get this to work in Office 365, because I can’t seem to get any of the web services to work in data view web parts like this.

Similar Web Parts

There are a couple of out of box web parts that do something similar, that are important to note. (Thanks, Craig for your question about this in the comments below)

The Site Users web part will show a list of people who have permission to the site, and it lets you see their presence (online status) and quickly send instant messages to them or click on their name to see their profile. In this particular case, I didn’t use this web part for a couple of reasons. First of all, at this particular client’s workplace, they have no instant messaging client at all. Secondly, most of the SharePoint groups simply contain active directory groups, which means that you wouldn’t be able to directly contact individuals. The third reason was simply formatting. They wanted the names displayed with the email address next to them.

The Contact Details web part is one that is very simple but pretty. It lets you enter a single person’s name in the web part settings, and it displays some basic info about them, such as their picture, name and job title, with presence information. Unfortunately, this is static information, and will not automatically change as people are added and removed from SharePoint groups.

Technorati Tags: SharePoint Designer,SharePoint,web parts,SharePoint group,site owners

Category: Web Parts

Published: 7/9/2012 10:12 AM

SharePoint Tuesday! Come visit me Online

laura — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 02:04:16 GMT

Body:

Every Tuesday, Rackspace hosts a FREE virtual question and answer session. Each of us on the SharePoint team have been taking turns. On July 17th, 2012, it’s my turn!

This will be from 2 to 3 Central time, and you can REGISTER HERE to attend.

July 17th, 2-3 central, FREE

Technorati Tags: SharePoint,questions

Category: conference

Published: 7/9/2012 9:33 PM

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Redirect Users if They’ve Taken the Survey

laura — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 19:42:11 GMT

Body:

The basis for today’s blog post is regarding some work I’ve been doing with a client and the Microsoft Productivity Hub (here’s a description of it). The Productivity Hub is great because it gives the enterprise users a one stop place to go to for self-service training on many different Microsoft products.

The client wanted to provide end users a link to the Productivity Hub in their environment, but they didn’t want to overwhelm everyone, and wanted to gradually wean them into it. They also wanted to start out by just providing the SharePoint training modules at first, and then put the other MS Office modules later, in Phase 2, once they’re used to the interface.

I created a 45 minute video of “Introduction to SharePoint” for end users for this client (specific to their own site and environment). A cool think about the Productivity Hub is that it has a built in Quiz. There are already existing quiz questions for products such as Excel and Word. There weren’t any SharePoint questions, so I created some based off of topics I had covered in my own video. FUN!

Then, here’s the cool part that this blog is about. We wanted the end users to HAVE to watch my video and take the quiz FIRST before going through all the other SharePoint content in the Productivity Hub. I created a web part and put it on the home page. If you haven’t taken the quiz yet, it automatically redirects you to a web part page that only has my video embedded and a big button to “Take the Quiz”.

Keep in mind: This solution can be applied to ANY SharePoint list. The concept is that you give a condition such as a certain item exists or doesn’t exist in the list, and the user gets redirected. Therefore, this solution can be done in ANY version of SharePoint or SharePoint Online with Office 365.

This is how I did it:

In the productivity hub, there is a list called Quiz Results. So basically, if the currently logged in user has no items in that list under the topic “SharePoint”, I want to redirect them.

Create a blank web part page.

click here

On that web part page, put the Media web part with your video, and under that put a hyperlink or pretty image with hyperlink to fill out the quiz. Note that the Media Web Part is only available with the enterprise version of SharePoint.
Insert the quiz list web part on your homepage, and set up a filter so that the Created By field equals [Me], and in my case I also added AND Product is equal to SharePoint.
In the web part toolpane, in the Layout section, check the box next to Hidden.
Open this page in SharePoint Designer. Put your cursor inside this new web part, and click the Design tab in the ribbon.
In the Preview section of the Design tab, click the drop-down and choose No Matching Items Template.
Click the Split button at the bottom of SharePoint Designer. Find the text in the code portion that says “There are no items to show in this view”. Put your cursor to the right of it.
Extra tips: After you select the text in the bottom design pane, click the Design tab, click Customize XSLT and choose Customize item. Then, you’ll see that in the code you can see the exact text that you have selected. In the code, you can put your cursor after the <xsl: value-of select=”$NoAnnouncementsHowTo”/>
This is the code that you need to paste in, so that users get redirected to wherever you want them to get redirected to.
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=http://yoursitetoredirectto"></meta>
Save the page. (oh, and that number 0 in there is the number of seconds until you get redirected, which is none in this case because I want it to be instantaneous)

Basically, if there are no items in the list, we’re redirecting the user somewhere else. In my case, if they haven’t taken the quiz yet, I’m redirecting them to the page that I created at step 2, with my instructional video and quiz. After they’ve taken the quiz, then the next time they visit the productivity hub, they will have “unlocked” all the fancy web parts on the home page, with have the links to all the other help content.

Another method, is if you want people to be redirected if there IS something in that list of items, you’d put your cursor in the code inside the actual row of data where the item is, instead of in the no items template.

Technorati Tags: SharePoint,Productivity Hub,redirect,SharePoint Designer,user adoption,training

Category: Web Parts

Published: 6/28/2012 3:10 PM

Summing Calculated Columns

Laura Rogers — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 12:20:43 GMT

Body:

This is basically a re-post of something that I did on endusersharepoint.com a couple of weeks ago…

Have you ever noticed that in SharePoint views, when selecting to view “Totals”, calculated columns aren’t listed as an option for column totals? In this screencast, I demonstrate this dilemma, and shows how you CAN create a view that displays calculated column totals. This is done by creating a Data View Web Part in SharePoint Designer. Also, if you’ve noticed that calculated columns don’t ever show up in a data view web part, I show the fix for this, too.

Here is the link to my screencast showing how to accomplish this.

Also, my buddy Mark Rackley, the SharePoint Hillbilly, has just written a blog post, that is a good supplement to what I show in the video. He shows how to create sums for groups in the DVWP.

Technorati Tags: SharePoint,data view web part,calculated columns

Category: Web Parts

Published: 3/31/2010 7:20 AM

Creating a Workflow Initiation Form for Approvals

laura — Wed, 16 May 2012 17:22:01 GMT

Body:

In SharePoint Designer workflows that are manually started, the initiation form is the page that has the “Start” button to kick off the workflow. In this 11 minute video, I show how to create an approval workflow that can be manually triggered.

I walk you through:

Setting up the workflow so that after the approval process, the content approval status of the document automatically gets updated.
Customizing the initiation form in InfoPath, so that the needed approvers may be selected from a people picker, and the colors are modified.
Adding a “high priority” check box so that high priority item approvals are due in a more timely fashion than normal.

This solution applies to only the enterprise version of SharePoint and SharePoint online. This does not include SharePoint Foundation because it uses browser-based forms, which are enterprise only.

How can you learn more? This solution is actually an excerpt from chapter 10 of our book.

Click to buy the book:

Already own the book? Open it to Chapter 10, and follow the step by step instructions that start on page 256.

Technorati Tags: InfoPath,SharePoint,workflows,SharePoint Designer,initiation form,approvals

Category: Office 365 Grid; workflows; InfoPath

Published: 5/16/2012 12:47 PM

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InfoPath: Create Common Multiple Choice Selections

laura — Tue, 15 May 2012 22:53:37 GMT

Body:

In InfoPath, when using certain controls such as the Drop-Down List Box, Combo Box, List Box, or Multiple Selection List box, there are several different ways that you can obtain the list of choices that are available to people filling out the form.

Enter choices manually – This option allows you to simply click the Add… button below and type in the values for each choice, and use the Move Up and Move Down buttons to rearrange the order.
Get choices from an external data source – This option allows you to select an existing data connection, such as one that receives a SharePoint list. This way, the selections can be dynamic. This is the best option to use when the values in the list change frequently. It allows you to simply change the source location, such as the items in a SharePoint list, instead of having to re-type the options in and re-publish the form.

This blog post is all about that other option, called Get choices from fields in this form.

This middle option is pretty useful in a couple of situations:

You have a list of fairly static choices, but you need to use them in several places in your form. A good example is a survey. Commonly, there need to be many drop-down boxes in a survey, but they have all the same choices, such as Yes, No, Maybe.
A different situation, which I don't come across often, is when there is a repeating table or section somewhere in the form, and the values that have been filled in there, need to be the values to select from in your drop-down box.

This blog post is about option 1 above. A survey with the same set of answers being needed multiple times in the form.

Here's how to create some choices "Yes, No, or Maybe", using that middle option in your drop-down box, and use it in many places in the same form:

In InfoPath Designer, in the Fields pane on the right, right click the MyFields folder (root folder) and click Add…
Name it SurveyChoiceGroup, select Group as the type, and click OK.
Right-click on SurveyChoiceGroup, and click Add… Name it SurveyChoice, and click OK.
Name it SurveyChoice, check the box next to Repeating, and click OK.
Your new structure in the Fields pane on the right should look like this:
On the Data tab, click the Default Values button.
Click the drop-down on the SurveyChoice field, and select Add another SurveyChoice below.
Do this one more time, so that there are three different Survey choices under the SurveyChoiceGroup.
Click to select the first of the three SurveyChoice fields. In the Default value field, type Yes
Click to select the second SurveyChoice, type a default value of No, and then for the third, type a default value of Maybe. Click OK.
Put a drop-down box on your form, and open its properties screen.
Select Get choices from fields in this form, and choose SurveyChoice. Click OK, click OK.

Now, when you publish or preview your form, you can see that when you click the drop-down, it shows the 3 choices of Yes, No, or Maybe. You can create multiple drop-downs or any type of selection boxes, and use that same list of survey choices in all of them. Then, if the list of choices need to be edited, you can just do it in one place. Of course, this can always be done by creating a data connection to a SharePoint list, but for such a simple set of choices, all of that may not be necessary. This is just another option.

Technorati Tags: SharePoint,Office 365,InfoPath,forms

Category: Office 365 Grid; InfoPath

Published: 5/15/2012 5:53 PM

User Information within InfoPath Forms

laura — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 02:56:13 GMT

Body:

There is a quick and easy way that information about the logged in user can be obtained from within an InfoPath form. You may have read my blog and other blogs before, with the user profile service web service instructions. In this post, I'm not going to be using the user profile service. This means that what I'm about to show you can be utilized with any version of SharePoint, whether you have a user profile service (enterprise) or not. This can be done with SharePoint 2010 Foundation, SharePoint 2010 enterprise and standard, and also WSS 3.0 and MOSS.

The User Information List is a list that exists at the site collection level, and contains a list of every user who has actually visited the SharePoint site. If they are a new user, they will not show in this list until they've actually visited a site in that site collection.

With that said, here are some instructions for getting some information about users, more specifically, the currently logged in user.

Open up your InfoPath form, click on the Data tab, and click the Data Connections button.
Click the Add… button.
Choose Receive Data, and click Next.
Choose SharePoint List or Library, and click Next.
Paste the URL of your SharePoint site, click Next. (No need for any "default.aspx" at the end, or any other .aspx)
Scroll down towards the bottom of the list of lists and libraries, and select User Information List. Click Next.
(note that even though the user information list physically exists at the site collection level, you will still see this list on every sub-site also)
Put check boxes next to the following fields, especially User_name. Click Next.
Do not check the box to store a copy of the data. Click Next.
This is very important. UNCHECK the box to automatically retrieve the data. Click Finish.
On the Data Connections screen, click Close.
Still on the Data tab in InfoPath, click the Form Load button, which will bring up the rules pane on the right side of the screen.
Click the New button to create a new Action rule.
Click the Add button and choose Set a Field's Value. On the Rule Details screen, click the button next to Field.
In the Fields drop-down box, choose User Information List, expand the queryFields, and select User name.
(be sure that you're selecting from the query fields, not the data fields.) Click OK.
Back on the Rule Details screen, click the function (fx) button next to the Value box.
Click the Insert Function button, and choose the userName function. Click OK two times.
This is what your rule looks like. Click OK.
Back over in the rules pane on the right, click the Add button, and choose Query for Data.
Choose the User Information List and click OK.
Now, each time the form is opened, the current user's information will automatically be queried, and that one record will be retrieved. There are many ways that this information can be used within your form. The data exists in the data fields of the user information list. In the Fields pane on the right side of the screen, choose the User Information List from the drop-down box.
Select the folder directly under dataFields, the one with the blue icon called d:SharePointListItem_RW. Drag it onto an empty area of your form, and when you let go, choose Repeating Section with Controls.
I'm really just having you put all this on the form so that you can see exactly what's being returned.
Go ahead and publish the form, and open a new form. You'll see all of the data about you will be displayed, something like this:
One more little trick. Go back to InfoPath Designer. Delete the "Picture" field. Add a Picture control to the form (not a picture button, just a picture), and choose As a link. Click OK.
You will be prompted to bind to a field. Select the Picture field under the User Information List data fields. Click OK.
Filling out the form again, now there's me:

You can see how this data could potentially be used in many ways in your form. You can set some field defaults the first time the form is filled out, you could display the currently logged in user's picture… You can even use formatting rules to show, hide, or disable certain fields depending on who the current user is or what department they're in. I don't usually drop the fields on the form like I showed you, that was for demonstration purposes. I usually just refer to that data via rules, etc. Keep in mind that the user information list does not have the 60 or so fields that the user profile service contains, but it is very useful nonetheless. There are many other blog posts out there that show how to tap into the user profile service using the web service in InfoPath, it's just that if all you need is one of these basic fields, you might not need to deal with all of the complexity that it entails.

Here are some other posts by me and others regarding user information in InfoPath:

Auto-Pop Life with InfoPath (Part 1 of 2), and Auto-Pop Life with InfoPath (Part 2 of 2) by Lori Gowin
MVPs for Office 365: Pre-Populating InfoPath 2010 Forms by Clayton Cobb (among many other posts on his own blog site)
InfoPath User Roles in Browser-Based Forms- Another Way (Part 1 of 2) and InfoPath User Roles in Browser-Based Forms – Another Way (Part 2 of 2) by me

Technorati Tags: SharePoint,Office 365,InfoPath,forms,Users

Category: Office 365 Grid; InfoPath

Published: 4/11/2012 10:18 PM

Laura Rogers @WonderLaura: Posts

Speaking at SharePoint Saturday Atlanta!

InfoPath and SharePoint Designer Workflows Together

Book Signing

Hack: Data View Web Parts in SharePoint 2013

InfoPath–”Save and New” button

Back in the Office!

Getting PerformancePoint up and running

Per Location Views in SharePoint 2007

Web Part Connections – Improved in SharePoint 2010

See You All at the Big SharePoint Conference!

Book Signing: Using Microsoft InfoPath 2010 with SharePoint 2010, Step by Step

Working in the Rackspace Booth

Book Signing: Beginning SharePoint 2010, Building Business Solutions with SharePoint AND Using Microsoft InfoPath 2010 with SharePoint 2010, Step by Step

Understanding 2013 tools and best practices for creating enterprise forms in SharePoint 2013 - Darvish Shadravan session #SPC239

SharePoint Express session: Document Trafficking: Now safer than ever with External Users in SharePoint Online

SharePoint Express session: From Zero to SharePoint Hero: 5 Easy Steps for bringing Business Value to Collaboration Solutions

SharePoint Tuesday 10/16! Come visit me online!

Obtaining a List's Views

Free SharePoint 2013 Webinars!

ALL WEBINARS

CMS Wire

9 Minute Video: SharePoint 2013 Workflow

SharePoint 2013 Web Part: Content Search

Basics

Refiners

Settings

Test

Number of Items to show

Display Templates

Property Mappings

Settings

In summary:

SharePoint 2010 Related Lists (Part 4 of 4)

The Query String URL & Data View Web Parts (Part 3 of 4)

Query String (URL) Filter Web Part

Data View Web Part With Query String

Query String URLs are Magical (Part 2 of 4)

Query String URLs are like, SO Useful! (Part 1 of 4)

InfoPath 2010: Pre-populate the People Picker

Report Viewer: Create a Hyperlink to SharePoint

SharePoint 2013 Social: Community Sites

Categories

Discussions (Conversations)

Replies

Likes and Ratings

Your Reputation

Community Members

Community Portal Site

SPTechCon Boston 2012 in July!

You can register with the code ROGERS to receive $200 off of your cost!

Using Report Builder for List Views and Charting

Creating a Forms Portal

InfoPath and SharePoint Designer 2010 Workflows Together

Building Business Solutions: InfoPath & Workflows

Book Signings – NEW!

InfoPath– Getting the “Signature”

SharePoint Permissions Video Series

Permissions Web Part: List of Site Owners

Similar Web Parts

SharePoint Tuesday! Come visit me Online

Redirect Users if They’ve Taken the Survey

Summing Calculated Columns

Creating a Workflow Initiation Form for Approvals

InfoPath: Create Common Multiple Choice Selections

User Information within InfoPath Forms

Book Signing:
Beginning SharePoint 2010, Building Business Solutions with SharePoint
AND
Using Microsoft InfoPath 2010 with SharePoint 2010, Step by Step