The SharePoint Hillbilly

Good news, this is my first video post, so less typing for me!  Bad news, you have to hear my eloquent voice.  Regardless, I thought I’d try it out and see how it flies.

So, a requirement popped up to allow the business to store “Contact Us” information in SharePoint and use workflows to manually send emails to the people who submitted the contact information.  Very easy.. nothing spectacular.  They also wanted the ability to send pre-formatted email templates as responses.  Also fairly easy to do creating an SPD workflow for each template, right?  Well.. what do you do so that you don’t have to open up SPD every time the user wants to add or modify a template?  I came up with the following solution.  You could take what I did here and build upon it to make it much more elaborate.  I’m sure you could format the emails more professionally.  You could auto populate more fields like the subject and signature. Hey, I got it started, you can make it world class.

So, in a nutshell here is what I did:

1. 1. Create a list to contain “Contact Us” information
2. 2. Create a list to hold “Email Templates”
3. 3. Create a manual workflow called “Send Email” in SPD on the “Contact Us” list that has a “Message” initiation variable
4. 4. Create one action that sends an email to the email address from the “Contact Us” list and the body of the email is the “Message” from the initiation variable
5. 5. Open up the .aspx file for the “Send Mail” workflow and add the “Email Templates” list to it.
6. 6. Set up a web part connection between the “Message” initiation variable and the “Email Templates” list

That’s it! nothing earth shattering.  So, without further ado, here’s the video.  Please let me know your thoughts on whether I should do this more often or make this a one time occurrence.  

So, Tulsa TechFest was held on November 6, 2009 in.. yep.. Tulsa.  David Walker (@DavidWalker) did a fantastic job of bringing together over 500 people for 13 tracks of information… yes… THIRTEEN…  only one SharePoint track though, I’ll have to get on to David about that. 

As expected I spent the entire day in the SharePoint track Talking with gurus Eric Shupps (@eshupps) and Corey Roth (@coreyroth).  Eric presented two great sessions on “Integrating Customer Data in SharePoint with BCS, WCF and Silverlight” and “Customizing the Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Deployment Process”.  You can find more information about his presentations on his blog http://www.sharepointcowboy.com. Corey (http://www.dotnetmafia.com) stepped in at the last minute with his Enterprise Search presentation.  All good stuff. 

Tulsa Techfest is where I was first introduced to the SharePoint Community last October. Wow, it’s been a busy year.  So, I was more than happy to present this year.  I presented my session on “Wrapping Your Heard Around the SharePoint Beast".  This is my favorite session that I do and try to have a good time presenting it.  If you learned something and were entertained, then I did something right.  I developed this session as the developer/architect session I wish I had seen before I started SharePoint.  My goal is to give attendees a good foundation to build on and maybe provide a couple of “ah-ha!” moments.

Up next for me is the Tyson Development Conference this weekend in Springdale, AR.  So, unless you are a Tyson employee or a presenter I won’t be seeing you.  After that that I will be speaking at SharePoint Saturday Kansas City on December 12th.  This promises to be an awesome event with some of the best speakers I know.  I’ll also be doing a brand new development session on SharePoint Web Services at this event.  That session will be a preview of the session I will be doing at the SharePoint Technology Conference in February.  So, get your butt up to one of these great events and stop by and say hello.  :)

Okay, now that I have a blog, I have a desire/need to write blogs.  Sometimes I have nothing technically interesting I’m working on at the moment or I simply don’t have the time to dedicate to a technical post.  I am, however, very opinionated and generally let people know what I’m thinking.  So, combine the fact that I need to write a blog, don’t have the time for a technical entry, and I’m really opinionated and you get posts like this…  so… enjoy… 

I’m not going to be saying anything today you hopefully have not heard over and over already, but maybe I can drive the points home a little more or give you a gem or two of knowledge that you didn’t think about before.

Where was I? Oh yeah… All you End Users, Business Analysts, and Project Managers… STOP Doing that!

Please stop trying to customize SharePoint when it may not need customization!

Does anyone else get this complaint A LOT! “I thought you could develop applications faster with SharePoint?”

YOU CAN! Just stop asking for the world every single time. Look, SharePoint offers a lot of GREAT out of the box functionality. Use that, and embrace that and I can get your site out to you in just a few hours.  If you start customizing it “Oh… just add this one really small detail…”  Well sure, let me crack open Visual Studio and now go through a full software development life cycle.

Now that you have SharePoint, stop, take a moment, and take it into consideration when designing your applications.  If you work around what SharePoint offers you out of the box you will get your applications out there MUCH faster!

Really, think about it, how important is feature “x”.  Think of the trade offs, I can have my site TODAY if I get rid of feature “x”. Feature “x” can be written and implemented at a later date.  I don’t have to wait 2 months for my application? This is not something to complain about, its something very cool! Start doing more NOW… we’ll get you the glitter and extras later.  One step at a time people!

Please take advantage of what SharePoint offers you!

Recently a user on a project site had a GREAT idea!  “Hey everyone! I uploaded an excel file so we can all keep track of our availability during this project! Please check out the excel spreadsheet from the shared documents when you get a chance and edit it to show your availability! Isn’t this great! Collaboration rocks my world!”

Uh? what? really? Stop doing that! If you create a SharePoint List with the same information as that spreadsheet everyone can edit it without waiting for someone to check it in!  Better yet! You can put a Calendar view on that SharePoint list and visibly SEE when people will not be available!  Take advantage of what SharePoint offers!

You may have to change the way you think about things.. sorry!  SharePoint is NOT just a file share! (some may argue it’s not really a file share at all!)

I’ll take this a step further (entering heavy opinion area here).  If you have an Excel spreadsheet that will be a living document for the life cycle of your site then there is a very good chance that it could be a SharePoint list and NOT a shared document.  Sure, there are a myriad of reasons why it should NOT be a SharePoint List, but ask yourself this question “Can I make my life and everyone else’s life easier if I make this a SharePoint List?”  Think about the views you can get, and you can always export it to an Excel Spreadsheet if you really want to.

This is only one reason of users not REALLY using SharePoint to its potential. Please share others, I can think of a few more off the top of my head, I’m just too lazy to write them down.  :)

Please stop whining!

“This is not how I’m used to doing things”

“But it LOOKS like SharePoint”

“I wanted a pie chart!”

“Can’t you just make it do ______ “

Oh stop it! Regardless of what TV has taught you, it’s NOT all about you and you can’t necessarily have it YOUR way. Tough! You can still do your job better and faster with SharePoint. Please come out of your comfort zone for a moment and open your eyes up to the possibilities.  At least CONSIDER the fact that maybe your SharePoint Admins, Architects, and Developers actually KNOW what they are talking about!

We are trying to help you. Let us help you. We are trying to make your life easier and give you the tools you need to do your job faster and easier. I’m sorry if the button is not as pretty as you want it.

So……………………

Okay… my rant is sufficiently over until next time.  When it comes down to it, the person that can be blamed for the way these users are behaving is staring me right in the face when I look in the mirror.  Train your users well. Help them understand what can and can’t be done in SharePoint easily. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, this is SharePoint, stop trying to make it something else.  Sure, I can make it do that, but do you really want to wait 2 months when I can give you this today? When it comes to SharePoint, ignorance is not bliss.  Ignorance is misery, frustration, and stubbornness.  True, many users just don’t like change, and to those users I offer a slap to the back of the head and ask them to go back to their VHS tapes, beepers, rotary dial phones, and tape players.

SharePoint can give you a lot of quick wins if you will just stop it. Seriously, just stop it.