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The blog by the Microsoft SharePoint End-User Content Team. The blog is designed, written, and published by the writers who bring you the SharePoint content on Office Online. We write content for all SharePoint Products and Technologies and encourage contributions from the SharePoint user community.
Customize list forms with InfoPath 2010: Friday Cool Content

For today's Friday Cool Content post, I'm going to point you to a great video by Daniel Broekman, one of the InfoPath Program Managers. It covers one of my favorite features in SharePoint 2010 -- the ability to customize SharePoint list forms with InfoPath 2010.

A SharePoint list form is the page that appears -- it’s usually shown inside a modal dialog box in SharePoint 2010 -- whenever you click Add new item to add a record to a list, or View item or Edit item for an existing list item.

You can customize SharePoint 2010 list forms with InfoPath 2010

If you have InfoPath 2010 installed, clicking the Customize Form button on the ribbon opens the list form in InfoPath. You can then customize the form by adding layout tables to help organize fields, themes, rules such as data validation, and more.

In the video InfoPath 2010 - Customize a SharePoint List Form, Daniel shows a few simple customizations and a few advanced ones -- all in under five minutes. It's five minutes well-spent. :-)

Here's that link again, in case you missed it: ;-) InfoPath 2010 - Customize a SharePoint List Form

Cheers,

Anthony
SharePoint IW Content Team

Where did that command go? Introducing the SharePoint Server 2010 ribbon mapping guide
 
 
The Office client applications started using the ribbon with the 2007 release. Now it's SharePoint's turn to get the ribbon in the 2010 release.
 
To help you make the transition to the new UI in SharePoint 2010, we have created a mapping guide that shows you the commands from SharePoint Server 2007 and their equivalent locations on the SharePoint Server 2010 ribbon. Click on the image below to access the Excel workbook mapping guide.
 
Click here to download the SharePoint Server 2010 ribbon mapping guide
 
We hope this is a useful resource for you and would like to hear your feedback. Use Comments to tell us what you think. Be honest (but be nice). :-) Your feedback really helps us target the right content for the right audience.
 
Cheers,
 
--Cris
SharePoint goes to the Opera
When you hear the word “opera,” you probably don’t think “SharePoint,” but this blog post might change that. Our very own Seattle Opera is in the process of deploying SharePoint Server 2007, which they are hoping will help them become “more efficient at making great opera.”
 
I recently had the opportunity to accompany the Office Intervention team on a couple of site visits to the Seattle Opera. Moving to SharePoint Server is a big change for the Seattle Opera, as it is for many organizations. Most Seattle Opera employees have no experience with formal document management or Web-based collaboration tools. The Seattle Opera is planning to phase out a large, unwieldy file share called the “H: Drive.” They’re also hoping SharePoint can help making planning and scheduling more transparent across their organization. If you want to learn more about how the Seattle Opera plans to use SharePoint Server, check out this article.
 
We’ve had some great conversations with the IT staff and end users at the Opera, and we’ve been able to point them to a lot of the resources we have on the Office Web site to help end users.
 
The IT staff at the Opera are setting themselves up for success with SharePoint because they’re directly tackling the change management and end-user adoption issues that come with any SharePoint Server deployment. They’ve designated “SharePoint Champions” in each department, and they’re working hard to train their champions so that they can, in turn, help their colleagues ramp up quickly on working in SharePoint.
 
If the "H: Drive were an opera, what opera would it be? Tune in and find out.
 
Office Intervention: We need SharePoint
 
 
Laura
SharePoint IW Content Team 
Create list relationships by using lookup and unique columns (SharePoint 2010)
Here's another SharePoint help topic that describes some great new features for lists in SharePoint 2010. You can now create relationships with cascade and restrict delete operations, define unique-valued columns with indexes, and display multiple values from two or more lists in one list via the Lookup column. Not discussed in this aticle but also a new feature is the ability to define a validation rule on any column.
 
The combination of these new features give you the power to create relational data with referential integrity, both through SharePoint 2010 and Access 2010.
 
Here’s the table of contents:
 
Overview of list relationships
    Creating unique columns
    Creating lookup columns
        A lookup column with an enforced relationship
        A lookup column with an unenforced relationship
    Viewing and editing items in list relationships
    Deleting items and lists in a list relationship
    Managing list relationships when lists have many items
    Using editing programs, such as Office SharePoint Designer 2010
How to create a unique and lookup column
    Create or modify a unique column
    Create a lookup column

You can download the article from here in both Word and PDF format.  
 
Download zip file

Enjoy,
Mark Gillis
What's new in PerformancePoint Dashboards and Web Parts

Last month, my teammate, Cris Berns, posted What’s New in SharePoint Server 2010? In his article, Cris mentions Business Intelligence. Today I thought I would share a little more information about some of the new features and capabilities you can find in PerformancePoint dashboards and Web Parts.

 

PerformancePoint Services enables you to create and use more sophisticated scorecards, reports, and filters in your dashboards. New features include:

·         Scorecards that have Drill Down and Drill Up capabilities

·         Scorecards that have KPIs on columns

·         Scorecards that contain KPIs that use calculated metrics, multiple actuals, variance, and/or Time Intelligence

·         New reports types, such as KPI Details reports and analytic pie charts

·         The ability to open a Decomposition Tree from some scorecards and analytic reports

·         Value filters, such as those that display the top (or bottom) members in a group or values that fall within a particular range that the dashboard user specifies

Want to learn more? Here are a few resources that we have available on our Office beta site:

·         What’s New in PerformancePoint Web Parts and Dashboards gives you more details on the items listed above

·         What’s New in PerformancePoint Dashboard Designer gives you an overview of new and improved features in Dashboard Designer

·         Getting Started: Introduction to the Business Intelligence Center gets you started using SharePoint Business Intelligence applications

We want to hear from you! Please give us feedback and let us know what kinds of content you’d like to see in upcoming posts.

SharePoint Server 2010 Inside Scoop: Where's the site search dropdown menu?
Hi -
 
Reports from the field suggest that there may be some confusion about why the search box on SharePoint Server 2010 sites no longer contain a dropdown menu.
 
To refresh your memory, here's what the site search box looked like in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.
 
SharePoint Server 2007 site search box
 
Here's what the site search box looks like in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010:
 
SharePoint Server 2010 site search box
 
Why the change? In Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, search automatically detects whether you're at the site or list level and only searches that level and everything below. The best way to search is from the highest level in which you expect to find the content.
 
Of course, if you are a site collection administrator and you really want to restore the dropdown options, you can add them to the search box for each site collection. To do so, click Site Actions, Site Settings. Under Site Collection Administration, choose Site Settings.
 
Add the dropdown to the search box
 
To return to the SharePoint Server 2007 experience, under Site Search Dropdown Mode, choose Show and default to contextual scope.
 
Or, experiment with some of the other settings.  We'll save the description of how those are used for another post.
 
Here's to finding what you're searching for...
...Renée
SharePoint End-user Content Team
Introducing SharePoint Designer 2010 video
 
In today's blog post, I'd like to share the Introducing SharePoint Designer 2010 video and get your reaction to it.

The video gives a quick tour of the SharePoint Designer interface and then goes into the four main areas of customization in SharePoint Designer.
  1. Create data sources
  2. Create custom views and forms
  3. Create custom workflows
  4. Design and brand a site
Taken together, these are the tasks you perform to create custom no-code solutions on the SharePoint platform.

I hope you enjoy it. Please send me your comments below!

Introducing SharePoint Designer 2010

 
Tom
SharePoint End User Content Team
Friday Cool Content: See hundreds of community-rated SharePoint sites

Ever find yourself looking at a blank site page, asking, “Where, oh where do I even start?”

 

Take a look at Top SharePoint, it’s packed with great ideas for SharePoint sites. And, these are not great ideas in theory! These are working SharePoint sites: tested, implemented, and customer-rated.

 

You can browse a site gallery, see which sites are rated highest and lowest, and find a wealth of connections to blogs you might not know yet. Happy hunting.

 

 

Thanks,

Becky

 

SharePoint End-User Content Team

 

How to allow users to run a SharePoint Designer workflow on multiple list items.

by Rod Stagg, SharePoint Solutions Architect/Developer
http://www.rstagg.com 

 

Overview:
Design and deploy a solution based on SharePoint 2010 to store and track data on events. 

Technical Approach:

  • Use SharePoint 2010 lists, libraries, and content types to store and track event data.
  • Develop SharePoint Designer 2010 workflows to standardize and replace current manual processes and provide secured views of sensitive data. 
  • Use SharePoint Designer 2010 workflows for data migration from current Excel spreadsheets and Access database.
  • Provide customized reporting using customized SharePoint 2010 list views and Microsoft Access 2010's ability to generate reports based on data stored in SharePoint 2010. 

Challenge: How to provide the user the ability to quickly kick-off a workflow on multiple events all in the same view.

We ran into a challenge on a key requirement to allow the user to quickly kick-off a workflow on multiple events all in the same view.  Given the large number of events involved it would be a time-consuming process for the user to select each list item representing the event, edit the final event details, and run the associated workflow process to complete and close the event. 

We evaluated using one of the new out-of-the-box features of SharePoint 2010: the ability to multiple select items in a list and perform an action.   This could have been an easy way to provide the user the ability to a workflow on multiple list items- the ideal solution-simply instruct the user to select multiple list items in the default view, select the workflow button in the ribbon, and execute the workflow.  

The challenge?  It appears the actions you can perform on multiple list items are limited to edit and delete, workflows are not included.   It is not clear to us if this is by design (SharePoint Designer team can jump in here and clarify if we are missing something I am sure) but since the workflow button is de-activated when selecting more than one list item and time was short we proceeded to investigate another possible solution. 

Screenshot of standard list view with multiple list items selected demonstrating the ability to edit and delete multiple items but workflow command de-activated.


 
Screenshot of identical standard list view with a single list item selected demonstrating the ability to run a workflow against a single item only.


How then to provide a mechanism in the user interface to allow the event coordinator to quickly and easily update information on multiple events without requiring a time-consuming process to open each and every event from the default SharePoint item edit view, update, and run the associated SharePoint workflow to complete the event?  Tires me just saying it. 

Solution:

Use the SharePoint multiple item form in conjunction with SharePoint Designer workflow ability to execute on list item updates.

  • Create a new field to designate the event as complete using the checkbox field type, one value for yes and no default value.
  • Create a new aspx page from the masterpage using SharePoint Designer, insert a dataview, select the appropriate fields in the datasource details pane, and insert as a multiple item form. 
  • Although multiple item forms are similiar to the datasheet view they provide the ability to customize to your scenario.
  • Add the complete column to the dataview to provide the checkboxes to designate the event as completed.
  • Set the close workflow settings to execute when an item has changed and add a condition to the workflow to check the complete status prior to execution i.e. if the event has already been closed do not execute workflow.  Easy addition would be to provide filtered views of the Event list by Complete=Yes and Complete =.
  • When the user selects the Complete event checkbox on multiple events and selects save the values in each associated list item is updated which in turn begins execution of the workflow for each list item selected. 


Screenshot of an example custom SharePoint list item form in the Multiple Item Form view.  

The user is able to select multiple events and designate as completed using the new Complete checkbox, update the event details using the fields in the multiple item form, and select Save.  The workflow will then begin execution on each item as they are updated.

Of course you can customize this page to suit your needs-SharePoint Designer 2010 provides a full range of options including conditional formatting, filtered views, and advanced editing mode. 

Important considerations when using customized list forms and workflows:

  • Use conditional clauses to ensure you don't create infinite loops and workflows are executed only when appropriate.
  • I recommend creating an entirely new .aspx page rather then editing the built-in list forms for adding a multiple item view when possible.
  • When editing existing list forms i.e. editform.aspx be carefull not to delete the list form control but use the web-part settings to hide instead. 

Summary:

Using the SharePoint custom multiple item form is one method to provide the user a quick and easy way to edit multiple list items and an excellent alternative to the default single item edit form.

Although similiar to the datasheet view multiple item forms are customizable.  

When the list is associated with a workflow the user has the ability to perform workflow actions on multiple list items as well. 

 

Tech review: Manage lists and libraries with many items (in SharePoint 2010)
If we had to pick one SharePoint help topic that has generated the most interest as we dogfood SharePoint 2010 within Microsoft, it would be the topic "Manage lists and libraries with many items". There are significant improvements in this area that will help keep your sites performing properly, while at the same time giving you assorted ways to work with lists and libraries that contain many thousands of items. A consistent theme emerging from SharePoint 2010 is providing a balanced partnership between IT and IW so that both users of SharePoint technologies can get their job done in a harmonious fashion. We think the improvements Microsoft has made to large lists and libraries are a great example of this. Here’s the articles's table of contents:
 
Overview of lists and libraries with many items
    Why is 5,000 such a magic number?
    What happens behind the scenes when you access many items in a list or library?
    Resource throttles and limits
Ways to manage lists and libraries with many items
    Creating SharePoint indexed columns
    Creating filtered views based on column indexes
    Organizing items into folders
    Controlling the display of data on the page
    Using the daily time window
    Using offline synchronization
    Using search to find list or library items
    About commonly-used SharePoint features
    Using external lists
    Using Access Services
    Using the Document Center site
How to index and filter views
    Create a simple or compound index
    Create or modify a filtered view based on column indexes
 
Want more? Here is a copy of this help topic available for you to download in both Word and PDF format. Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to read the topic and provide us feedback and comments.
 
 
Thanks for taking the time to do this, and as an added bonus, the files will not self-destruct in 5 minutes.
Mark Gillis
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 Most Recent Posts

Customize list forms with InfoPath 2010: Friday Cool Content
Where did that command go? Introducing the SharePoint Server 2010 ribbon mapping guide
SharePoint goes to the Opera
Create list relationships by using lookup and unique columns (SharePoint 2010)
What's new in PerformancePoint Dashboards and Web Parts

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