Going Beyond Site-Bound Application Design with SharePoint 2007
Author: CorasWorks Corporation
Team sites are the core collaboration application design element of SharePoint 2003. Their ease of use and flexibility has driven strong adoption amongst users and organizations. With the release of SharePoint 2007, Microsoft is providing new capabilities and promoting SharePoint as a platform for business applications, evolving its usage beyond collaboration. Yet, the potential for business applications to leverage these capabilities is limited by the typical predisposition of SharePoint users to utilize site-bound design, where applications are viewed as a single site or as an ad hoc collection of sites.
Speaking at the Global SharePoint Conference 2006 in May, Bill Gates cited several examples of applications that could be running on a SharePoint platform, such as "employee surveying, personnel review, expense tracking, sales analysis, new product release management." With the new capabilities of SharePoint 2007, such as workflow, online forms, and connections to external data sources, these types of applications are just the beginning to the potential of SharePoint 2007.
Yet, in order for business applications on SharePoint to rival commercial off the shelf business applications, SharePoint users need to effectively leverage these new capabilities and not limit themselves to site-bound design. Because of the success of team sites, it is quite common for users looking to build an application to view applications as a single site or as an ad hoc collection of sites, thus limiting their "vision" of SharePoint's capabilities.
Seeing Your Entire SharePoint Environment as Your "Design Canvas" for Applications
The greatest opportunity, however, is to view the "application space" as the entire environment "on top" of SharePoint. Thus, applications can be designed that span site collections, virtual servers, and the "zones" of the Internet, Extranet, and Intranet. These applications can reuse data and functionality distributed across a SharePoint environment or even external data sources. This unbounded design opens up an entirely new category of applications that can have a much greater business impact by eliminating silos, reducing duplication of data, and allowing the integration of application functionality and process.
Examples of potential applications designs include:
·Distributed applications, such as an HR Travel Request solution, where the requests reside in a list in HR, but, the views and functionality are distributed across the environment in different departments, so that users can see and work with information where they typically work instead of having to go to the applications.
·Integrated application sets that share data. Imagine having a centralized customer list that is used by a sales application, marketing application, and customer service application. This list could reside within SharePoint or an external data source that is connected to SharePoint. This eliminates duplication and allows for "normalization" of data.
·Management applications, such as a Program Management Office or Portfolio Management application that provide you with the ability to centrally manage hundreds or thousands of "project" team sites distributed across the site collections and virtual servers in your environment, and even "weed out" sites that are no longer relevant.
·"Process applications" that move information from site to site, such as from the Internet, into the Intranet, and back to an Extranet as work is done.
The starting point to these types of applications is to break out of site-bound design and see the entire SharePoint environment as your "design canvas" for applications. The next step is to create the additional capabilities necessary to implement these types of applications. These capabilities can be created by extending the new SharePoint 2007 platform using Visual Studio or the new SharePoint Designer, although this approach can be hampered by the limited depth of technical expertise of the site administrators/designers.
Alternatively, organizations can look to CorasWorks, a third party ISV that offers the capabilities that address these requirements. CorasWorks (www.corasworks.net) offers organizations modular components that extend SharePoint to allow you to connect data and use rich displays to build applications that span sites, site collections, and virtual servers. CorasWorks also provides you with the ability to inter-connect and manage these applications as part of an integrated system. These modular components are so user-friendly; they simply snap together allowing you to quickly build applications without the need for custom development. You can see these capabilities demonstrated in their new online Showroom for SharePoint 2007. And, CorasWorks also offers a number of hands-on workshops across the country and internationally that demonstrate the powerful features available to their customers.
Whichever approach you choose, it is clear that the new SharePoint 2007 is poised to extend the potential seen with SharePoint 2003 by enabling the creation of business applications that go beyond the typical bounds of a collaborative platform.
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Defining Moments
The world of Knowledge Management is filled with many terms that can be confusing to those not immersed in the subject. To help you better understand some of the phrases and buzzwords you might encounter, this column will explain some KM terms as they are defined by AKG. Read these KM definitions now
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New! AKG's TTAC Review
Our Technical, Training, Adoption and Change Management (TTAC) Review helps you identify the human, organizational, and technical issues involved in collaboration technology initiatives. The TTAC Review delivers a valuable tool to help you better understand the process needed to create a successful collaborative environment. This analysis outlines the scope of the initiative, along with a plan to approach it successfully. There are a limited number of these reviews currently available, so be sure to get on our reservation list soon! Read complete details about AKG's TTAC Review
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SharePoint® Quick Tip
Using the Datasheet View
Standard views display list information in the manner that you specify when you add or remove columns. In a standard view, you filter, update, add, or delete items one at a time. This can be very time consuming if you have multiple entries to add or delete. Datasheet views allow you to access the entire list at once. You can then quickly add, delete, and update list entries just as you would in a spreadsheet program like Excel. To utilize datasheet views requires that you have a Windows SharePoint Services-compatible datasheet program installed, such as Microsoft Office 2003.
To begin working in a Datasheet View:
Switch to Datasheet View in the main list page. Now you can edit/add content as you would in Excel:
Quickly add content in the last row using TAB and ENTER. For multiple entries to the list, just continue adding content. This eliminates the multi-step process of adding items to a list one by one.
Quickly select a whole column by clicking the column heading or drag over several column headings to select multiple columns. Select a whole row or rows by clicking/dragging through the first blank cells on the left.
Use the boundary cursor between column headings to change the columns width, or between blank cells on the far left change the row height.
Use the Move cursor to move one or more cells elsewhere.
Use the AutoFill cursor to copy contents of cells to adjacent cells
Use the Sort and Filter drop-down arrow next to each column heading to display items with specific attributes
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They Said It
It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.
Charles Darwin
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New Style of AKG Holiday Greeting Helps St. Jude!
AKG began a new tradition with the 2006 holiday season: in lieu of sending a traditional holiday card through the mail, AKG opted to send a special e-greeting. Each recipient received a humorous e-greeting, and a message that a donation was made to St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in their honor. The feedback from our clients, partners and friends has been overwhelmingly positive. If your organization would like to consider this alternative, please visit the St. Jude website for more information.
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