SharePoint in-a-box™ Business Solutions!

One of the most lacking feature in SharePoint 2007 is the ability to create relations between lists and items in lists. We have thought long and hard about how to implement this functionality in SharePoint while leaving as small a footprint as possible.

Our first implementation of this functionality was bundled in a product called Sopra and was aimed towards CRM. The product was basically a few webparts, a relationship API and some backend lists to keep the relationship information. With this approach we were able to add our relationship webpart to the editForm.aspx pages of lists and configure it to be able to add items / documents in relationship with the current item.

This approach however came with huge drawbacks for both our development team and the clients. So we decided to review our implementation and came up with the next generation of relationship management – xRM – Anything Relationship Management. Some of you might have heard that buzz word before and that’s because it’s from Microsoft (http://www.xrm.com/).

The basic idea is to not be limited in the relationships we can setup in your business. The relationship management module of our new Alexya™ platform for SharePoint leverages the concept of anything relationship management, but inside SharePoint. Think about it, in SharePoint you can create much more than items and documents in lists. You can create wikis, blogs, documents, lists of data, lists of images, lists of contacts, team sites etc… Why would you limit the relationships to only 1 or 2 of those?

Our new generation xRM is so tightly integrated into SharePoint that the implementation is literally a zero footprint integration. No more webparts to manage and absolutely no loss of out of the box functionalities in the relationship views; now, you actually get added functionalities like the checkbox. The xRM module relationship area is 100% Ajax and all the work you do while using it will never trigger a page refresh, this is a major enhancement for users. Also, the original list forms are preserved and never changed.

The way relationships are created between objects in SharePoint is now centralized in a Silverlight administration interface completely integrated into SharePoint, no external database, no separate server.

If you wish to see it in action you can go on YouTube watch one of our videos: http://www.alcero.com/sharepoint/alexya/demos.htm

We are delight to show you our Extranet in-a-box module latest version.  In this video you will be able to see not only the Extranet module in action, but also working in relationship with the Extensible Relationship Management and content transformation module. 

We have build our Extranet with various Alexya’s module to support our business needs: Case Management, Customer Support and Extranet collaboration.

Enjoy the video!

As a SharePoint developer, you often have to struggle with certain platform limitations. One of those limitation is the fact that the EditControlBlock (The list item contextual drop down menu) does not support menu items display based on server sided conditions.  For example, you cannot do something like say: only display this menu when the document has a metadata value of “approved” in a specific column.

As a SharePoint product developer, this is a major problem since we have, to date, 11 products that sit on top of SharePoint some of which use this contextual menu in order to display available features to the end-user.

Let’s  take as an example render-It, a document transformation product that allows documents like doc or docx documents to be transformed in another format like pdf, html etc… Everyone will agree that this “rendering” menu item should not be displayed unless the current document meets the requirements for the transformation.  Some people on the web have taken an approach where they modify or override the core.js functions and add their own logic. This was not an option for us since we wanted a “non-intrusive” way of adding our logic to existing functions.

So instead, we used the reflective nature of the JavaScript language to “hook” up to existing core.js functions and modify their parameters in order to add our own menus at run time by making some ajax calls. This preserves the original core.js functions and prevents bugs due to possible upgrades or changes Microsoft might implement in the core.js.

This nifty little trick allows us to make an Ajax call to the server at run-time in order to validate if a specific menu item should be displayed for this specific item in this specific context. It makes the end-user experience much more enjoyable by not having 5-6 menu items that will give you an handled error message after you click on it like ‘this action is not valid for this item”  which is very unpleasant.

The result is a much more intuitive editcontrolblock menu with menu items available only when specific feature requirements are met by the current item, security, type, metadata etc….

Alcero will be participating @ The Gildane Conference in Boston, MA  from December 1st-3rd 2009.  If you happen to be in Boston during these dates we invite you to come and visit us as we will be demonstrating some of our new products such as Reperio, Findability for SharePoint and Sudo, Workflow in a Box for SharePoint.  This is a great opportunity for you to view Alexya and the suite of products it comes with and also how we can enhance your SharePoint implementation.