SharePoint in-a-box™ Business Solutions!

Archive for the ‘Products’ Category

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….

In a perfect world, in the perfect document management system, there would be no folders. The windows OS has trained end-users to use folders in order to classify their information. Whether it is in a local drive or a network share, today when you are looking for a place to save your information, you are looking at finding the correct folder location.

Document management –capable systems such as SharePoint are able to abstract this folder hierarchy with the use of metadata. But what is metadata exactly? As always, I turn to my trusted friend Wikipedia for an answer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metadata .  

The problem with metadata is that users with years of folder usage often have trouble adjusting to new ways of classifying their information, as they say, old habits die hard… This is why in many document management system implementation you will find the same old folder structure you had on your old network drive literally copied over to the DMS¹. 

But DMS¹ are capable of so much deeper and complex classification schemes, it all comes down to how you want to retrieve your information. I could go on and on about the different ways to implement a taxonomy in your  DMS¹ , and maybe I will in another article, but for now, let’s focus on what Replicate MD can do to help take a step in getting rid of our old folder habit.

Let’s take a look at a pretty common business scenario:  project management.

The typical document management implementation for project management would look something like this: A project management site or area, project document lists based on either clients or even projects and inside those lists you will have a folder hierarchy defining the rest of the relevant information like project name, project number etc. I can’t stress enough how wrong this approach is, but since most users are used to this and change is hard to implement, it might be the only way your users will adopt the new DMS¹.

Now that we have accomplished our first step, which is to make the users accept and actually use our new DMS¹, let’s see how Replicate MD can help us take it to the next level. Let’s go back to our folder structure where we have a list for all our project documents and our first folder level inside the list would be Client -> Project ID -> Project Name -> and maybe another folder level for each deliverable.

Client –
             |
                — Project ID –
                                        |
                                        — Project Name –
                                                                      |
                                                                      – Deliverable 1
                                                                      – Deliverable2 …

Now what would happen if we upload a document inside the deliverable1 folder and use the SharePoint search to find it? Chances are, when you are looking for this document, you don’t know exact keywords found in the content that would help you narrow down the search and find it. Comes to the rescue, metadata! If you implement metadata on your content, you now have a more efficient way to search for your information. You can now search for any of: project name, project id, client or even by deliverable.

Your new challenge is to get users to actually fill in the 10 new metadata fields required for this to work each time they enter new content in the DMS¹, let me tell you from experience, not going to happen; This is where Replicate MD does its magic. Replicate MD is able to take metadata values from its parent folders, and push them on the new document being created in the system without any user interaction. So your new document can inherit metadata values from deliverable, project name, project id and client at upload or creation time.

You now have the best of both worlds for your end-users, the ability to drill down a folder structure when creating a document, and the ability to retrieve information based on metadata (known information about the content they are looking for). Someone will not always know where a specific document was put in the system, or how to get there, but using a search with Reperio™ for example, would give them quick access to it.

(1)DMS – Document management System.

Alcero the leader in Intranet/Extranet SharePoint in-a-box^™ solutions is very proud to announce the release of 2 new Products, EXsto™ Extranet in-a-box for SharePoint and IuGO™, SharePoint in Outlook.

With the addition of these two (2) new products, we have built an impressive line-up of components within our Alexya^™, Intranet in-a-box for SharePoint solutions to meet our customer business requirements.  With EXsto™, users will now be able to rapidly deploy a secure Extranet within hours with an in-a-box solution and provide a secure environment for your external business partners, customer or various users. 

For more information on this solution please log onto the following:  http://alcero.com/sharepoint/exsto/solution_overview.htm

 With IuGO™, users can now access most of the SharePoint list in online or offline environment thus improving workplace efficiencies.  Our objective is and continues to be to leverage the SharePoint platform and build solutions that will allow users to optimize their SharePoint.

For more information on this solution please log onto the following: http://alcero.com/sharepoint/iugo/solution_overview.htm