September 22

Top 6 New Features for SharePoint Designer 2010 Workflows by on 9/22/2010 11:56 AM Category: SharePoint 2010; Productivity; Business Processes; Workflows Hannah Short, Business Analyst, Allyis, Inc. Hannah works as a Business Analyst on the solutions team at Allyis. Her primary role is to collect, review, analyze, prioritize and document business and system requirements. She has extensive experience designing, developing and administering custom SharePoint team sites and has implemented successful SharePoint solutions for clients such as Microsoft and Anchor QEA. What are my favorite new features for SharePoint Designer workflows? 1. Reusable workflow This new feature allows you to create a workflow that can be applied to as many lists or libraries on the site as you need. The reusable workflow can be attached to a list or library using both SharePoint Designer or using the workflow settings page in the UI. In addition, the reusable workflow can be associated with a particular site content type. The workflow can then only be activated only on lists or libraries containing that content type, which eliminates the need to build a check content type action into the workflow itself. 2. SharePoint Designer ribbon allows easy access to workflow building blocks The SharePoint Designer ribbon is your one-stop-shop for all the tools and parts you need to create your workflows. 3. Workflow action prompt You can now type your workflow logic directly into the workflow. SharePoint Designer will prompt you with the possible actions that match what you are typing. This makes creating each step in your workflow much more efficient. 4. Customize out of the box workflows Using SharePoint Designer, you can now customize the out-of-the-box workflows that come with every SharePoint site. This means that you can make small tweaks and adjustments to the pre-configured workflows without having to create your own custom workflow from scratch. 5. Impersonation step The impersonation step allows the workflow to perform all actions within that step with the permissions of the author of the workflow, not the person who initiates the workflow. This means that the workflow can perform actions the user would otherwise be restricted from doing on the site – for example copying an item or document to another library to which the user has only visitor access. 6. Two-way import/export between SharePoint Designer and Microsoft Visio Premium 2010 This new feature allows SharePoint workflows to be built visually using tools in Visio 2010 and exported directly into SharePoint Designer. Using the Microsoft SharePoint Workflow template in Visio (found in the “Flowcharts” template section), you will get access to all the actions and conditions available within SharePoint Designer. The screenshot above is only a small sample of those available. In addition, workflows already created within SharePoint Designer can be imported into Visio for visual representation. Bonus! Workflows no longer have to be tied to a list item Although not specifically a feature of SharePoint Designer, there is a new feature for 2010 and I believe it is worth mentioning: Workflows in 2010 do not have to run on a single list item or document. The new Document Set feature of SharePoint Server 2010 allows you to bundle together different types of documents into groupings that make sense for your business. Rather than having to run a workflow on each individual document within the set, you can now run a single workflow on the entire Document Set.

How to Improve Workflow Performance in SharePoint Server 2010

Throttle

The workflow throttle setting controls how many workflows can be processing at any one time on the entire server farm. This setting does not control how many workflows can be "In Progress" concurrently, but rather how many can be actively using the processor. When this number is exceeded, workflow instances that are started and events that wake up dehydrated workflows are queued for later processing. The default value is 15. This setting is per farm, so the number of front-end Web servers is irrelevant.
The impact of this setting is that when a workflow starts, the number of currently active workflows is checked. If it exceeds the throttle number, the workflow is not started and instead, a timer job is created to try running the workflow later. If the number of currently active workflows is less than the throttle setting, the workflow is started.
You can check the current throttle setting by running the following command:
stsadm -o getproperty -pn workflow-eventdelivery-throttle
You can change the throttle setting by running the following command, in which you can replace 25 with the new value:
stsadm -o setproperty -pn workflow-eventdelivery-throttle -pv "25"
The throttle property exists to allow you to control how many resources workflows require in your environment. Because you cannot designate dedicated "workflow servers" the way you can for index or query servers, this mechanism prevents workflows from overrunning your environment.

Batch Size
The batch size property can be secondary to the throttle property. This fact applies only in Scenario 1 (discussed earlier), where we are dealing with initial workflow starts. If the throttle setting restricts a particular workflow instance from starting (because too many workflow instances are running), no work items for that instance are released, regardless of the batch size setting. In this case, the UI shows a status of "Starting" for the workflow instance. The workflow is run by the timer service when the throttle limit is no longer exceeded.
An important point regarding your throttle setting is that workflows that are being run by the timer service do not count against your throttle limit. From a performance perspective, then, the throttle prevents the W3WP process from being overloaded, and the batch size setting prevents the timer service from being overloaded. Working together, and in conjunction with the workflow timer interval and the workflow timeout (discussed later), these settings help to keep your environment running smoothly while still handling the work necessary for thousands of workflow instances.
You can check the current batch size setting by running the following command:
stsadm -o getproperty -pn workitem-eventdelivery-batchsize
You can change the batch size setting by running the following command, in which you can replace 125 by the new value:
stsadm -o setproperty -pn workitem-eventdelivery-batchsize -pv "125"

Timeout
he timeout setting specifies the amount of time (in minutes) in which a workflow timer job must complete before it is considered to have stopped responding and is forced to stop processing. Jobs that time out are returned to the queue to be reprocessed later.
The default timeout period is five minutes, which should be sufficient for most environments. However, if your workflows require more time to start, complete tasks, or modify other workflows (especially when running under load), you must increase this property value. Understand, though, that if a workflow instance encounters a problem that causes it to wait for a response (from an external system, for example) before the first commit point, you could encounter throttle issues because that waiting workflow instance is still considered part of the count of your currently running workflows that the throttle property monitors. This condition could prevent other workflow instances from processing.
You can check the current timeout setting by running the following command:
stsadm -o getproperty -pn workflow-eventdelivery-timeout You can change the timeout setting by running the following command, in which you can replace 10 by the new value:
stsadm -o setproperty -pn workflow-eventdelivery-timeout -pv "10"
Workflow Timer Interval The workflow timer interval specifies how often the workflow SPTimer job fires to process pending workflow tasks. This interval also represents the granularity of delay timers within your workflow. If a timer is set to delay for one minute, but the interval timer fires only every five minutes, the workflow delays for five minutes, not one minute.
For performance considerations, if your workflow creates a lot of work items, you can use this setting, in conjunction with the batch size, to control the processing of those settings. For example, with a batch size of 100 (the default) and a timer interval of five minutes (the default), Windows SharePoint Services processes at most 100 work items every five minutes. If the batch of 100 work items for one workflow instance finishes processing in two seconds, your workflow instance is sitting idle for 4 minutes and 58 seconds. This may be acceptable; it may not. Decreasing this interval setting allows more batches to process by causing the timer to fire more often and request more work to do; but it also means that workflow processing consumes more server resources.
The minimum value for this setting is 1, which means that the timer will fire every minute.
You can check the current interval setting by running the following command, in which you replace the URL with a valid path to a SharePoint application:
stsadm -o getproperty -pn job-workflow -url http://myWssServer You can change the interval setting by running the following command, in which value is a valid SPTimer schedule string:
stsadm -o setproperty -pn job-workflow -pv value -url http://myWssServer

Infopath form services in sharepoint 2010

Some times Infopath form services are not available in sharepoint(2010) under general application settings in central admin.



How to get this links?

Follow this steps to get the infopath form services in sharepoint cetral admin.

1) Install the feature "IPFSAdminWeb" either by using stsadm or PS(Powershell)
2) After this feature is installed the infopath form services will be availabel, if this feature is not available then we need to activate this feature explicitly in sharepoint central admin. This can be done through stsadm or PS.




3) If everything works fine then well and good but some times when we click on infopath form services then we will get the page not found error.

Then there should sharepoint version problem. If sharepoint Client Access License is installed then this will cause the problem.

4) How to change the version
Open SharePoint Central Administration and went to the (i.e. upgradeandmigration.aspx on the Central Admininstration site).
In the "Upgrade and Patch Management" section click on the "Convert farm license type" link to bring up the Conversion.aspx page.
Enter in the new product key and convert to the "SharePoint Server with Enterprise Client Access License" edition.
Now go back to the General Application Settings page in SharePoint Central Administration and you should now see the "InfoPath Forms Services" section with its links.

The Wiki Homepage Feature

The Wiki Homepage Feature

When you create a blank site in SharePoint 2010 the homepage (default.aspx) will be a web part page as usual. But now there’s a new feature called “Wiki Page Home Page”.

When you activate the feature it creates a document library called “SitePages”, adds a wiki page named “default.aspx” and set it as the new homepage for the site.

The feature transforms your whole site to a wiki. Every time you create a new page it will create a new wiki page and store it in the “SitePages” lib (similar to the publishing features in 2007).

For sure you can tag Wiki pages as any other page as described in my previous post Managing Metadata in SharePoint 2010.

Content

While in SharePoint you could only write some rich text, you now could upload files (will be stored as a separate file) and add Web Parts.

No joke, you can now add Web Parts at any place within the wiki rich text!

[[Wiki Linking]]

In SharePoint 2010 you will get an intellisense like linking experience. That’s kind of cool :-) Just an enter [[ and press ctrl+space


You can now link easily pages, lists, items, documents and views.

Enterprise Wiki Layouts

Additionally there’s a new Site Collection feature called “Enterprise Wiki Layouts” for creating a large-scale wiki with categories and page layouts.

Seems to be correlated with the publishing infrastructure, because the feature add a new page layout content type. This means you can create wiki page layouts with SharePoint Designer 2010.
Click and see the beautiful new SharePoint 2010 error message.
Never mind this a technical preview and lot of things already work great. Can’t await to continue with the beta in November…

PDF Ifilter SharePoint 2010

 These notes are based on SharePoint 2010 Beta 2 (made publicly available in November 2009). Once the product has officially launched on 12 May 2010, an update will be posted if any changes are made to the process. The process is very similar to SharePoint 2007, with minor changes to folder location (14 instead of 12) and a slightly different administration user interface in the browser.

SharePoint Server 2010, like its predecessors, includes indexing and search capabilities. But what doesn’t come out of the box is the ability to index and search for PDF documents. PDF is a format owned by Adobe, not Microsoft. If you want to be able to find Adobe PDF documents, or have the PDF icon appear when viewing PDF files in a SharePoint document library (see image above), you will need to set it up for yourself. This post describes how to.

1. Download and install Adobe’s 64-bit PDF iFilter* http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=4025
2. Download the Adobe PDF icon (select Small 17 x 17) – http://www.adobe.com/misc/linking.html
   1. Give the icon a name or accept the default: ‘pdficon_small.gif’
   2. Save the icon (or copy to) C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\IMAGES
3. Edit the DOCICON.XML file to include the PDF icon
   1. In Windows Explorer, navigate to C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\XML
   2. Edit the DOCICON.XML file (I open it in NotePad, you can also use the built-in XML Editor)
   3. Ignore the section <ByProgID> and scroll down to the <ByExtension> section of the file
   4. Within the <ByExtension> section, insert <Mapping Key=”pdf” Value=”pdficon_small.gif” /> attribute. The easiest way is to copy an existing one – I usually just copy the line that starts <Mapping Key=”png”… and replace the parameters for Key and Value (see image below)
   5. Save and close the file
      
4. Add PDF to the list of supported file types within SharePoint
   1. In the web browser, open SharePoint Central Administration
   2. Under Application Management, click on Manage service applications
   3. Scroll down the list of service apps and click on Search Service Application
   4. Within the Search Administration dashboard, in the sidebar on the left, click File Types
   5. Click ‘New File Type’ and enter PDF in the File extension box. Click OK
   6. Scroll down the list of file types and check that PDF is now listed and displaying the pdf icon.
   7. Close the web browser
5. Stop and restart Internet Information Server (IIS)*² Note: this will temporarily take SharePoint offline. Open a command line (Start – Run – enter ‘cmd’) and type ‘iisreset’
6. Perform a full crawl of your index. Note: An incremental crawl is not sufficient when you have added a new file type. SharePoint only indexes file names with the extensions listed under File Types and ignores everything else. When you add a new file type, you then have to perform a full crawl to forcibly identify all files with the now relevant file extension.

That’s it. If you now perform a search, PDF files should be displayed in results where they match the search query, along with the PDF icon on display in results. The icon should also be visible in any document libraries that contain PDF files.

Object Model Server Architecture

Collaborate with Colleagues Using SharePoint My Sites

Today, I want to share one of the ways you can get the most out of the social capabilities in Microsoft SharePoint 2010 by promoting the use of My Sites within an organization.

There’s a lot of buzz today about social networking within an organization, and with good reason! According to Gartner, “It is no longer a question of if an enterprise should invest in social software, but when, from which provider and for what business purposes.” and by 2015, 40% of large enterprises will have a corporate "Facebook," for circulating both business and personal data. (Gartner, Predicts 2011: When Social and Business Processes Collide, November 19, 2010) When done right, enterprise social networking can be a very valuable tool in helping employees find colleagues with the expertise they need to solve a problem or better serve customers. SharePoint has included My Sites since the 2003 version, and today in 2010 they are better than ever at helping people locate one another and the critical business information they share, enabling everyone to do their jobs more efficiently and feel more connected across the enterprise.

Now onto the good stuff! SharePoint My Sites is only as valuable as the information people contribute, which you can do easily by leveraging tools such as tagging, document and photo libraries and colleague connections. So in an already busy work environment, how do you ensure your employees understand the value of My Sites? Below are some tips for driving adoption in your organization.

• Identify a select group of early adopters who can spread the word about My Sites among their colleagues. Showcase them through email, a newsletter or an Intranet feature story, citing personal examples of how My Sites has improved their everyday work life. Also, reach out to the avid consumer social network users in your organization to become early adopters and promoters of safe, secure social networking inside the organization.
• Use My Sites as a marketing tool inside organizations. For example, smaller teams within a larger organization can boost their profile by making sure their My Sites are completely utilized. Each team member can list expertise, share documents, tag material and update newsfeeds, making them easier to find in an organization. In fact, simply saving your documents to your My Site will make it much easier for people to find out what you know and benefit from your work. It is much easier to find files by looking up people in SharePoint.
• Make My Sites your own. Custom skins that live on top of SharePoint allow organizations to brand My Sites, helping drive interest and loyalty. The theme might be for your department, role, or a corporate HR-sponsored initiative—whatever is most relevant for your business.
• Incorporate filling out My Sites as part of an employee orientation. This helps quickly drive adoption and ensures employees know how to properly utilize the tool. Many of your new employees will already be familiar with these tools as consumers and successful job seekers.
• Encourage high-profile executive involvement. When your executives share, they set the tone for everyone. Using the built-in blog on a My Site is a great way for executives to share trip reports, reflections on the business, and career development tips. This knowledge is shared more visibly and persistently than in email and encourages other employees to share their experiences as well.

We use My Sites widely across Microsoft, and from personal experience, it has helped me engage colleagues more quickly, locate expertise and find the information I need to not only do my job better, but be more efficient. When I can find the right contact for a customer by doing a people search, take advantage of colleagues’ presentation by finding it on their My Sites, or stay in touch with a colleague through their personal updates, SharePoint is enabling me to benefit from the power of social computing in the enterprise. That makes me more productive, effective and connected in today’s fast-paced world of business.