Digital Signatures in Office/SharePoint using a Tablet PC (Video Demo)

This week I watched a webinar by SharePoint MVP Laura Rogers on approval processes in SharePoint. One of her demonstrations showed how digital signatures could be used in Word documents as part of the approval process.

Out-of-the-box, a digital signature

SharePoint Online for the Entrepreneur

{my article originally posted at IT Martini}

On June 28th, Microsoft launches its long-awaited upgrade to its traditional cloud services. What was known as Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) now becomes Office 365, which brings a suite of powerful SaaS tools to your fingertips, including:

-Exchange Online (e-mail)
-Lync Online (instant messenger)
-Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote)
-SharePoint Online (web-based collaboration)

Office 365 is a big deal for business owners and SMB's in that it provides access to enterprise-class solutions at an economical price. As a SharePoint consultant, I'm particularly excited about this offering due to the inclusion of SharePoint Online (SPO), and the opportunities that this powerful collaboration tool brings to the entrepreneur who has started, or is looking to start, their own business. In this short article, I'll just mention a few of the features that I think are pretty exciting:

From On-Premise to the Cloud

Some of you may have given SharePoint a try already, by installing the free version of the server product within your office. Unless your organization has good IT resources, you might have discovered that maintaining a server product like SharePoint is not the easiest task. Thankfully, Office 365 puts those days behind you. As a cloud offering, you can rest comfortably, knowing that trained Microsoft professionals are caring for your intranet data, instead of your colleague's nephew who took a few Comp Sci classes last semester.

Long Live the List

Many of us are used to storing and sharing our tabular data in spreadsheets. With SPO, we can now begin to embrace the concepts of Lists (or as I like to call them, spreadsheets on steroids). Imagine having all the basic power of a spreadsheet, as well as the additional benefits of customized Views, simultaneous collaboration of the data within your team, and the ever-important value of having one version of "the truth" - all available from any Internet-enabled browser or smartphone.

Office Web Apps

You don’t have to sell many people on the value of using one of the most familiar and widely-used office applications suites of all time. SPO provides an excellent place to store, search for, and collaborate on Office documents. But in addition, it also now allows you to view, edit and share these documents via your browser, with more fidelity and feature-parity than you might expect. In addition to the flexibility of this feature, it provides a great opportunity for the SMB to manage the costs of buying full software packages for themselves or their employees.

Say Goodbye to the Yellow Puppy

What if I told you that you could put all your files into one big filing cabinet without worrying about how to categorize them, and still find exactly what you need when you need it? If you're an office worker from the days of 10-levels-deep file system folder organization, you'd say I was crazy. But today we've got to realize that indexing search engines are extremely powerful. SharePoint Search can find your file in an instant, regardless of its location in the site, and can also search through the contents of your files, including PDFs. So, gone are the days of watching the WindowsXP yellow search puppy for 5 minutes while you scan thru your C: drive for a single document.

Make Your Developers Happy

One major difference between BPOS and Office 365 that should please any company making use of custom solutions (like Web Parts) in their SharePoint site is the new ability to deploy sandboxed-solutions - easily deployable custom-code solutions specifically designed to be safe for the stability of your SharePoint installation. This has great implications for those companies with in-house developers who want to take full advantage of the customization options of SPO, but could also provide value in terms of standardization and configuration management for the company that wants to outsource their development.

Business Process Automation

Workflows provide the ability to automate your real-world manual processes, providing better governance, insight, and auditing of your company's activity. In the full-version of SharePoint, workflows are a major feature, and many well-developed workflows come right out of the box, including document Approval, Feedback, and Review workflows. SPO currently only provides a simple three-state workflow, but even this can be used effectively. Perhaps you need to track your Sales Opportunity activity - a three-state workflow can manage the flow of that process by assigning persons to each state of the process - e.g. 'Potential Lead', 'Lead Contacted', and 'Business Acquired'. Now there's less of a need to call everyone on your sales team to figure out what's going on with all your clients - you can check the status and history of the workflows and see for yourself!

SPO has many great advantages over on-premise installations for the small company, and together with the full feature set of Office 365, promises to be a game-changer for many entrepreneurs.

SharePoint Saturday India

I just finished presenting my SharePoint Dev presentation for SharePoint Saturday India. (my first presentation that I’ve had to deliver at 3:30AM EST – yes, I said AM)   This is a presentation I originally presented for a local conference back in February, so I’ve referenced my original slide deck posting above.

I think it’s very kool that I was able to participate in an international event like this one. In my session I know that at least a few countries (India, Australia, South Africa) were represented.

I hope the attendees were able to get value out of my content, and hopefully were also able to appreciate my use of Transformers in my slide deck (with $700 million in worldwide movie sales, I suspect India knows about Transformers as well).

Recordings of the sessions should be available in a few weeks – I’ll let you know how to get them once they’re published.  Kudos to the organizers like Alpesh Nakar, and kudos to Live Meeting for hanging in there and delivering my presentation live out to the world. : )

Published at NBSP

One of my articles has just been published over at NothingButSharePoint.com (a very useful site for SharePoint info of all kinds).  I’m happy to join an impressive list of writers over at NBSP, and I plan to add more articles in the future.  Take a look and lemme know what you think!

Top 4 Signs that your Users are embracing SharePoint

{my article published at EndUserSharePoint.com – June 2011}

Have you ever been in an organization, big or small, where SharePoint has been in place for months (or years?), but when you look around, you realize it’s not being used to its full potential? I’m not talking about something big like they’re not using InfoPath for their forms automation, or not using Business Connectivity Services to expose their data through external content types. I’m talking about the organizations who are simply storing old archived documents in a library still named “Shared Documents”, and whose most elaborate web part is the one that shows today’s weather forecast. :) I’m talking about the organization that installed SharePoint, but obviously never heard a good speech about how SharePoint can be used effectively to make their work life more productive.

So let’s say, one day they finally get to hear the speech, and they’re now armed with enough knowledge to get some good end-user SharePoint collaboration going. Other than seeing someone running down the hall with a cowbell screaming “I gotta have more SharePoint, baby!”, how do you know that your users are finally starting to drink the SharePoint kool-aid and use it collaboratively? Well, in true Letterman-style, here are my Top 4 Signs that your Users are embracing SharePoint:

InfoPath: Team Development

InfoPath can be your best friend when it comes to building dynamic and engaging forms in SharePoint that your customers can use to interact with their data in a rich and visual manner.  In many ways, it’s suitable even for the Power user to quickly produce a feature-rich form.  But I think it becomes even more powerful in the hands of a team of SharePoint Developers, who can fully explore advanced design options like data integration, complex rules generation, and even incorporation of code-behind files.

As with any SharePoint development technology, it’s important to follow good practices when developing in a team environment.  This series (which you can follow with the infopath-TeamDev tag) will look at several aspects of InfoPath team development, and attempt to offer helpful advice on best practices.

Some of the challenges we’ll look at will include:

• versioning your team work
• working in parallel
• managing data connections

We’ll also explore useful team dev tips, like incorporating Template Parts, using data field naming conventions, and maximizing the power of InfoPath Rules.

Let’s see where this ride takes us!  More posts to come.

Heartland SharePoint Conference Redux

Ever since ICC presented the Microsoft Heartland Region SharePoint Conference 2011 in February, and even after a mini encore presentation via online webinar in March, I’ve had a few people ask me where they can get all the presentation slide decks from ICC’s SharePoint team in one convenient location.  Poof! Your wish is granted!:

		Make Your Developers Love You! (aka SharePoint 2010 ALM for Dev Managers) -Ricardo Wilkins
		Success with SharePoint 2010 – Over and over and over again! -Mario Fulan
		Getting SharePoint 2010 Deployments Right -Veenus Maximiuk
		Social Networking Features and Governance in SharePoint 2010 -Chris Rygielski