Unleash extra power to SharePoint 2007 Workflows

April 4, 2010   14:06

I’m very enthusiastic about the Nintex Workflow product. With Nintex Workflow it is possible to build very advanced workflows. The downside of course, is that that Nintex is a 3rd party product and therefore it isn’t available in all my projects. In that case I will have to rely on the normal SharePoint Designer Workflows.

The problem with normal workflow actions is that they are designed to work inside a single web. It is not possible, for example, to create a new list item in a different web. Creating list items in different webs is a very powerful feature, because it allows us to interact with different site areas and we might also want to initiate new workflows over there.

To overcome the short come of these standard workflow actions, we can use the SharePoint web services. But there is one major problem: SharePoint Designer Workflows don’t have a workflow action that allows you to call SharePoint web services.

Luckily I found a project at CodePlex which allows us to do just that. The iLoveSharePoint project contains a subproject with the name SharePoint Designer Actions V1.0. Download this expansion for SharePoint Designer and install it at your SharePoint farm.

Below I will provide a few demonstration steps that will use the following new SharePoint Designer Actions from iLoveSharePoint:

• Call a WebService
• Query XML

The “Call a WebService” action will allow us to communicate with the Microsoft SharePoint web services and provides us with an almost unlimited range of extra development possibilities. The small downside is that these actions are advanced and that it takes some time to configure them.

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Posted in SharePoint, Tools | Permalink | Read 3 comments

SharePoint 2010 Mobile Web Part development

January 17, 2010   22:15

For a SharePoint 2010 demo i’m building a web part that should be accessible by Mobile devices. In SharePint 2010 all mobile devices are redirected by default to the mobile SharePoint rendering engine.

The mobile rendering engine of SharePoint provides mobile users access to the sites with a completely stripped interface. Its main function is to list all libraries and to provide basic access to them. For wiki and blog sites the rendering engine also provides some content rendering.

To keep the amount of data as low as possible, almost all web parts are completely stripped from the mobile site. Only when a web part developer provided a special mobile version of the web part, the web part will be accessible in the interface and to keep the mobile screen as empty as possible, the user must first expand the web part via its title to see it.

Documentation about SharePoint Mobile development is provided at MSDN. At first it all looks quite complex, but building a mobile version of a web part is actually not that hard. Below I will explain the required steps with a ‘Hello world’ example. For this sample I will not rename the default object names provided by the Visual Studio templates.

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Posted in .NET, SharePoint | Permalink | Read 16 comments