Microsoft SharePoint Tips and Tricks Key Terms Term Definition Introduced in: Blog template A site that allows users to quickly post information in an informal format and allow others to comment on it Module 1 Document Center A site that allows users to centrally manage all documents within an organization, and is optimized to create and use large numbers of documents; features include a document library, ability to create a personalized view of documents, view assigned tasks related to a document, a tree view navigation, and versions of a document Module 1 KPI Key Performance Indicator; a visual cue that allows an invdividual to quickly view the amount of progress made toward a goal Module 5 Meeting templates A site that allows teams to customize and manage different kinds of meetings; includes basic, blank, decision-focused, social, and multipage meetings Module 1 Search template A site that allows an individual to quickly search for information within specified parameters set by the site builder Module 4 Subsite A single site that branches off of the parent site that can inherit permissions and navigation structure from the parent site, or can be managed independently Module 1 Task list A site which allows multiple users to assign, edit, and manage assignments for projects Module 1 Team template A site that allows teams to create, organize, and share information; includes a document library, announcements list, calendar, contacts list, and links list Module 1 Wiki template A site that allows users to quickly add, edit, link web pages, and record information; a history of edits are recorded and can be restored if necessary Module 1 Workflow The ability to implement business processess on documents and items that allows users to collaborate on documents, manage project tasks, improves efficiency and productivity, and assists with the consistent use of business processes by managing the tasks and steps involved Module 2 Glossary Page 1
MICROSOFT SHAREPOINT TIPS AND TRICKS MODULE 1 SHARE AND COLLABORATE WITH COWORKERS MALE: Welcome to Microsoft SharePoint Tips and Tricks. My name is Phil Underwood. And today I'm going to be walking you through how SharePoint can help you solve various common business problems. The reason why I wanted to do it from the perspective of business problems is because a lot of times if someone just goes through and shows you features, the features may be cool, but it's hard to see how they apply to the kinds of things that you're going to be doing on a day-to-day basis. And so what I decided to do was make this webinar focus around using SharePoint to actually solve specific issues that come up for the business from day to day. SharePoint, as you probably know, is a web based collaboration tool, and it's used by teams as a central point to do things like share documents, communicate about tasks. And it can do a whole lot more than that, too. And so what we're going to do today is go through a series of business problems and how SharePoint can actually be used to help you through those business problems. SharePoint does solve problems. That's the whole reason you might be interested in implementing a SharePoint solution to begin with. And the specific problems I want to look at today are these five. Now, these are not the only things that SharePoint does, obviously, but in my own experience, these are the kinds of things that are very common, that people in workplace want to use SharePoint for. These are the kinds of issues people are trying to solve. Page 1
And so today we're going to talk about how SharePoint can be used when you are sharing and collaborating with distributed coworkers. And distributed doesn't necessarily mean all over the globe, or even all over the city. A lot of times in your larger companies, your coworkers may sit very far away from you, and it's not that you can't get up and go see them, but it can be inconvenient sometimes to keep having to do that or to keep having meetings. So if you are working with distributed coworkers, SharePoint really excels at helping overcome some of those issues. SharePoint also solves the problems of updating information that's shared by many people. In other words, we have very documents or various status stores that lots of people need to use. And sometimes that can get really unwieldy, especially when talking about Word documents or Excel. SharePoint can also be used to manage workflows where something moves from phase to phase. For example, if there's a document that needs to be signed by several people, or a particular ticket or task that needs to get approval from a certain chain of people, SharePoint can take care of that. Another problem that SharePoint can solve is getting information from different sources in a way that works for me. In other words, a lot of times when we need information, that information can be hard to find when it's scattered all throughout the enterprise. Maybe some of the information you need is in an Excel file, another one's in a database, another one is in a Word document that someone emailed you two weeks ago. And sometimes getting all that information together, figuring out where all that stuff is and pulling it together, can be a real challenge sometimes. Page 2
And then finally, just knowing what's going on. In other words, once I've identified the kind of information that I need on a regular basis, how can I put that into a format that's easy for me to read that gets updated on a regular basis. You know, we're all familiar with things like reporting tools and that kind of thing. But what about using SharePoint to illustrate this data in ways that can be immediately meaningful to us, dashboards, key performance indicators, reports that we might generate for our own use. And so these are the different things that we're going to be looking at today. So the first business problem that I want to look at today is this issue of sharing and collaborating. Now, if I could boil SharePoint down into just one business problem that it was trying to solve, it's this one. How do you share and collaborate with coworkers who are going to be potentially distributed all over the place. As you know, team members don't always sit together. Even if they're in the same building, they may not sit together. And then the problem just gets worse the more you spread out. You have employees who might be on the same team, but not even the same city, not even in the same country sometimes, depending on your organization. We also see that there's a trend that business is moving toward remote workers. Instead of teams becoming more core located and more consolidated, they're getting more spread out. You are having more people telecommute. You are having more people moving to an outsourcing model. You are having team members have to collaborate that are in different offices of the same company. And business is only Page 3
going to move more and more in this direction. It's probably not going to go the other way any time soon. So how do teams deal with this? And some of the ways we deal with it now are through email and attachments, probably one of the least attractive ways of dealing with this, because you end up with lots of emails and lots of attachments, and people have changed your attachment and mailed it back to you. Probably one of the least effective ways of dealing with a non-co-located team. We have teleconferences, whether it's telephone or video. And this is actually pretty good. And you'll probably see this more and more with Skype and other tools to help teams that are not co-located have meetings together. Instant messaging is sort of a hybrid here between these two. You have teams that have the same instant messaging program, and they can sort of chat with each other during the day that way. But SharePoint was basically built to deal with this issue. How do you take a team that has members all over the place and enable them to communicate and share things, and be on the same page all the time? This is a very basic SharePoint site. As you can see, I haven't been real creative with it. A lot of it is defaults. I didn't want a lot of stuff kind of getting in the way of the presentation. The news has witty titles like sample link 1, sample link 2. But if you've never seen SharePoint before, it will look nicer than this once you get it set up, because you customize it with your colors, your company's logo, your own photographs. You make it look how you want to look. Page 4
But one of the things that is important for understanding how SharePoint works is that SharePoint is a website that contains other websites. And that kind of throws some people sometimes, because if you look at these links up here, these sort of look like web pages, don't they? Like we have the document center page, we have the reports page, the news page. And that's not accurate. Actually what we're looking at here is the very top level of SharePoint, the top site. And what you do with SharePoint is you create sub-sites. And those sites contain sites. Now, of course you've got pages in these sites. But the point is SharePoint is like tree that goes down through your organization. So I have this top site which is my portal, and everything my business is going to share through SharePoint, and then I'm going to create sub-websites for everything else. Teams can have their own websites. Individuals can have their own websites. And even as we'll see in a minute, even meetings can have their own websites. So with that in mind, I want to tackle how SharePoint can help us deal with this issue of teams that are not co-located. Going to come over here to site actions. This just one of the ways to do this. And I'm going to come down here and create site. Now, when I'm down here in creating site, one of the things I want to draw your attention to right away are these templates. Page 5
This is really the core of how we get stuff done in SharePoint, you know, you create a website for it. And then you have these templates to help you out. I can create a website for a team. I can create a Wiki, create a blog. I also want to point out while we're in the neighborhood, these meeting templates. I'm not going to create a whole meeting website, but these meeting websites are extremely handy. What they do is you create a website for a specific meeting. It allows you to invite people. It syncs up with Outlook and all that stuff. But the real value of a meeting website is, if you look down here, it provides lists for managing the agenda, meeting attendees, and documents. So anything we do at this meeting, or anything we decide at this meeting, or any documents that would be helpful for this meeting, we can store here. And it's got to be on that website until we take the website down. So we can always come back to it, even after the meetings, and look at those documents, look at what tasks were done and what decisions were made, which is extremely, extremely useful for teams that aren't co-located. I mean how many times do you receive a meeting invitation and it's got all these attachments, and those attachments maybe even change by the time you get to the meeting, and so they have to keep sending the invite out with new revised attachments. This meeting website can just really make a lot of that go away, because that can be your repository for all those things. Page 6
But we're going to focus more on the collaboration tab. And I'm going to make a team site. I'm going to make it for the IT team. I'm a software developer by trade, and so a lot of my examples come out of that background. But they fly to just about everything. If you're in accounting, this could be an accounting website. And you see how that goes. Come up with a URL for it. Notice I have the option to set unique permission. So if I don't want anybody but the IT team in here, I can go in and say give these users permission to the IT site. Don't let anybody else in, or give everybody read only permissions, but only let the IT team make changes, you know, however I want to set that up. And then I have categories that I define myself that I can assign to this site. I'm not going to do every little possible thing we can do with these sites. I just want to show you how this is going to go. So, boom, new website, you know, and it's right here off the main navigation. I can change that if I want, but that's where it puts it by default. Now, this is a site for the IT team. And notice what it made for us. It, by default, made us a place where we can keep our documents shared. It made a shared calendar. This isn't an individual's calendar, we all share this. A shared task list, and a place where we can make team discussions, so we can have like a forum discussion right here. Page 7
And we can make our own sub-websites under the IT team site. So we can have a website for a project. We can have a website per individual on the team, you know, whatever we want to do to be able to collaborate, share information. So a couple of things I want to show you real quick that are kind of key to these things, are the calendar. We can open up the calendar. And if you've used Outlook or some other similar calendar program, this is nothing new. I can pick a date. I can come up here and I can add a new item. This can be anything, right? It can be the date of a release. It can be the day that Cathy takes PTO. It can be a meeting. It can be anything that's important to us. We can attach files to this item that might be pertinent. Let's say I'm going to have my team meeting here. And once again, if you have used Outlook before or some other kind of calendaring software, this is old hat to you. So I can make it last from nine to 10, put in whatever. Make it an all day event. People love those meetings. Make a recurring one. And notice I have the opportunity right here to go ahead and check this box and it will make one of those meeting websites for me. So I don't even have to go through that other screen to set it up. I can fill out my calendar event and say could you create a meeting website for me built around this meeting? And SharePoint will automatically do that for you, and set up a list where you put up the agenda and invite people, and attach documents to that specific meeting. I'm not going to do that right now, but as you can see, it's just extremely powerful. I hit okay, puts it on the calendar. Once again, if you're used to calendar programs this is not something that, you know, that's hugely different from what you're used to seeing. Page 8
The only thing that I would point out is that we all share this calendar. Everybody on the team can see this calendar. And we can give read and write permissions to people, however we want to manage this calendar. But we all share it, which is important. It's not just our own individual calendars. However, we can synchronize this with our Outlook. So I can go to this team calendar and I can download it into my Outlook however I want to, or export it to a spreadsheet, or whatever I want to do. I can also receive email notifications when this calendar changes. So if someone adds something, I can know right away. Another thing I wanted to show you in this section are the task lists. I can come down here to tasks. Once again, this is shared, right? So I can come in here and I can add a new task, and the task can be, you know, whatever I want. Get requirements. This is a high priority because people are always on developers' backs to get stuff going. Trust me. I can put in whatever statuses here. It's not started. Percentage complete. I can assign it to somebody. I'm going to assign it to Bill, okay. These are users that are already set up here in the server. Description, start date, due date. Do pretty quick here, Bill. And put it in there. Now, once again, the team can all see this, so I can come over here to my team task list and I can see who's working on what, what the status is, when it's due, what the percentage complete is, if there are documents that are pertinent to that task that can be attached directly to that task, it's just a great way. Page 9
If you can imagine a whole team's task list here. And, of course, I can sort to see who's assigned to what, or sort by status, whatever I need to do. And all the same actions are available to me. So I can synchronize this with my Outlook task list. I can export it to an Excel spreadsheet, especially if I want to hand it to a manger or something like that. I can receive email alerts when things change on my task list. So this is a pretty handy thing for a team, especially if we're not in the same place. We may not be able to look at the same board or things like that, so we have this electronic task list we can all contribute to. And when we have our meetings, we can talk about these tasks that we're sharing cause we've got them right in front of us. The last thing I want to talk about in this section is the creation of blogs. Now, most of us know what blogs are. And blogs, just on SharePoint, can be like any others. They can be personal blogs, you know, if you want to give your employees a way that they can express themselves and kind of share about themselves with the rest of the team, and that's fine. But you can also use blogs for all kinds of other things. And so I can create an IT team blog here that belongs to the team. I can create blogs for individuals. And the way I do that is -- remember SharePoint is a tree of websites. So at the top level we have all these different websites. IT team is a sub-site under that. Well, here in this website I can create sub-websites. And that's what this link is all about here. Page 10
So I can come down here to sites. I don't have one, and so I click create. This is all pretty intuitive. Now, as you can see, there's already things here that I could create. Quite a wide variety, actually. But assuming I want to make a blog, then I want to come down here to sites and work spaces. And you can see here that one of my template options is blog. I've got Wikis. I've got all kinds of other things. This is -- I'll call this Phil blog. Notice it's under my IT team URL. This is a sub-website under that. Hit create. And a few seconds later, now I've got a blog. I can customize the categories for my blog. I can link up photos. I can create posts, and comments, and set permissions, all kinds of stuff here for my blog. And so this can be a great way for teams to communicate and collaborate, not just within their team, but now we might actually start thinking about using this as a tool to start communicating with other departments, right? You want to know what IT team is doing? We might not give everybody public exposure to our task list, but we might give everybody access to our blog, so you can kind of see what the projects are that we're working on and what kind of discussions we're having. So as you can see, SharePoint was really built to address the business problem of sharing and collaborating with distributed teams. And we haven't even scratched the surface. There's so much more. /// /// Page 11
MICROSOFT SHAREPOINT TIPS AND TRICKS MODULE 2 UPDATING INFORMATION MALE: Now we come to the business problem of updating information that's shared by many people, because documents are oftentimes shared resources. We don't really have a lot of documents that just belong to us that nobody else is ever going to see. Usually in a business, most documents are shared. And so how do you deal with this when you have more than one person maybe who's responsible for this information or has to make updates to it? And we run into all kinds of issues, because, as you see down here at the bottom of the slide, some of the common ways of dealing with this are by emailing attachments to people or by putting the documents out on a shared drive. And you run into issues with this. One is that they can get locked to updates. You've probably run into this before, if you've got a document on a shared drive and you want to take a look at it, if someone has else already has it open and is messing it, sometimes it won't even let you do that. The other problem is also very common. Lots of local copies that getting out of sync. Because sometimes a shared drive is inconvenient for people, they make local copies of these documents. And so you've got the same document, you know, 50 -- a hundred -- on a hundred different people's machines. And if they make any changes to it, those documents are all out of sync now. This is especially problematic when people send around Word documents for revisions, because what happens is I might send the same Word document to three people. They're going to take a local copy, make their changes, and send it to me. Page 1
Well, now I've got three different Word documents, and somehow I've got to merge those changes into mine. So SharePoint gives us some tools to deal with this. And these tools center around the document center. Remember once again, what we're looking at here is a top level website with sub-websites under it. So document center here is not the SharePoint document center. It's a sub-website that it's just a generic. It happens to be called document center cause that's what it is. But we could have called it anything. And I want you to think about the fact that document center is just a type of center in SharePoint. So any other website in SharePoint, whether it's a team website or a meeting website, can all have their own document centers. And this is what a document center looks like. If I want to create one, what I can do here is go to the website I want to make a document in, come down here to site actions, come down here to create site, just like we've done in the other modules. And one of the things that I can do here is I've got -- there's document workspace, which is good for working together on one document. But what I really want to take a look at is over here in the enterprise tab, the document center. And so I could actually create a document center to help me manage my documents. And when I create a document center, it makes these little sub-websites here the documents. This is the actual document library announcements. And this is just a library of announcements that might be related to this body of documents and tasks. Page 2
So I can actually create a shared task list for people who are interested in these documents, whatever these documents are. Maybe they're IT documents. Maybe they're accounting documents, marketing, whatever. And I can make tasks and connect them to these documents. But I want to focus on the documents themselves. So I'm going to click here, documents. I already have a Word document that I put up here, the feature list for the iphone Droid 4T. I wouldn't hold your breath. I don't think this is actually going to be released any time soon. But this is the way the document library works. And I can actually, from here, I can come over here and actually create a new document straight from SharePoint. I can create a folder for my document library to help me organize things, or I can upload documents that already exist. So if I've already got a Word document or something I want to use, I can just do that over there. So I can upload one document or I can upload multiple documents, which is very handy if you are transitioning to SharePoint, and I've already got a server full of documents. I can upload a whole bunch of documents all at once, if I want to. Okay. So what I'm going to do just to show you how this works is I'm going to upload a single document. So just click browse. This is, you know, really straight forward stuff. Got this little Excel file here called feature list. And I can make any comments I want. And I click okay. This document was uploaded successfully, and it's checked out to me. Now, we'll talk about this in a minute. Need to fill out any required properties before the user connect. It's got a file name here. I can give it a title that's completely distinct from that, if I want. Page 3
And I'm just going to go ahead and check this in. Okay. So now I've got these documents. Once again, these documents are shared, a lot like if you've got a shared drive that has your documents on it. So right now it doesn't look at that different. But notice a couple of things over here. Shows me when that document was last modified. Okay, well, you know, a shared drive usually shows me that, so that's no big deal. Notice it also shows me who the last person was to modify it. And sometimes that information is not readily apparent on a shared driver. But here in SharePoint I can see right away who the last person was. Okay, so big deal, right? So now we've got documents and if somebody modifies them, we see who it was. Well, there's a whole lot more going on here. I'm going to work with this Word document a little bit. So I'm going to come down here. And I can do all kinds of things with this document. I can even make it into a webpage, I want to. Now, one thing that I want to do is, if I want to edit this document, I have to check it out. In other words, when I check this document out, it tells everybody else looking at this list somebody is working on this document right now. So when I come to edit this in Microsoft Word -- okay -- it's going to open it in Microsoft Word. Everybody else who comes to this SharePoint site who looks at this document's library will see that I have this document checked out. So they know that Phil is working on this document right now. They can still read it. They can still open it. They can still -- they still have full access to it, but they know that I'm working on it, okay. Page 4
So I can come down here and I can -- let's see -- notice my phone, can place music, stream video, have a task list. But we forgot an important phone feature. It can't actually make phone calls, so that's an important feature; don't you think? So I'm going to put the phone should make phone calls, okay. And I'm going to save. And I'm going to go ahead and close. Now, notice it says the other users can't see your changes until you check them back in, okay. So it's like these changes are committed until I actually tell it to. So it's just my local copy until I say okay. And it will say, is this a minor version, a major version, is it an overwrite? It's a version control kind of thing. So I can actually say, you know, this is a minor version change, added a feature. And I can keep it checked out or not. I'm going to hit okay. And it's going to check this file back into SharePoint. Now, since I was the last person to alter this file anyway, this may not look all that much different. But check this out. I can come down here, and I can come down here to version history. And SharePoint is going to show me all the different versions that this document has gone through, okay. So here I added a feature. The document got smaller because I actually created it in a different version of Microsoft Word, so when I saved it in this one, it got smaller. So don't panic because of that. But you'll notice here I can look at a document and see all the changes and who made them. And when I look at these different document versions, I can actually come over here and I can view the document in that versions, okay. Page 5
So let's say somebody made a bunch of bad changes in version 2. I can actually come down here in version 1 and still see what version 1 looked like, and I can actually restore that as the main version, if I wanted to. So it's an amazing way to not only manage your documents, but the changes that happens in those documents, SharePoint keeps track of all of that for you. Now, I'm looking at the properties of this document. And I can look at managing copies of this document. I can put permissions on it. There are workflows. We'll talk about workflows in a different module. I can also come to alert me, which means I can get an email if somebody starts messing around with this document. Once again, we're just scratching the surface here, but you can see some very powerful document features that work much better than email attachments and much better than simply having a file sitting on a shared drive somewhere. We have so much more power and flexibility built in to the way SharePoint manages documents. /// /// Page 6
MICROSOFT SHAREPOINT TIPS AND TRICKS MODULE 3 MANAGING WORKFLOWS MALE: So in this section I want to talk about workflows. Workflow is just a fancy word for anything that has to move through a process. A loan application, for example, not just one person handles the whole loan application. Somebody gets the application. Somebody has to review it. Somebody has to approve it. Somebody has to approve an amount. Somebody has to underwrite it. There's all kinds of steps that go into approving a loan, and usually it's different people doing it. So the work items has to flow through a process. Documents need to be approved. Purchase reports need to be approved and signed off on. Expense reports. If you really think about it, in an organization, just about every piece of your business is a workflow. Some workflows may start and stop with one person and never go outside their desk, but it's still a workflow. It's a process that something has to move through before it can get done. Well, when this process involves several people, when it's a collaborative process, sometimes it can be hard to figure out where things are at in that process or where your bottlenecks are. Ways that people deal with this is they just put things on people's desks, you know, so I have a piece of paper that I need you to sign, so I just stick it in your inbox and hope you get to it at some point. And I have no real way of knowing if you've signed it until I get it back, or if I bug you every day or whatever I need to do. Another way of dealing with this is through faxes, or email, or through standard mail. Interoffice mail; you could add this to the list as well. You have a document and you route it around for people to initial, or take a look at, or whatever it is. Page 1
Or maybe time is of the essence, so I'm going to fax you a form and you're going to fax it back to me with your signature. Another way workflows get managed is just by moving the stuff around. You walk around and you get signatures that you need, so you go from desk to desk, or you check off the items you need to check off. Most of these ways of handling workflows have a disadvantage that there's no real visibility into what's going on. And you run into some real issues with that, because, you know, if you need someone's signature and you don't get it when you need it, that can be really problematic for you. Well, who knows what else they've got to do, and they not get around to signing that piece of paper when you need them to, so there's no real way to manage that. Or maybe someone goes on vacation and you're just stuck for a week until they get back. Well, SharePoint is not a complete workflow management tool. There are other tools that have been specifically built to manage workflows at an enterprise level. But SharePoint does have a lot of built-in functionality to deal with the kind of workflows that most of us deal with on a regular basis. So it addresses some of our common workflow needs. And so I'm going to show you how SharePoint attacks some of these issues. Here I am back in the documents. And I'm going to kind of use these items that we're going to need to route around. As you can see, this document already has had a cancelled approval, cause I was messing around with this earlier to see the different things I might want to show. Page 2
So I'm going to take this document. This is the feature list for the iphone Droid 4T. Now, this isn't something that one person can come up with. We got to come up with a feature list, and people have to agree these are the features that we want. So the first workflow I'm going to start is the approval workflow. And the approval workflow is easy. I can come down here in the dropdown and just go to workflows. You'll notice there's a workflow in the history that's already been completed, just cause I was messing around with it earlier. And right here from start a new workflow, I've got approval and collect feedback. These are not the only workflows available in SharePoint. It's just since these are the most common, these are the two you can access right off the bat. There are other workflows that also involve Microsoft Word being involved. But I'm going to start here with approval. Okay. So the first thing I need to do is I need to add my list of approvers. So I'm going to rely on Bill again. I use Bill for a lot. Now, we can put more approvers here, you know, I'm not limited to just Bill. And I can search for other users and, you know, I could add Cathy in there if I want. Another thing I can do is use groups. So if you have groups set up on your server, you know, like an Outlook, you'll have groups as opposed to individuals sometimes. I can also put groups in the approval change, and that gives me my option here to assign a single task to each group. This is really handy if I need to send a document to a department for approval, and I don't know who's actually going to do it. I can sit here and say assign Page 3
the task to the group as oppose to assigning it to every individual in that group or a single individual in that group. I can put in a message to send, because what's going to happen when I put this in and kick off this workflow, it's going to create a task in SharePoint for Bill, it's going to assign it to him, and it's going to send Bill an email. And that email is going to have my message in it, and it's going to have a hyperlink back to the document in SharePoint, so that Bill can approve it immediately. So Bill's sitting in his desk, email pops up, Bill, I need your approval on this, here's a link. He clicks on the link, he clicks approve, and his job is done. And so it's a really handy way to facilitate this. You don't have to have due dates but if you want, you know, if time is of the essence, you can give them three days, and a SharePoint will bug them with email until they get it done. If I don't want people involved in the approval process but I want them to know what's going on, I can CC them so they can see the workflow. Then I hit start, okay. It's going to kick off a workflow. Notice the approval is in progress. So if I take a look at this, notice that it's assign -- there's a task here, it's assigned to Bill, and a task was created for Bill. And he was emailed with it. If we go over here and look at the task list for the document library, here it is. Please approve feature list, sign the bill. It has not been started. Here's the priority. Dot, dot, dot, here's a link straight to the document so Bill can approve it. And he's getting an email with the same information. Page 4
And so I can come here at any point and see in my task list for these documents where workflows are. I can look at the document itself and see, oh, this approval is in progress. I can open this guy up, and it will show me the workflow history, right? Here's the workflow was initiated, the task created. I can see who's approved it and who hasn't. So it's a great way to keep track of that workflow. And it will mark it as complete when the workflow is complete. Another thing that we commonly do with documents is not just get them approved, but to actually get feedback. In fact, that may even be more common. I want to send a Word document out to the team, and I want them to mess with it. And doing this through email can be really cumbersome. Everybody has their own copy of it. Doing it on a shared server, a share drive, isn't always better. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to use this Excel spreadsheet. This is an Excel feature list. I'm going to come down here to workflows. And I'm going in the collect feedback. Who's a reviewer. Let's see. Let's put Bill in. Bill's just such a busy guy, you know, this company would fall apart with him. It's just like the approvals list. I can set due dates, you know, whatever I want to do. And I can kick off this workflow. And the same thing is going to happen if I take a look at this guy's workflows. I think I accidently -- did I accidently do it for the Word document? Yes, I did, okay. So I accidently put it on the Word document, okay. So that's my bad. Page 5
But you can see I've got a workflow here to collect feedback. This is in progress. And you can see there's a task assigned to Bill. Please review for the feature list. Once again, he got an email for it. That task has not been started. If I hop over here to the task list, says please review. It's also assigned to Bill. And so Bill now has the ability to get in here and modify this task, and do whatever it is he's going to do. I can also come in and I can edit this task as well. So you notice the priorities in here are both normal. Maybe it's really, really important this review happens right away. And so I can come in and I can do things to indicate that, change the due date, whatever it is I need to do. I can also come down here and reassign this task, which is really important if I'm going to be out, okay. So Bill's going to be away on vacation, we need to have his assistant do it. That's what the reassign task is there for. /// /// Page 6
MICROSOFT SHAREPOINT TIPS AND TRICKS MODULE 4 FINDING INFORMATION MALE: So now we come to the section about getting information from different sources. This is a big business problem sometimes because you have information, you know you've seen it before, you don't remember where you saw it. Did somebody sent it to you in an email? Was it in a Word document? Was it something that came up in a meeting somewhere? Information can just simply be stored in a wide variety of sources. And so finding information that you want can sometimes be very difficult. It can be buried in folders. It can be buried in other files. I don't know how many times I've been on a shared drive somewhere and I now, you know, I'm looking maybe for a server name. And I know it's in one of these Word documents, but I don't know which one. So I'm opening Word documents, looking for the information that I want until eventually that I find it. So what are the ways people with the fact that we have information all over the place, and it can sometimes be hard to find, especially if it's in different sources. Well, one of the things that people do is they make folders with their own copies of this information. And so you end up with multiple copies around the organization. Local copies, especially. Another way people deal with this, they just ask around, you know, hey, I'm looking for this map of the third floor, I know I saw it somewhere, I don't remember where it is. Page 1
And another way people deal with it is by looking through old emails, especially emails that have attachments on them. If you can remember the last time you sorted your inbox by which emails had attachments, then you know what I'm talking about. You know you've got it in a file somewhere, but you don't know where. And this is an extremely common problem. And maybe you find it right away. Maybe it takes you a long time to track down the information you're looking for. But it's a business problem, because the only reason you don't have that information is because there's all kinds of different places it could be, and you don't have a really handy way to get at it. Well, SharePoint helps us out a great deal with that particular issue. So over here in SharePoint I want to draw your attention here to this search tab. Now, one of the things that's a little bit misleading about this setup is this setup is so small. I set up just a very small sandbox so I can show you the features that we're interested in for this webinar. And some organizations that are smaller organizations, may have a SharePoint implementation that isn't really much bigger than this. They do have, you know, maybe one document center for the whole company and one search site for the whole company. Maybe a team site here or there, but it's just not going to get much bigger than this. But for a lot of companies that are larger, what I want to encourage you to do if you're watching this and you're from a larger organization, is keep in mind that the Page 2
structure of SharePoint is websites inside of websites inside of websites. It's like you're creating your own intranet, basically And so the IT team -- I can make a search site just for the IT team. I can drill into the accounting website and make a search just for them. So I want you to keep in mind that search is actually a type of website you created by coming over here to site actions, going to create site, and then choosing search as your template. So there's all -- you may have search sub-sites all over your SharePoint implementation. It all depends on how big it is and how you want people to be able to get at the information. For the purposes of our demonstration, this is such small site, that just having one search site right off the bat that searches all the sites under this one, is going to work just fine. And it's usually not a bad idea to have a search at this level anyway, because, really, you are searching the entire SharePoint store at this point. But it makes a lot of sense if your SharePoint implementation is much larger, to go into the smaller sub-sites and create a search sub-site just for them. Once again, it's not any different than what we've worked at earlier where you come in here, you come down here to create site, and one of the templates here in enterprise is search center or search center with tabs. So you can create this as a sub-site anywhere you are. I'm going to come right back up here to the root search. Page 3
Now, what makes this search so useful as oppose to maybe, you know, searching in Outlook or doing a find in Microsoft Word, is these searches will search any of the information that SharePoint contains. Now, if you gears are turning, you know that SharePoint is more than just document management. What kind of information can we put into SharePoint? Well, we put in task lists, right? We put in calendars. We put in sub-sites specifically for meeting. And we put in document management. If you have the enterprise version of SharePoint 2007, you can even go a step further, because it has tools that enable you to connect to databases. It has tools where you can connect to SAP if you have a SAP implementation. There's just so many stores of data that SharePoint can get its fingers in. But even if you just have the regular SharePoint implementation, which is perfectly adequate for most organizations -- when I so a search, I'm searching tasks, I'm searching meetings, I'm searching, documents, I'm searching calendars, anything that might have a reference to the thing that I'm looking for. So you can actually see this in action. We call this enterprise search because it searches all over the enterprise. So I can actually come over here, and let's say do a search for feature, since I've been working with documents that deal with feature lists. So when I do my search, notice some text is coming up. This is text off my home page. Here's that document that I uploaded, that Word document that came up. Here's the Word feature showing up in text in some other websites. Here's that Page 4
feature Excel spreadsheet that came up. So we -- and we got links to those, and see file sizes and all that good stuff. We would even, you know, we even see it here in our images library. And so it really is a comprehensive search assuming that we don't do anything but put in key words. And, you know, because Microsoft is helping us out, we also have these nice little Bing searches that come up here on the side. Not too obtrusive, but enough to drop hints at you, I guess. If I come over to over to advance search, I can narrow this search down further, much like if you've used advance search with Google or something like that, or Bing, for that matter, you know, you can narrow your search. This can be very handy depending on how much you know about what you're looking for. If I know it's in a Word document somewhere I can say just search the Word documents. I can also put in things like I want to find things where the author was Bill, or where the subject does not equal this, or where it equals this and this, or -- there's just all kinds of things we can chain together depending on how much we know about what we're looking for to help narrow the search results down a bit instead of just getting, you know, every possible thing that might come up. Maybe you want every possible thing that might comes up. But it all depends on getting this information in a way that works for you. /// /// Page 5
MICROSOFT SHAREPOINT TIPS AND TRICKS MODULE 5 GETTING INFORMATION MALE: So now we come to the section where we talk about simply knowing what's going on. How do you report off of all of this data that SharePoint has stored in it. We talked about how you can search it, but how do you sort of compile all this information into ways of looking at it that are useful to you? One of the issues we run into with this business problem is data simply isn't always in a format useful for you. And sort of a correlater to this is you may not have a lot of control over how information correlated and presented. When it comes to getting reports, you don't always have a lot of control over how those reports get generated or what those reports are on. And you may want the report to look one way for you. Your manager may want the report to look differently for them. Or you may be interested in different kinds of information. And from a business prospective, this is really hard to work out, because you're a poor report writer, you know, is stuck, trying to figure out a way to tweak this report for every single person who might want to see it a little bit differently. Or what's more common is you just don't. You have a big report that's static, and I hope you can deal with this, because it's not going to get changed. So when we talk about ways of dealing with this, one of them is going through that report writing process, whether you have the access to create your own reports, which is rare and not always institutive, although there are some organizations that do that. Sometimes organizations will just hire people. Although it is kind of weird to think about, there are people whose jobs entirely consist of going over large Q Page 1
quantities of raw information and putting it into a format that's more digestible for someone else. A lot of times upper management, for example, is very interested in sort of the bottom line issues or, you know, how things are going in the business at a high level. They're not interested in every individual's task, but they are interested in seeing the trends, and the patterns, and how things are going. And so, you know, how do you get all this working data into the trenches into a nice concise format that they like? Well, you -- sometimes you have people whose entire mission in life is to do this, is to go over information, you know, project managers, a lot of times, find this to be a huge component of their job, where they get information from the team kind of in the trenches and they have to package it up in some kind of format that makes sense to decision makers. It's a hard job. And you have people specifically trained to do it. Well, I want to say at the outset that SharePoint is not a report writing tool. There are other tools that specifically do that, they're specifically written to connect to data stores and generate reports. Even Excel, for example, has a lot of reporting capabilities built into it. If you've never looked at Excel's reporting capabilities, you might want to check it out, because you might be amazed at the different charts, and graphs, and things you can produce really without knowing a whole lot about Excel. But there are other tools that do a lot of heavy duty reporting. What SharePoint is very good at is helping you put these reports together in ways and displays that make sense to you. SharePoint does have some built-in reporting capabilities, but that's not why you buy it. Q Page 2
You buy it mostly because you have data out there, you have reports that you can use, and now you want to put these together into some kind of web-based interface that you can access easily, like a dashboard that has charts on it or links to reports that you look at on a regular basis. So let's take a look at how SharePoint can address this issue. So I'm actually going to leave Phil's personal site here, and go on up to the top level of SharePoint cause that's where I've got a reports tab already working. Okay. So I've got reports here. Once again, just like everything else, I know I've said it in every single module, but it bears repeating, SharePoint is a collection of websites and sites under those, and sites under those. So for this relatively small implementation, having a report tabs that covers the entire SharePoint implementation, works just fine. If your organization is larger, this will probably get unwieldy, and what you will want to do is create a reports website in your sub-sites that are relevant to that. So you want to create a report sub-site in the accounting team's website and the IT team's website. And just like any of the other website types, it all comes from site actions, create sites, and then you pick the site you want from the templates. If you ever have a chance just to play around with SharePoint, that can be a lot of fun in and of itself. And every website you make can be deleted. So it can be kind of fun sometimes just to hop over here to create site, and just start messing around with all these templates, and playing around with them, and customizing them, you know, in all honesty, that is a great way to learn SharePoint, is just by playing around with those kinds of things. Q Page 3