With [...]]]> I have been hacking around for a few weeks with some web app frameworks in order to prototype a few application ideas. Now I’m not a developer by trade, I consider myself to be a ‘technical’ BA (see my earlier post on business analysts) and I’m always interested in learning new technologies.

With this in mind, I started playing around with Django (I’d been toying with Python and natural language processing so Django was a natural extension) and then gave Rails a shot after hearing people buzzing about it for a few years.

“I came for rails but I stayed for Ruby”

I heard this phrase many times when reading through the mountains of posts on the subject and it couldn’t be more accurate. Like I said earlier, I’m not a developer but I can read and make vague sense of most mainstream languages but I have never seen anything so intuitive and obvious as Ruby. The syntax is clear, it doesn’t contain a lot of onerous escaping semi-colons or braces, or use excessive indenting, it just reads so cleanly. Conventions like using question marks (empty?) just make so much sense and makes reading and writing Ruby so easy.

Up and running with a new Rails app in 5 minutes

It really is incredibly easy to create a basic skeleton app in 5 minutes (assuming you have an environment setup already – which is max 30 minutes anyway!). Using generators and gems like awesome twitter-bootstrap gets you not just a basic skeleton but also an incredibly functional UI framework ready to build upon (I love you twitter-bootstrap!).

Less focus on arduous scaffolding, more time to prototype!

For me, the beauty of Rails is being able to quickly mock-up up an idea without spending several hours building the scaffolding before I can put in anything useful. I can draw a quick data model and a few UI sketches on paper and translate this into Rails in under 30 minutes to get my idea out of my head and into something *real*.

I’ve tried in the past to transpose my ideas in different ways, sketching UIs on paper, building PowerPoint/Prezi presentations of key concepts, Balsamiq mock-ups and stream-of-conscious sessions into text files, but they never went anywhere because they were always abstract – there was no ‘easy’ step to transition to something real. I’d always get lost / sidetracked choosing platforms, technology stacks and eventually find myself looking at a detailed jQuery library on some low-level UI element that probably had nothing to do with my app in the first place.

Something tangible, something flexible

Rails gives you powerful tools to get something out quickly and then build upon with a robust toolset (RSpec, Cucumber) to ensure you aren’t cutting corners and allows your 10 minute prototype can transition into a robust application.

Sure there is a learning curve, but its the easiest of the bunch (IMO) powered by a beautiful language and backed by a vibrant and vocal community.

Let the ideas flow…

With that said, lets see if any of my half-baked ideas eventuate into anything other than personal playgrounds – Github be ware, I feel a large amount of commits coming from this ‘non-developer’..

By definition, the title ‘business analyst’ is very vague and naturally differs significantly depending on the context, corporate environment and personalities involved. I [...]]]> Recently I have wondering a lot about the role of the ‘Business Analyst’, a role which I reluctantly use for myself, as it has such a wide variety of meanings and contexts.

By definition, the title ‘business analyst’ is very vague and naturally differs significantly depending on the context, corporate environment and personalities involved. I meet a lot of people who call themselves business analysts but really have no formal ‘analysis’ skills, would stare blankly when you asked them what a use case was and haven’t heard of the UML acronym. Now I’m not saying that every self-described BA necessarily needs to understand these traditional methods, but I want to drill into what I perceive to be the role of a BA and not the misnomer perpetuated by recruitment agents with a lack of understanding of the role.

The context – IT/Technology projects

The context of my definitions relate to the world of the IT, or whatever industry buzzword you want to call it, where software is developed to solve business problems.

The role – the generalist ‘Business Analyst’

In a simplified project model, we have several role types; developers, business analysts, testers and project management (remember I said simplistic model!). Within this limited and generalised role scope, business analysts are defining the requirements and assisting the development team with what they need to develop the application and solve the business problem.

Yeah, yeah. We all know what a business analyst does – they define requirements. They write a business requirements document. They either have a deep domain knowledge or liaise closely with those that do, and churn out documents which the development team diligently read and build from, right?

Well, while this certainly true and works in some organisations, this is not a good model. A business analyst does need to be a subject matter expert (SME) and being a SME does not automatically qualify you as being a business analyst. The larger an organisation is, the more prevalent and accepted this notion seems to be and how blurred the line between business analyst and SME becomes.

The cross-functional team and generalised specialists

A good project team consists of good people, skilled resources who work well together and apply their various skills to solve the over business problem, tackling small obstacles and changing requirements throughout the project’s lifecycle. Agile teams talk strongly about having cross-functional team members and there is interesting debate on the notion of the ‘generalised specialist’.

According to Scott (Ambler), a generalizing specialist is someone with a good grasp of how things fit together and as a result of this they tend to have greater understanding of what the team is working on.

In my view, everyone on the project team should be a generalised specialist. A business analyst does not need to know how to write code and participate in performance testing, but understands the concepts, participates in team discussions and has a few specialities which are accepted and can utilised the team. It is not uncommon for a cross-functional BA to perform comprehensive data analysis and modelling or a developer assisting the test team by writing a test harness to expedite performance testing.

So what’s wrong with the SME-as-BA model?

Nothing as long as it conforms to the above principals. The problem occurs with BAs who have strong subject (usually from many years in the business) but not a good grounding in analysis principals, methodologies and can not bring other skills to the project team. These SME resources are of course crucial to the project to provide insight and understanding of business operations, they may not be the best fit for the business analyst role.

Cross functional is the key

So how does a BA operate without having adequate domain knowledge? By having a varied functional toolkit, a BA can use their elicitation, modelling, analysis and documentation skills to engage the relevant stakeholders and produce the right outcomes (which are typically requirements documents but may be much more than just a single BRD) tailored for their audience.

I think the last part of the above statement is crucial – ‘tailored’ for their audience. Who are you producing the document for, is it a large development team, an offshore team, a single developer? Do they understand UML, do they like UML, do they prefer requirement statements, do they ignore documentation and develop from phone calls (most likely!) and how would you mitigate this by providing tailored documentation?

There is nothing worse than the template zombie phenomenon. Find the template, keep the structure, replace the content. This not only bores to death anybody who gets past page 5, it also severely constrains the BA to a certain way of thinking. Sure your organisation may have a defined process complete with templates but these can always be built upon – not blindly followed.

Tailor to your audience and challenge when there is a better way!

You might call it idealist, but challenging the status quo isn’t mission impossible. If you project/organisation has written BRDs with requirement statements as bullet points for 10 years that’s not a good reason for continuing to do so. Why not propose a quick use case model to structure your thoughts? PM doesn’t like use cases? That’s okay, you need them as part of your workflow so can do a use case model at least to map your thoughts, get the structure for things and take a few people on your journey, showing them how its useful, why you do it and how it all links in. Your PM still might not like it, but the development team finds it useful to get context and so you can include it. If you have found yourself being dictated what deliverables you need to produce and what they contain, you are not alone! Its not a great environment to work in but there is scope to change minds, and even if that is too politically challenging, then there is always scope to utilise your own methods and practices that might be beneficial for the team.

Document management (particularly older document management systems) are often loathed, regarded as annoying and prohibitive tools that inhibit efficiency and require too much overhead. In some organisations their use is mandated but not followed, others enforce their use across the board and some prefer an organic approach to let the author choose his poison.

Let’s face it, we’ve all used them (or at least heard others cursing at them) and likely been frustrated at a seemingly simple ‘save’ action taken an unnecessarily long amount of time. So why do a select few push their use so so strongly? Do the perceived benefits really outweigh the annoying overhead required in their day-to-day use? To answer the question let me first describe the ‘organic’ world of no document management.

Organic (or no) document management

Some organisations prefer not to, or simply haven’t found reason to, enforce use of a document management system. In such an environment, the main document ‘store’ will likely be the ubiquitous ‘network share’ – that extremely well-organized set of nested folders and wide assortment of filenames. The person who created and/or maintains the folder structure has no problem finding what they need (every other employee struggles and constantly emails for the same document link) and the systems works well until Mark from accounting (* no real names or job titles used of course!) accidentally deletes the project folder and the backup from yesterday loses your days work. Sarcasm aside, the system can work in smaller environments with less than 20 or so employees but even they would benefit from a more structured approach.

Versioning? (which version was that again)

Another familiar scenario: Once the document you were after has been located, you scratch your head and wonder if v0.13 is the current version or whether what John was saying about still using the approved v0.11 still holds true. A quick email/call/rush-to-his-desk would clear that up, but he’s not there….

We know the problem – multiple versions of the same thing and we usually go with the latest, which is always a best guess and there are many reasons why the highest version isn’t necessarily the right answer (pending PCR, unapproved feedback, draft mistakes in latest etc.). Explicitly knowing the right version to use without needing to ask saves time – and saves rework, but is it worth the hassle?

Concerns with document management systems

So why don’t people warm to the concepts of document management? Let’s take a look at a few common complaints:

• It takes too much time to make a simple save
• It asks for too much extra information
• It’s too slow
• I can’t figure out how to save something
• What’s a check in?

Most of the above issues are related purely to usability, with some down to implementation, but the main inhibitor always seems to the systems usability. A document management solution needs to be ubiquitous and provide no more (or only slightly more) effort than hitting the Word save icon.

Some of these issues are inherently present in the design of the solution, particularly from the bigger industry players, but a lot of pain can be saved in the implementation by not saddling the users with too much metadata to complete and providing seamless integration into MS Office and popular document creation products.

Cost vs. Benefits? Is the value proposition really worth it?

Without debating the pros/cons of particular product offerings (an entire post on it’s own), is the benefit of using a document management offering really worth the pain/annoyances of their day-to-day use?

To me the answer is a resounding yes, but proportional to the overhead required by the particular implementation. For me, coming from a technical SharePoint consulting background, I am able to easily setup a painless and *almost* seamless document management experience for my projects with the required admin access and up-front planning (or help from IT team to get what I need created)*. What takes a day (max) to create upfront before a project saves not just me, but each team member, multiple days of frustrating effort attempting to locate and share documents.

* I reference SharePoint as it is commonly available in organisations, but the same holds true for other platforms with configurable ECM/DMS functionality

It has benefit when working with co-located teams, multiple vendors with different networks, distributed authors of single documents, serving up different views of static content and provides a static baseline for activities such as traceability (a topic of discussion in upcoming posts).

To pain that is associated with document management in my view comes down largely to product selection and implementation decisions and I appreciate there isn’t a lot that the average user can do to influence in these cases, but that’s not to say it isn’t worth asking. There may be regulatory reasons for enforcing strict rules around document management but often in it’s a poor understanding of the user base and a medium between ease of use and information capture.

Is there a better way?

For now I think it depends entirely on your organisations current situation and strategic direction, but the potential for influence is strong. While cloud-based solutions will unlikely be the answer due to unanswered security questions take a look at your current options and see if there are options to streamline the process. The key to a successful document management solution lies with a single word: seamless.

I use it for the extended ‘Undo Send’ feature but also came across a few other interesting add-ins that I thought would be useful.

To [...]]]> It’s been a while since I last posted anything so why not start small and quickly go over this handy feature I stumbled across the other day – Gmail Labs!

I use it for the extended ‘Undo Send’ feature but also came across a few other interesting add-ins that I thought would be useful.

To get there, head into Gmail and go into ‘Settings’ from the top right of your screen.

Under settings there is an aptly named ‘Labs’ section which contains all of these little gems.

Scroll through the various labs in the list and if you’re looking for the extended Undo feature like me, it’s very near the bottom.

So what is this undo feature ? it simply allows you to ‘undo’ the sending of an email. By default this value is set to 5 seconds in Gmail so you need to be quick – OR if you like to have flexibility you can extend this to ’30 seconds’ to afford yourself more time to realise you sent your mail to wrong person or left in that obvious spelling mistake!

Other labs I added on first look were:  ‘Google Docs previews in mail’, ‘Google Maps previews in mail’, ‘Google Search’, ‘Got the wrong Bob?’, ‘Mark as Read Button’, ‘Title Tweaks’ and the aforementioned ‘Undo Send’.

Just a quick update to shed light on this handy tool set I stumbled across – hope you like!

Sound easy? Well everything works fine if you plan to use the default shapes provided by Visio (and map to SP [...]]]> I have been looking into the new SP 2010 Workflow Template that comes with Visio 2010 Premium with the intention of building complex workflows entirely within Visio and then exporting to SP Designer for implementation.

Sound easy? Well everything works fine if you plan to use the default shapes provided by Visio (and map to SP Designer default actions/conditions). Using these you can build workflows as complicated or simple as you like and have full synchronization to and from SP Designer.

The problem with this method is that you are limited to the default actions and conditions that ship with the product. Now granted this default set is better than 2007′s offering but there will certainly be lots of cases where the default set simply does not do the required job and a custom action or condition is required.

Custom actions and conditions can used easily within SP Designer and work really if your building your workflow there but if your planning to import and use those custom actions in your Visio model then you might want to re-think your strategy. Visio will allow you import these custom actions and they are shown with their own shape but you are unable to reuse these custom shapes in other parts of your diagram.

How does it Visio block you from doing this?

Well if you look at the validation rule set for the SP Workflow template using the bVisual Validation Explorer from  David Parker- the SharePoint template has the following rules

The rule that we encounter when trying to reuse custom actions in your Visio model is Rule #14 ‘Custom action cannot be added to workflow diagram..’ (see table above).

So the rule set is preventing the reuse of custom actions/conditions for some unspecified reason. I’m sure there is a valid reason for blocking this (maybe the Visio team simply ran out of time?) but the rules are customisable, so you should just be able to edit or override the rule and be done with it, right?

Well no actually. As it happens there are two methods of performing diagram validation using Visio 2010 – deploying the rule sets into the Visio template or writing a Visio solution and burying the logic within the code to fire on the RuleSetValidated event (more info on the Visio Team Blog). Unfortunately for those of us wanting to customise the SharePoint validation rules the SP Workflow template uses the latter method and we are unable to view / modify the logic.

So if you are planning to develop complex and powerful workflows for SharePoint 2010 then you might want to rethink your approach and decide whether you will need to use custom actions / conditions or whether the default set will suit your purpose.

Having said this, it is still possible (and very useful) to use custom actions / conditions and build your workflow entirely within SP Designer then export out to Visio for workflow visualisation. This way you will have accurate workflow representation including all custom actions / conditions but you will not be able to make changes within Visio – it must be done at the SP Designer level.

I intend to look further into this matter to see if there is some way in which custom actions / conditions can be reused  and Visio be leveraged for complex workflow design so look out for updates in this space shortly.

Update 1: Nothing so far from TechNet forums but I’m  awaiting a response from Microsoft to see if there is anyway around this issue.

In my example I want to show how it [...]]]> I’ve been looking into the options of using Visio Web Access to link Visio objects to SharePoint data. Now that its possible to capture shape data and use it to filter web parts there is a an opportunity to supplement Visio diagrams with contextually relevant information.

In my example I want to show how it is possible to use the selected Visio shape to filter a SP list to display contextually relevant information on the fly.

The list I have created has supplementary information that might be useful to the diagram – please note I made it up very quickly and should not reflect any system design! You can mock-up something similar to the list shown below or anyones interested I could upload it as a list template – just ask.

For this example I have also created a very simple Visio diagram of ‘entities’ which we are going to use as our filter criteria. Create a new Visio diagram and drop on a couple of shapes – it really doesn’t matter what type they are.

The main thing here is the Shape Data – if you are familiar with adding Shape Data  simply define a new data property called ‘Entity’  and type the entity name into the shape information panel.  For those you don’t know what I mean by this, see the steps below.

Right click the shape and select ‘Define Shape Data’. Remove any existing data properties and add a new one called ‘Entity’ as per the diagram below (removing the ‘Order’ text under Value as this is specific to the shape and is added in a later step).

Now with the ‘Shape Information Panel’ you should see the ‘Entity’ data property with a blank value and you can enter the entity value for each shape – which in this example is the same as our shape name. If you don’t know where the Shape Information Panel has got to, enable it by selecting ‘Task Panes -> Shape Data’ from within the ‘View’ ribbon.

At this stage you are possibly wondering why you can’t simply use the Shape Name – doesn’t  the Visio Web Access surface this by default?

Well yes it does but in my tinkering I could not find a way for the Shape Name to correctly filter the list using the Shape Name and after many attempts decided to follow the approach of using custom shape data. If you have figured out a method of using the Shape Name to filter then I’d love to know – hopefully it’s not just something within my environment!

Before moving on make you to add entity values for all your shapes using the shape information panel.

Save the example diagram as a Visio Web Diagram (*.vdx) using the ‘Save As’ function and upload to a document library on SharePoint.  The source data is now created so move on to creating the page and making the filter connection.

Create a new page either using web interface or SP Designer and add two web parts: Visio Web Access and the list you created earlier. I will run through the web interface method below.

Select ‘Site Actions’ -> ‘More Options’ and select ‘Web Part Page’

Select ‘Full Page’ Filtering as your layout, enter a name for your page and click ‘Create’

You will be looking at a blank web part page with a big button to ‘Add a Web part’.

First add the ‘Visio Web Access’ web part which will act as your placeholder for your Visio diagram.

Click the link that says ‘Click here to open the tool pane’ and either paste in the Web Drawing URL to the saved .vdx you uploaded earlier or navigate to it like below.

QUICK TIP: The ‘Override Web Drawing’s default initial view’ option in the web part settings (second configuration option) should be disabled if you are using a diagram with multiple tabs. Despite what you might infer from its name, when enabled, it always refreshes the diagram back to the first tab with each shape selection. My suggestion is to disable this option unless you specifically need the functionality or are using a diagram with only one tab.

The other web part option that needs to be set before we can move on is the ‘Expose the following shape data..” field.

Because we are using custom shape data to filter (i.e. not Shape Name, Shape ID etc) we need to tell the web part to expose this data in order to use it in our connection. In this field type in ‘Entity’ if your following my example, or the name of the data property you created in Visio. We can now use this value to send as a filter to our list web part.

The go back and add another web part for the list you created earlier. This is done by selecting the list from ‘List and Libraries’ Category. It must be pointed out that the list must exist in the same site for this method to work. If your list is in another location or SP Farm then you will need to build a Data View Web Part like I have run through in this article.

Now that both elements are on the page we can set up the web part connection to send the filter value from one to the other.

Make sure the page is in edit mode and select the web part settings drop down for the Visio Web Access web part and select ‘Connections’

The connection type we wish to make is the ‘Send Shape Data to’ which will send the value of the selected shape to the list.

This will bring up a new window with the two-step connection wizard.

Select the ‘Get Filter Values From’

Then select ‘Entity’ in both the provider and consumer field. Essentially you are defining what value is being passed from the Visio web part (in this case our entity shape data value) and the consumer field defines what column on the list is to be filtered based on this value (and again in this example it is also the entity column).

Now the connection is set up, when we select a shape on the diagram it passes the entity name from the shape data to list web part and filters the list accordingly.

In my example I’ve attempted to show how web part connections can be used to supplement an entity relationship style diagram with information from a SP list but this is just one of many possible applications. Now that you can capture ANY type of shape data and pass this to ANY web part – the doors really do open.

Currently I am looking into a documentation system that uses such references to make a set of interactive, highly linked and contextually relevant document with as little content management as possible. I will post more in this space as it progress but this article should prove to be a useful starting point.

Creating the data source went smoothly but when I tried to use it in the DVWP it threw the following unhelpful [...]]]> I’ve been playing with the REST protocol in SP2010 to bring in data from external lists (external to the site collection) and using it to display the result in the data view web part (DVWP).

Creating the data source went smoothly but when I tried to use it in the DVWP it threw the following unhelpful error.

“The server returned a non-specific error when frying to get data from the data source. Check the format and content of your query and try again. If the problem persists, contact the server administrator.”

I checked the service in the browser and it was working fine – so a quick investigation identified authentication as the problem. I went back to the data source and forced the service to  use my domain account instead of the default windows authentication provider.

As soon as the authentication was forced and I refreshed my data connection – the DVWP pulled everything through perfectly.

This issue seems to be with SP Designer not recognising your domain account when using windows authentication. This work-around will do the job – although it must be pointed out this method sends your credentials unencrypted in the call. Not the type of thing you would put into a production environment but will at the very least get you up and running with REST services inside SharePoint 2010.

More to come on this topic soon, specifically around potential uses of the service and a detailed walk through (time permitting as always!)

This time I’d like to demonstrate Visio Web Access and its nice Silverlight UI that includes features like linking [...]]]> SharePoint 2010 brings to us some really nice Office web apps that allow in-browser rendering (and editing)  of Office 2007/10 formatted documents and I took a brief look at Word and its co-authoring functionality last year.

This time I’d like to demonstrate Visio Web Access and its nice Silverlight UI that includes features like linking to sub-processes, presentation of the shape data via the shape information panel and the ability to switch between tabs. Visio 2010 now comes with the web drawing format (*.vdw) allows any diagram to be rendered in-browser and is easily done using the  ’Save As’ function and selecting the *.vdw format.

The Silverlight rendering allows the viewer to ‘zoom and pan’ around the Visio canvas, negating the need for scroll bars and allows large diagrams to be easily displayed on a single page.

It is hard to see from the static picture above but the user can easily drag around the interface, zoom in and out and interact with individual elements within the diagram. In the screen grab above the ‘Rule 2′ decision has a blue highlight indicating it has been selected and would display the shape information in the information panel.

The image below attempts to show the user panning to right hand side of the image and exposing the blank canvas at the top and right of the diagram.

The new ‘linked sub-process’ feature allows shapes to be linked to a sub-processes on a separate and Visio web access maintains this connection through hyperlinks. Using this technique you can have great click-through diagrams linking areas that previously were only accessible by manually switching tabs.

The Shape Information Panel displays shape and hyperlinks data for the currently selected shape.

There is also an option to open in Visio allowing you make edits and save changes back to the document library. These updates are reflected in the rendered version as soon as the document is checked back in to SharePoint. The same result can be achieved by uploading a new version of the .vdw and overriding the existing file.

Visio Web Access  renders tabs in separate canvases and provides a drop down control to navigate through the tabs provides an alternative to linked sub-processes  (although I suggest you utilise this where possible – it’s very user-friendly!). The above screen illustrates this control.

That was a quick look at Visio Web Access and I intend to return to the subject when I have explored the data linking and other cool new features available in SP2010.

Using SP2010′s enhanced rich text field, you can upload and add an image directly into the list without having [...]]]> Ever found it incredibly annoying when trying to add images into a list on the fly? (without having to go away and add them to a library first – then come back and manually add a reference).

Using SP2010′s enhanced rich text field, you can upload and add an image directly into the list without having to leave the page.

When editing the enhanced rich text field (whether editing a single item in the edit form or using the cool new ‘Inline Editing’ feature (explained here), you have the option to insert from the ‘Editing Tools’ menu.

This brings up the ‘Select Picture’ dialog where you can select a local image to upload and a library to stored the uploaded copy.

Then save the uploaded image and complete any metadata requirements.

The image is inserted into the SP list but is managed centrally within the chosen library.

A very handy feature that was missing from 2007 and I’m glad it has been addressed in 2010.

You can then select the image format and away you go.

Even if you don’t like working within OneNote you can use its screen clip feature to quickly grab and [...]]]> Another handy OneNote feature that is particularly useful when working with screen clips or picture/text edits – is the ‘Save as’ option.

You can then select the image format and away you go.

Even if you don’t like working within OneNote you can use its screen clip feature to quickly grab and save an image.

Personally I find it the most useful way to take screen grabs – and having it in a powerful and underrated application like OneNote is just a bonus!

If you’ve never used OneNote [...]]]> In the second post in the Quick Tip series I want to show you is the ‘screen clipping’ feature built into OneNote.

Personally I find it the most useful way to take screen grabs – and having it in a powerful and underrated application like OneNote is just a bonus!

If you’ve never used OneNote before, you need to fire it up and make sure the icon is placed in the taskbar.



Go to the OneNote ‘Options’ and select the ‘Display Tab’

Now that the OneNote icon is displayed in the taskbar you can take screen ‘clips’ with the ‘Windows Key + S’ shortcut.

This action greys out the entire screen and allows you to select an active area of the screen to grab. If you require the entire screen, simply start in one of the corners and select the screen as if it were a selection in paint.

The default action is to open the screen clip in OneNote and dump it onto  the clipboard. Personally I prefer to just dump to clipboard and paste where necessary (normally into a word doc or Paint).

To change the default action, go back to ‘Options’ menu and select the ‘Send to OneNote’ tab.



Hope you find that as useful as I do.

More Quick Tips coming up – suggestions welcome!

First up [...]]]> In a new series of posts I plan to share a range of tips for making life that little bit easier. Generally this falls within the realm of ‘general tips’ or ‘productivity tips’ but it may extend further if they are well received (or if I get enough time to write them down!) .

First up we are going to look at a handy OCR feature in OneNote.

OCR for those not acronym-inclined is optical character recognition – or even better yet, its identifying words within pictures.

Cool technology but why on earth would I need to use something like that? Well if your like me and you’re an obsessive screen clip taker you sometimes find that you actually want the text within the screen grab and not a huge embedded image.

Sure you can often go back to the source, find the content you screen grabbed and select the text, and that might be easier for you, but there are other cases where you simply can’t select the text for one reason or another. Protected PDF’s, screenshots from overs and text within data sources that don’t lend themselves to straight forward text exporting (trust me – there are some).

Well, how do you use such fancy technology? By using the heavily underrated OneNote of course – and its so easy!

Simply do a screen grab with your favourite method (mine also uses OneNote’s screen clipping feature – explained here) and paste your screen grab into OneNote.

Then, all you need to do is paste your clipboard to get the converted text from the image.

Viola! You are done..

Now this technology is obviously not foolproof and non-standard fonts and special characters tend to confuse things a little, but at worst this generally means just tidying up odd words manually, but overall the text is converted correctly.

As you probably have heard Visio allows us to use this template to model our SharePoint workflows in Visio with a new shape set and then export it directly(as a zipped [...]]]> Just a short post on how to approach designing and implementing large or complex workflows using the SharePoint 2010 workflow template in Visio 2010 Premium.

As you probably have heard Visio allows us to use this template to model our SharePoint workflows in Visio with a new shape set and then export it directly(as a zipped XML, *.vwi file) into SP Designer for the developers to ‘hook up’.

I am currently modelling quite a complex / large workflow and I can see its going to be an absolute beast to contain within a single, sprawling Visio workspace. After talking with the development team it was decided that breaking out into ‘tabs’, although not as powerful as the linked sub-process of standard models, would be sufficient for development.

Rather than exporting and maintaining as a single .vwi file, the ‘export’ option of the process tab only exports the contents of the current tab – so it is possible to break detail out into ‘tabs’ and export as separate .vwi files, which in turn are imported and implemented into SPD.

You wont get as much detail in your workflow visualisation if you implement in this manner, but you could always link the tabs or .xml in the .vwi’s together at the end to get a single (if not complex) workflow visualisation.

Will post more on SP2010 workflow design in Visio as I come across – which be the looks of things, will be a lot!

The firs thing I do with a new document library if it isn’t enabled already – turn on versioning! It’s not really document management without versioning so get in there and enable it first thing.

Don’t know how? Follow the steps below

Select the [...]]]> 1.) Versioning – otherwise its just a network folder!

The firs thing I do with a new document library if it isn’t enabled already – turn on versioning! It’s not really document management without versioning so get in there and enable it first thing.

Don’t know how? Follow the steps below

Select the ‘Document Library Settings’ option from the ‘Settings’ menu. If you don’t see the settings menu you don’t have permission and will need to ask someone who does politely.

Then select ‘Versioning settings’ from the General settings column.

Here you have two choices and I suggest you select the second, creating both major and minor versions. Gives you a lot more flexibility and options around ‘publishing’. More on that later

Hit ‘OK’ and your done. Now each time you check a document in it will keep a version on the server and allow you track a full history of your document.

Small sidenote, if you have permissions setup correctly (i.e. not everybody has admin/contribute rights to every document library), ticking the ‘Only users who can edit items’ for drafts is a good idea of hiding documents from those who shouldn’t be reading them until their published form.

This is in a project life-cycle where either the test or dev team needs to review a base lined document but work needs to continue without creating two separate copies. Set this option and you control who see’s what!

2.) Force check out – crucial to have with versioning

Small point but important – no point having versioning unless you force all documents to be checked out before edited!

Always set this to yes unless you have a specific reason not to. If you need to do a bulk move or bulk edit, temporarily remove the force checkout, do what’s required, and set it back. Removes the hassle and keeps the functionality – everybody wins!

Found under document settings -> versioning settings (same as above)

3.) Use content types – managed metadata and consistency across documentation

SharePoint content types are an incredibly useful way of organizing content and in particular, reusing structure that’s been set up elsewhere. I wont go into detail but have a read up on it here.

I normally setup at least one content type per document library, usually a applicable template or work product such as SRS (Software requirement specification) and a generic document type above that sits above that.

The general content type has standard project related columns such as:

• Project Phase (‘choice’ column of relevant phases)

• Build (‘choice’ column with set list of builds

• Category (‘choice’ column of categories such as requirements, technical design, testing

You can use whatever is relevant and the above is just an example of criteria that is relevant to all documents within the library. Then as a child content type of the general, I create a few columns specific to a SRS.

4.) Use Office 2007/2010′s integration – it’s a great way of converting the sceptics

Continuing on from good use of content types above, using Office 2007/2010′s SharePoint integration to save metadata and check in and out documents converts most sceptics.

Common criticism of SharePoint is that you have to check in and check out each time, and you have to edit properties to save metadata blah blah..

With the integration offered in 2007/2010 (and to an extent but not as seamless, 2003) such sceptics have no excuse!

Document metadata shown by default when document is opened and you are required to update the metadata on check in.

Built in support for versioning including comments (which can be used effectively in the document library view)

New in 2010, the Backstage view has built-in drop down menus, presence indicators from Office Communicator integration and a much smoother (graphically) integration.

5.) Workflows – even the default workflows are very useful

SharePoint comes built-in with some useful workflows, such as approval and collect feedback. I tend to use these quickly to request and track feedback on a document.

Access them and any custom workflows you may have built for the workflow/content type, via the backstage in 2010.

6.) Use version history effectively – it’s not just for security/peace of mind!

I use version history extensively and find it very useful for doing document comparisons and finding why I made a certain change or retrieving an existing format/content from an out-dated version.

I tend to use the backstage view of Office 2010, where you can see comments for each version, see all versions and compare against existing fairly easily.

Open an older version and you get the following options for comparison in the backstage.

Quickly compare using the powerful word compare functionality against an existing document. Useful for showing changes if you can’t/don’t use tracked changes. Particularly useful if your generating your documentation out of tools such as Enterprise Architect or Axure RP (anything really, those are just the two that I’ve done it for in the past).

7.) Document library templates – enforce documentation standards

Document library templates are another useful way of setting standards within your document library. You can assign a .dot template (or any other office template for that matter) to the document library or content type and use that each time a new document is created – very useful!

Rather than the standard ‘New Document dialog’  you can set a specific template  for all documents using the content type. In my example, we have one setup for all SRS documents that uses the same styles, structure and document info for all of your requirements documentation. Small thing to set up that significantly reduces rework and doesn’t bog you down during the review phase.

Setting a template is done via the document library settings -> Advanced Settings. There is an aptly named ‘Document Template’ option where you can upload and edit the document template.

Well that’s all for now, those are most of the main additions I use in day-to-day document libraries I use and if anyone wants any further details on particulars or further justification as to why I chose a certain option, feel free to email or comment! Any and all feedback is welcome.

If you’re like me and love manipulating data in Excel to clean up and use elsewhere, rather than doing it the long, slow and manual way, then you will probably like to explore this feature of Visio.

I recently created a state chart and I [...]]]> Ran cross another handy feature of Visio – Shape Reports!

If you’re like me and love manipulating data in Excel to clean up and use elsewhere, rather than doing it the long, slow and manual way, then you will probably like to explore this feature of Visio.

I recently created a state chart and I needed a quick export of all of the states I used on the diagram.

Sure, I could manually type them out, or individually copy and paste each one into a document, but that’s now how I like to operate! If there’s a tool for the job – I like to use it.

So I opened up the ‘Shape Reports’ option under the ‘Review’ ribbon and begin to design my extract.

We want to create a new report, so go ahead and click that to begin the new report wizard.

Now, depending on what you’re doing or what data you’re trying to extract out of your model, you can export everything (easiest – but takes longer to clean up) or put some criteria around what you want to export (little bit trickier but my favorite!)

Easiest option is to create an export using the ‘Shapes on the current page’ and click through the wizard with the default options  and selecting  ‘Show all properties’. This will give you a dump of all properties and you can filter through what you need in Excel.

Personally I like to extract just what I need from the model, so I set some export criteria using the ‘Advanced’ option on Wizard step numero uno.

Here you can define some conditions for what you want to pull out of your model. For the above example I’ve opted to ignore the transition shapes as I just want to see a list of state names.

Play around with what’s available, particularly under the ‘Master Name’ property, to find the criteria your after.

So proceeding with example of not including ‘transition’ elements, you can then move on to selecting what properties to export.

Again, depending on what your modelling and how you defined it, your requirements may differ here. In my example I’ll be using ‘Displayed Text’ – as that’s the exact data set I’m looking for.

Give your a report a name on the next step and then a report definition (for recognizing the report later on!).

Double click your newly created report to see the results.

You need to select an export format, as I said earlier, Excel is my personal favourite for manipulating large amounts of text and filtering – but the choice is entirely yours of course.

Voila! Your data is exported in a lovely styled format ready to use as you please.

I kind of skipped over the selecting the report criteria section, so if anyone would like more guidance in that area let me know!

I’ve had a quick play with the feature set and [...]]]> I have been doing some analysis work on a new SharePoint 2010 implementation and have wandered across the new SharePoint workflow template in Visio 2010. It’s an area I briefly touched last year on the 2010 Beta but didn’t get much hands on time with.

I’ve had a quick play with the feature set and the template and wanted to share my findings and thoughts on the subject. A good search didn’t bring much info in the way of SharePoint / Visio 2010 so I will do my bit to contribute to the ever-growing pool of resources.

So as you have probably seem from the marketing guff and the PowerPoint decks, there is a new SharePoint workflow template available in Visio, with the intention of empowering the business analyst (or power user) to design or re-design workflows within Visio and have that exported directly into SharePoint designer.

The advantage here is all the developer needs to do is take the exported Visio process and connect up the data sources / lists to the appropriate places, and you have your working workflow. Easy as that!

There are some interesting discussions going around about the pros / cons of this, particularly around whether such users should be empowered to make these design-type decisions (or more accurately, whether developers should take the models and deploy them verbatim) but I will make my comments on this further after a brief primer.

You have probably seen the process before in presentations or similar blogs, but for those who haven’t, I’ll quickly run through the process.

First you select the ‘SharePoint Workflow’ template in Visio.

You then get a blank canvas and a raft of SharePoint-specific workflow shapes to choose from

They are set out in normal style: actions, conditions and terminators.

Drop the shapes as if you doing a standard process flow and then run the validation rules.

Under the ‘Process’ ribbon, select the ‘Check Diagram’ option.  Generally you need to avoid things like looping back to parent shapes and ensuring all decision points have a Yes / No branch.

Below is an example of a validated workflow.

Once your workflow is validated, it is then exported into a Visio Workflow Interchange file (*.vwi) before being imported into SharePoint designer.

To export your Visio workflow , select ‘Export’ from the ‘Process’ ribbon and select a save location.

Now fire up SharePoint designer and connect to a site. Choose ‘Workflows’ from the ‘Site Objects’ list.

Select ‘Import from Visio’ and locate the interchange (*.vwi) you exported above.

Now choose whether to assign to a list or a content type. Depending on your plan this is an important decision but for the purposes of this demo just choose a content type under the ‘Reusable Workflow’ dropdown.

So as you can see the logic from our Visio model has been imported into a If/Else start into SharePoint designers. From here the developers can link up the steps to the data sources / lists as required and you have a working workflow! Easy!

This is just an overview and I haven’t really got into the guts of the possibilities yet, but should serve as a primer to getting in and having a stab yourself.

Personally I see value in this more in improving and re-designing workflows than perhaps designing from scratch. A developer can build a workflow from requirements as they see fit and make the required design decisions based on their experience and understanding of the technical requirements. A business user may inadvertently make bad design decisions that impact the performance or the usability of a workflow.

The beauty of this model (I think at least!) is the ability to import an existing workflow, pull it into a nice, visual Visio format and let business users muck around with that. The logic and conditions will remain in the XML and when it is exported back to SharePoint designer, the detail will remain along with the required changes to the flow.

I’ll have more comments / thoughts in this area as I progress through, but if nothing else the above should serve as a base for those looking at SharePoint workflows in Visio.

Watchout for my next post on custom workflow actions and how they look when pulled back into Visio!