Category: Capabilities

Microsoft Project & SharePoint

Michael Bratley / / Capabilities

A late find is that Microsoft Project can be integrated into a SharePoint site, which enables project managers to easily share project tasks, milestones and timescales.

The article details the ways in which Microsoft Project can be setup with SharePoint. The architecture of your SharePoint setup will determine the method you use  integrate Microsoft Project with it. One of the ways for example includes synchronising the tasks within Microsoft Project to a tasks list within the SharePoint project site. Another way that you can set it up is with the use of a Project Management Server, which allows greater functionality.

For mobile customers, the best current way to interact with SharePoint is to use a Windows Phone. Windows Phone will synchronise loads of documents with SharePoint Online sites. You can also use Microsoft OneNote 2010 to make notes and these will be synchronised to the SharePoint Project site.

The recent article, in full, was posted at the following link: http://goo.gl/LQ9rV. There is also the white paper from Microsoft available here: http://goo.gl/sCQWU.

Why I’m starting to dislike Office 365

Robert Everatt / / Capabilities, Office 365

When I was hired, I was told that we would mainly be looking at migration into Office 365. Five months’ in we were told that instead, we will be looking closer at SharePoint Server 2010, and I couldn’t be happier.

We have now been using 365 for over 5 months’, to begin with it was terrible, service interruptions for days at a time, style sheets wouldn’t load properly, and we got an error for almost every other page click. In time, Office 365 began to be more stable, and it began to work great for what we were doing, until we wanted to see how far we could go with it. Turns out, it can’t really go as far as we wanted it to, despite being built for enterprises. In my opinion, Office 365 is just a shadow of SharePoint Server 2010, despite the fact that SharePoint Online is modelled from 2010.

One of the biggest losses on SharePoint Online is the use of Windows PowerShell, PowerShell is a powerful command line administrative tool that can remove repetitive tasks using scripts. These scripts can also be activated by workflows, allowing complex administrative tasks to be completed quick and easy, even by a user without the appropriate permissions’.

SharePoint Online also lacks a great many other features that come with SharePoint 2010, we have gone through these in a previous post.

As well as these missing features’, I’m finding that the service provided by Office 365 is deteriorating, the website has gradually become slower and slower, errors’ are becoming more common, and Microsoft don’t admit to any service interruptions on the health check page. The support staff don’t appear to know anything about problem solving, we’ve had to deal with them on multiple occasions for problems that have occurred in the past, these service requests can last weeks at a time, the task is often swapped between service staff who then ask the same question the previous person did.

All in all, Microsoft Office 365 is a very frustrating platform to work with, and despite Microsoft’s 99% up time guarantee, is very unstable. I cannot imagine any business, let alone a university, using Microsoft Office 365 as a long term solution. Unfortunately, until we get a copy of SharePoint Server 2010 installed on a university server, we’re stuck with Office 365.

RE

User Properties

Michael Bratley / / Capabilities, Development, Features, Office 365

Whilst investigating another problem we were experiencing on the SharePoint site, we stumbled upon some User Profile and Properties options. We had previous been looking at storing additional fields against a user to hold information such as leave entitlement and leave remaining. The properties of the user can be edited and custom fields can be created. The image below shows the administration centre where these additions can be made.

Manage_Users

We were able to add the two additional fields that we require at this stage in testing and development. We were also able to read the values of the two fields and have them returned to the user in an email using a workflow. However we quickly discovered that it appears to not be possible to write data back to the fields. In this instance this would allow us to keep track of the number of days leave a user has remaining.

Workflows [Updated]

Michael Bratley / / Capabilities, Features, Office 365

Over the last few days I have been looking at Workflows in the Enterprise Edition environment, after they were very limited in the Small Business Edition. I started by creating a reusable workflow, that can be applied to almost any list or document library. This workflow would allow users to request annual leave, the workflow would then get their line manager to approve or deny the request. This worked very well, and did what I expected it to. After accomplishing this Rob and I decided to add more functionality, which would add the leave (if approved) to the corporate calendar. At this point I discovered that the workflow would need to be associated with a specific list to enable it to obtain all the fields within the Annual Leave list. This time I recreated the workflow as a list workflow and selected the list to associate it with. I could now access the required fields to add the approved request to the corporate calendar. However upon testing the workflow, it stopped at a certain point and returned an error. Below is the workflow that has been created, and the sections in red appear to be causing the problem, this process does start though as an email is sent to the initiator to say this.

I have been trying to find a solution to the problem, but so far have been unsuccessful. I have discovered though, that the workflow may need to be split in to two. When the workflow is initiated, it runs under the permissions of that user, which will not likely have permission to approve items. I will be looking at this soon too.

Update:
After submitting a service request to Microsoft, I have this morning (17/10/2011) been contacted by a representative, who has taken me through some troubleshooting. Throughout this he took screenshots to enable the process to be recreated, to try and identify the problem. A solution is expected on Wednesday.

Update 2:
The representative from Microsoft has since been in touch to inform us that he is still working on the problem.  A solution is expected any day now.

Microsoft Office 365 Enterprise

Michael Bratley / / Branding, Capabilities, Development, Office 365

We now have access to an extended trial of Microsoft Office 365 Enterprise Edition. This will now enable us to actively use and test features of the service that the University may upgrade to in the near future. We will now begin to look at complex workflows, integrating InfoPath Forms, and RSS Feeds amongst others. In a just couple of days we have managed to give the site some basic branding, after coming across many difficulties trying the same thing in the Small Business Edition. As always we will keep posting with our progress.