SharePoint Designer Workflow

Some improvements and new activity that I would like to see in the upcoming SharePoint

SharePoint as a platform is hugely successful and comparing MOSS 2007 and SharePoint 2010; SharePoint 2010 is more refined and feels more solid as Enterprise Content Management System.  Workflow in SharePoint saw a dramatic improvement compared to MOSS 2007. Today, Designer workflows are definitely considered while making decision about choosing SharePoint as a CMS in the enterprise. But there is an opportunity and huge room available for the workflow to be improved in SharePoint 2012 or SharePoint 15.

In 2010 we got more activities standard in designer workflow and another area that got a facelift is using VISIO as a designer tool for developing workflow. As an enthusiastic SharePoint’er  I wish some of these areas can be improved

1.       Improvement in VISIO designer:

·         Allow configurations to be done in VISIO Designer

·         Enable to preview the working of activities in VISIO

·         Integrate Visio Designer into SharePoint (Having the VISIO outside and have to goto Designer to publish is a sticky point in regulated industry)

·         Provide an easier way to include custom activity with custom icon in VISIO

2.       Improvement in Activities

·         Need more standard OOTB activities VIZ:

·         Activity to Create a Site/Site Collection

·         Activity to Create a Library/List

·         Action to query a list to get list items.

·         Allow calculation of business days in date time activity

·         Get User Information for User Information List

·         Create List Items in different Site (This will be good if we can create list items in different location in the site collection)

·         Convert Document /Infopath to PDF (We can use Document Conversion service but if this is available OOTB then it is huge selling point)

·         New Utility Action to Trim white spaces (This is needed while using Multi Lookup)

·         New utility activity for regular expression operation

·         An Activity to Loop through a collection of Items (List of Values in a multi-lookup field)

Content Type Syndication-Part 2

Content Type Syndication (CTS) is a new feature in SharePoint 2010 which is used for Centralization and Sharing of Content Types between site collection and even Farms using Managed Metadata Service application.  For more information on content type syndication and business case for using it please refer here.

In this blog we will see how to configure content type syndication and how to publish and subscribe content types and metadata.

How CTS works :

The figure gives a picture of how content type syndication works and it general architecture.

 

Managed Metadata service acts as a channel to service these content types to the subscriber sites. This is possible because of the service architecture in SharePoint 2010. As shown in the figure the same publisher can be used to publish to different web application using Shared Managed Metadata Service application.

• ·         Publisher = Content Type Syndication hub
• ·         Subscriber = is Consumers of published content type

 

How to Configure

Let us now see how we can configure this in our environment. I created a site collection within my web application called “Content Type Syndication Hub”. Please create a site collection in the web application that you want to serve a publisher for content types.

Once you created the site next step in the process is to activate the content type syndication feature at the site collection level. This is to make the current site collection as the hub or source for our consumer sites.

We now have the site collection that can serve content types to any subscriber who wants to consume these content types. But we haven’t provided the channel to serve these content types. We have to create a managed metadata service as conduit.

Let us now see how we can create Manage Metadata Service.

Service application needs to be created in Central Admin 

Application Management >Service Application > Manage Service Applications

Create a New Managed Metadata Service.

Remember to specify the site collection that we created as the content type hub

Now all is set to use the site collection as content type hub and now we need to create a content type and publish it so that consumer site collections can subscribe to the content types from here.

Let us see how we can publish the content type. We need to create a content type for our test purpose and I created one called “Test” with a site column “test”.

We have all we need for the content type to be syndicated to other site collection. This process is pretty straight simple and we will see how we can achieve this.

While you are in Content Type information page click on Manage Publishing for this Content Type, the publishing content type information page will have option to publish and since I have already published my content type while writing this blog I get to see 2 other option to “Unpublish” and “Republish”. If we click ok on the page will publish the content type to all the site collection that is subscribing from t this site collection.

If you now navigate to any site collection that subscribes from this site collection we will be able to see the Content Type published.

If you look at the content type information page of this content type you will have restricted option compared to the content type that is native to this site collection.

If you do not see the content type published as soon as you click ok check your timer job that helps in pushing these updated to all subscriber sites. SharePoint has 2 timer jobs defined that pushes the content type publishing to other sites in the web application. These usually run every hour and you can force it to run immediately if you want it to be pushed immediately.

Well done we have out content type published. Please share your thoughts in comments.