Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Too often organizations have important knowledge locked inside the email accounts of their information workers. Email messages contain information like project updates, status details, or even the latest version of an attachment. Although the contents of an important message could cause the organization to initiate a business process that requires a team to act based on that content, email is often just forwarded to team members, lost by some of them, and eventually filed away in some folder of a personal mail archive. It is not captured as an asset of the organization or of the business process. In this chapter we will detail how, as a developer, you can extend Microsoft Outlook to enable users to easily persist these messages to SharePoint repositories.

It is rare to find an organization that has a seamlessly integrated data tier that is uniformly used by the organization’s business applications. More common is a set of siloed tools that duplicate data with no obvious authoritative source. Information workers in this type of environment often jump in and out of tools, copying and pasting data from one screen to the next to accomplish their tasks. With SharePoint, the organization is introducing enterprise portals and collaboration workspaces into this environment — and without careful planning, they are increasing the risk of redundant data. SharePoint lists and metadata of documents often need to include values whose source is one of these external applications. In this chapter, we will detail how as a developer you can register an external application so that is data is referenceable in SharePoint using the Business Data Catalog.

InfoPath, introduced with Office 2003, is an Office application that allows users to quickly create electronic forms that can collect and display business data. These forms can include validation rules and rich formatting, as well as have the ability to read and persist data to XML files and enterprise data sources without requiring extensive development expertise. Most information workers in the enterprise quickly realized InfoPath’s value by creating simple solutions that automated the collection of data traditionally collected on paper, such as vacation requests and expense reports, with relative ease. In fact, most of the InfoPath 2003 solutions that exist today are simple departmental email or SharePoint-library-based forms solutions that allow users to collect, route, and store data using familiar desktop tools both online and offline. The next obvious question is, what about the Enterprise? Enterprise forms solutions typically require custom business logic or workflow, and in some cases extend beyond organizational boundaries to people in other departments and even outside the corporation.

In the previous chapter we discussed how InfoPath 2007 and Share Point Forms Server 2007 allow developers to quickly create enterprise forms solutions that can be deployed to a user desktop and to the Web, giving information workers the ability to work both online and offline as well as in a thin-client setting. In this chapter we are going to build on that concept by introducing the ability to automate the business processes that these solutions typically feed. When we think of business-process automation we usually associate it with some type of workflow. There are three basic types of workflow: application-oriented or structured, human-oriented or ad-hoc, and those that span both. Historically Microsoft has had a somewhat disjointed workflow story with several different implementations in several different products, many of which overlapped; this made it difficult for developers to choose the right technology for the task at hand. Take for example the workflow capabilities exposed in Exchange 2003 and those in BizTalk Server. Exchange gives power users the ability to construct ad-hoc email-based workflow. BizTalk Server provides the ability for developers to construct highly scalable, declarative, rules-based workflow and introduces a framework for developing human-oriented workflow—called Human Workflow Services (HWS). To solve this problem Microsoft developed a workflow platform called Windows Workflow Foundation (WF). Built on the .NET Framework 3.0 (WinFX) namespace, it provides a workflow engine and a Visual Studio .NET visual designer that for the first time gives developers a common programming model, engine, and set of tools to build workflow applications of any type in a consistent manner on the Windows platform. The release of WF also provides a common platform for Microsoft to build its own products on—for example, Microsoft Office 2007 now has support for WF workflows in its clients and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 ships with several standard workflows.

Today many organizations lose productivity because their workers find it difficult to find, use, and share the information they need. Software developers build solutions to try to reduce this loss. However, by not incorporating their applications into tools familiar to the user, they can often increase user workload.