June 12, 2010
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Things I learned – Sharepoint
Racking my brain trying to think of something to post on this here blog, and after listening to an episode of Casually Hardcore on http://media.vtwproductions.com/ I decided to start a Things I learned series. Since I have been working on Sharepoint like mad as of late I figure I will put what I have learned from that up here.
To give a bit of background on this, starting last year my boss decided that he wanted a completely rebuilt Sharepoint website (okay I may have pushed it a little bit) since we had been running on WSS 2.0. As I was the only one in our entire department who had ever even seen a Sharepoint 2007 website much less built one I decided to volunteer my efforts in rebuilding our WSS site into a 3.0 version. I have to add also that during this time frame I was going through ITIL V3 certification and as such a lot of what I have built into the site is based around this framework. In any case we setup a development site that I could break as much as I wanted to in order to get this thing up and running. I have to say I had no idea what I was getting myself into, in any case after about 3 1/2 months of tinkering we had a new and GREATLY improved Sharepoint site (if you had seen our previous version you would understand) and I still only understood about [--] that much of what Sharepoint could do.
Well our company was also going through a corporate merger during this time as well and so I had to put on hold a lot of my learning for Sharepoint until recently. As stated in previous posts I have been self learning my way through basic and intermediate programming in order to understand what it is Sharepoint is all about. This week I decided to finally put what I have been learning into practice and build a brand new Change Control web part along with a very useful workflow that would allow our change manager (my boss) to approve/reject any changes put forth for our infrastructure.
It took me all week to build this thing and was a great learning experience all over the place. I basically dove right in and started working on the site using Sharepoint Developer 2007 (yes 2010 is coming out but I had to use what we are currently working with, we will be moving to 2010 as soon as I can put forth a business case for it).
Initially I thought it would be a great idea to use Developer to build the Change Management console, however after reading a bunch up on the site (and getting completely frustrated with how Microsoft do things) I found that building the change list in the admin console from within the site was the much better idea. So I did this with much hmm and hawing about what should go where etc, finally I had that complete and went to work building the workflow…god what a nightmare. When you build a list and design a workflow for it, Sharepoint will use whatever task list is closest on hand in order to build the Data Collection part of your workflow, regardless of where you want it to go…I however did not know this and was racking my brain for 3 days because there was no entry on this any where that I could find. I did however manage to find a side note on some guy’s website on how to find a GUID for any given list, and how to decode it..this was a godsend. I went into the XML document that points your workflow at the particular lists that you want to attach it to and found out that my Data Collection was pointing at a completely and utterly unrelated list then what I wanted it to (I wanted to cry with tears of joy by this point as I finally knew it wasn’t me being a dip). So i pop in the GUID of the task list that I want the Data Collection to point to and the whole workflow just went POOF and started working like magic…mind you this was Friday night at 4:28 PM right as my boss was about to walk out the elevators, I look up at him and go ” IT’S FRIGGIN WORKING OMG!!!.” I don’t think he quite understood my excitement…ah well.
I figure that I will be having quite a few of these moments over the next few years with me starting Uni and all…so why not make a blog entry about them. i cannot guarantee when these posts will be, but I will try to put them up when I can.
