SharePoint Server 2007 Revealed

Now we'll create a workflow.

Workflows are ways to support business processes using SharePoint. We'll specify that after an expense report has been submitted, Penny or your user must approve it before a check is cut. Back in your browser, in the Expense Reports library, click the Settings button and choose Form Library Settings, Workflow Settings.

On the Add a Workflow: Expense Reports page, give the workflow a name (e.g., Expense Report Approval) and select the Start this workflow when a new item is created option and the Start this workflow when an item is changed option. All other defaults are fine. Click Next.

On the Customize Workflow: Expense Report Approval page, enter Penny or your user's name as an approver. Click Check Names to confirm that you entered a recognized name—the name will become underlined. Alternatively, you can click Approvers to find your approvers. Approvers can be individual users and/or groups. At the bottom of this page, select Update approval status when the workflow is complete.

Now comes the moment of truth. Test it! In the Expense Report library, click New. On a computer with InfoPath installed, the form will open in InfoPath, ready for the user to complete with the full functionality provided by the standalone InfoPath client. On a computer without InfoPath, the form will open in the browser.

Fill in the form and click Submit at the top or bottom of the form. If you have any trouble with that in your test environment (which I did), just click the Close button at the top of the form and then save the report when prompted.

Now, let's see if the workflow triggered correctly. Click the Tasks link in the Quick Launch navigation. You should see the task for your user to approve the just-submitted expense report.

Experience 15:
My Site
We don't want our users to have to look for their tasks. Although users could subscribe to Alerts or RSS feeds from a task list, or integrate a SharePoint task list directly into Microsoft Office Outlook 2007, a better solution is to use My Site. My Site, which Figure 3 shows, is a user's personal portal. You can customize, and manage it, and push content to it.

Open a separate instance of Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) and browse to the Finance site. You'll likely be authenticated as yourself. Click the Welcome link with your name at the top of the page and you'll see a dropdown menu that lets you sign on as a different user. Log on as your test finance user (e.g., Penny Xavier). You'll see the Welcome link change to indicate your new credentials.

Click the My Site link next to the Welcome link at the top right of the window. The first time a user clicks My Site, SharePoint generates a personal site for the user. The personal site has many capabilities, and the one we'll look at right now is task roll up. After the user's My Site has been created, you should see Finance listed in the SharePoint Sites section. This list of sites is dependent on the user belonging to the site, so if you don't see the Finance site on the list, perhaps you forgot to give the user permission to it. You can also click the Sites dropdown menu and add the site manually.

When you click the Finance button, you'll see the titles of tasks, as Figure 4 shows. Users can browse tasks by department, team, or project, depending on how you've configured the site structure.

The Journey Continues
After your users experience SharePoint, they might realize its potential for significant ROI. In the future, I'll provide guidance about how to plan for, deploy, administer, optimize, secure, and troubleshoot what is arguably the most important new product from Microsoft in six years. Join me at the Windows IT Pro SharePoint Web site, http://www.MySharePointPro.com, to discuss SharePoint and to share in the collective knowledge of a great SharePoint community.