This has been an eye opening experience to say the least.  In the last mini project, we covered the Search API,  Search Administration, the Document and Records Center and Information Management Policies. This was a lot to go over in a short bit of time, but we did get it done.

If this course had been longer, I don’t know what I would have done. It was totally worthwhile, but it certainly was a lot of information to cover. I was finally glad to get it done, so that we could do our Final Project.  Right now, we’re almost finished.  Next week, we will finish up and make our presentation to the staff.  The Final Project is a team project.  This is good because it more replicates working in a real team environment. You find your strong points and even more important, you find your shortcomings.  Just a hint for those coming into this program – when you find your shortcomings, that’s the thing for which you volunteer in the project creation. That way,  you can brush up on the things you might have forgotten.

The Final Project does present its own challenges. We’re not in the same physical building, we’re all over the country (or world, as our class is) so organization and sharing files sometimes becomes difficult,  but as I’ve seen,  it can be done.

At first, when I saw the specs for the final project,  I was a little blown away and frightened.  I wondered how we could actually do this.  But now that we’re a couple of days from the end,  not only did I find out it can be done,  but it’s added new strengths, skills and capabilities to my repertoire which I wasn’t expecting at all.

Like I said earlier, this has definitely been an eye-opening experience, but it’s one that I would not trade.  It’s landed me in a place where there is nothing but an open future, adding to my .Net knowledge and creating a whole new world of possibilities.

My Sites are pretty neat, as it is a way to add social networking into Sharepoint, adding User Profiles, and allows the users to create their own personal sites. It is an extremly useful feature which allows people within the Sharepoint environment to collaborate with one another based on common experience.

BDC is a very big and important feature of MOSS. It allows Sharepoint to accesss and work with all kinds of data whether it’s inside or outside of Sharepoint. It’s even possible to add this data without even using code! It works with external databases, as well as Web Services.

Cool stuff!

We learned all about the different terminology and the Portal site definitions, along with all the possibilities that came along with it, like the approval, and collecting signatures workflows.

It also comes with new navigation tools out of the box, like a Site Directory (page layout feature) and Table of Contents web part, in able to advertise the navigation to the users.

It’s starting to look very interesting.

We started with Sharepoint Designer workflows all the way through creating workflows in Visual Studio. We found out that with SPD, you can do things as simple as sending an email to certain people when an item is added to a library, to Digital Signature retrieval, collecting feedback, Approval and multi-step conditional workflows, or even moving files from one list to another.

We also included creating workflows in Visual Studio, with a Sequential Workflow.

This certainly wasn’t our hardest project, but it wasn’t our easiest that we’ve had, either.

All in all, it was a good experience, enabling us to use what we’ve learned in the preceding weeks, to create something tangible for our project.

Sequential workflows are fairly straightforward, doing activities sequentially. You can also do certain parallel activities in a sequential workflow, we found out.

State Machine workflows are more event driven, in response to something else happening, which ‘triggers’ an activity in a workflow.

Then, we moved on to learning about custom task types, and associating InfoPath forms within the workflow itself. We also learned about Association, Initiation, Task and modification forms and how to integrate them with our Visual Studio projects.

This was all jammed into a short week (no Saturday, just two week nights), so it was a lot of information to digest.

Setfocus has a new ASP.Net Code sample posted:
http://www.setfocus.com/TechnicalArticles/Articles/conditionalgridviewcheckboxes.aspx

Click here to view the embedded video.

Hi, this is David Wier.  Welcome back to my SetFocus SharePoint video diary.  This week, we went even further with SharePoint developer, learning more about workflows, creating custom lists, forms, and applications and using much of the same techniques I was already familiar with in my many years of ASP.NET experience.  It was also interesting to learn that I can leverage some of my older knowledge in this way.

Next we hit the highlights of InfoPath.  Learning to create forms and then learning how to make these forms available in SharePoint, followed up by learning about additional features of InfoPath that we can also use.  After that, we got into the second business processes book, learning how to work with workflows using Visual Studio and learning how to code the workflows, as well as learning the different types of workflows available.  Well, that’s all for now.  So I’ll see you next week, pretty much the same time, pretty much the same place with my next entry in my SetFocus SharePoint video diary.