October 2007 - Posts

• How good is SharePoint as Document Management System?

  This blog has moved. Click here to open the new site. One of the most important features of SharePoint 2007 is document management. I decided to review SharePoint in terms of features that a document management solution should have. Definition on DMS can be found here (I just adapted this definition with few things mentioned in April 2007 edition of Directions on Microsoft). Feature SharePoint Score Metadata Very strong, especially when used with Office 2003/2007 documents. Integration Integration is present, but only with Microsoft tools. Needs improvement. Capture There is no built-in functionality to capture paper documents. Indexing Very strong. Indexing for non MS formats (like PDF) and other content sources is also available. Storage SharePoint and SQL Server 2005 act as very stabile storage platform. Document migration and retention policies be introduced in SharePoint 2007 but these still need improvements. 3rd party tools are required for serious document archiving. Retrieval Search and filtering technologies have been improved in new version but search capabilities are far from ideal. Security Item level security is available, but product lacks abilities to set permissions on file type and reports on permissions already set. Workflow Workflow capabilities have been improved, but managing complex workflows cannot be done without 3rd party products. Collaboration Strong for users using Internet Explorer. It still needs to be improved for Firefox users. Versioning Strong. It misses some advanced versioning rules. This blog has moved. Click here to post a comment. Posted Oct 09 2007, 09:18 PM by toni with 14 comment(s) Filed under: editions, document management

• Workflow: An error has occured in Approval

  This blog has moved. Click here to open the new site. I have created a custom approval workflow in a document library. On customize workflow screen I selected the following option: [x] Update the approval status (use this workflow to control content approval) During workflow testing I was surprised when SharePoint reported the following error: “An error has occured in Approval.“ The solution for this problem is very simple, if you want your workflow to update approval status you need to enable content approval in your document library. To enable content approval here is what you need to do: Go to your document library Settings > Versioning Settings and select „Yes” for “Require content approval for submitted items?“ option. This blog has moved. Click here to post a comment. Posted Oct 08 2007, 11:13 PM by toni with 10 comment(s) Filed under: issues, workflows

• SharePoint Usage Reports

  This blog has moved. Click here to open the new site. One of my customers recently deployed intranet site on MOSS 2007. After a while we wanted to analyze the usage of this site. I was rather disappointed to see the built-in reports in MOSS. Reports are very basic and do not give you many clues about real usage of your site. You can read a little bit more in great Joel Olson post about same topic. I just hope some vendor will provide us with something better. Has anyone tried to implement Google Analitics on a SharePoint site? Were you satisfied with the results? This blog has moved. Click here to post a comment. Posted Oct 03 2007, 10:49 PM by toni with 6 comment(s) Filed under: usage reports