This is cool product. We did a joint webcast with Microsoft in November where we talked about integrating Extranets in the Cloud with Intranets on premise (what we termed the X design). In it, we highlighted the Spirit Community Services Suite which was just released. This product allows organizations to create very webby UI, integrated collaborative communities on SharePoint. It contains a set of 4 modules that you use to create your communities, or, you can use the modules to add “community services” to any site in any SharePoint environment – Intranet, Extranet, or Internet.
We’ve been using the different modules for some time in our own Community – so I am a believer. If you visit the Resources section of the Community you’ll see the link service in action. In our Partner Extranet we use the link service, the news service, and the group blog. The neatest part though is the UI that is all clean CSS/XSLT. This is particularly important for the main community navigation template, which makes it very easy to change and rebrand. With that piece, it is quite easy to pop up, eye popping communities across your environment.
A subtle but key part of the design is that the services modules run as centrally configured web application services. You configure them using a simple, native SP interface, then, you distribute the UI’s, called Service Viewers as web parts to wherever you want to use them. So, when you make changes centrally to a service, any and all uses of it across the environment are immediately updated. This allows you to make access to community services convenient for users by putting them where the user works (like in their departments) while minimizing the maintenance.
It runs on the CW Toolset on top of WSS 3.0 or MOSS. You can run it on premise or in the cloud via our offering with Fpweb.net. The documentation is rather extensive. Armed with it, you can deploy your first community, as shown in the demonstration video, in just a couple of hours. In a full day, you can have a slick, branded community, integrating information from across your SharePoint environment.
If you want to get some business leverage for your organization in 2010, interactive communities that engage and leverage people, inside and outside your organization, is a great way to start.
william
Being able to relate information across SharePoint lists and libraries is important but fraught with a number of gotchas. A key ingredient for this is the ability to create unique and distinctive ID’s that work well with calculated columns and lookups. CorasWorks has had our Workplace ID field in our Toolset and AppEngine products for some time. Now, to kick off the new year we are releasing this tool the SharePoint community for FREE as part of a new Building Block. The whole package is free to all CorasWorks customers and any SharePoint 2007 or WSS user (no additional CW software is required).
The Workplace ID Generator Building Block is available from the CorasWorks App Store (you do need to register to download it). It includes the Workplace ID field (a DLL in a WSP file). Once installed it adds a new field type that you can use to generate your ID’s. The Building Block also includes extensive documentation on the tool and examples of using it in relational scenarios. We have two scenarios supported by two sample templates: one for native SharePoint users and the other for CorasWorks users.
Some of the core gotchas that it addresses are:
- You can’t pad the numerical sequential ID that is native to SP or add static text
- If you do a lookup to an item and want the numerical ID then your lookup will only show the ID when selecting it (i.e., 1, 2, 3 - not very informative or useful)
- You can’t use the SP sequential ID in a calculated column
- You can’t use the Name field of a document library (so people have to use the Title which often isn’t filled in) in a calculated column
- A bunch of other limitations about what you’d want in your item ID’s
The Workplace ID field allows you to create ID’s that have the following 8 elements that can be used in any combination:
- Numerical ID’s with padding – such as 012, 013
- Static text – such as DOC012, DOC013
- Alphabetical sequencing – such as DOC012AD, DOC013AE
- Date – such as 05-12-2010 (supporting date functions)
- Day of Year – such as 035, 036
- Field value – such as picking up the value in a Customer field or including the use of a document name (!!)
- List ID – use the GUID for the list in an ID to make it really unique system wide
- Site ID – use the GUID for the site in an ID to make it really unique system wide
The Workplace ID Generator field plays nicely with calculated columns and lookups to give you the ability to create useful relations between information. The sample templates provide working examples of a set of related information. If you are a CW customer, I recommend that you also download the Idea Hub from Future Structure. It is a free app that leverages the Workplace ID to allow you to create and relate more than 10 lists and libraries to each Idea in the hub so that you can see everything related to an Idea in a single view.
Enjoy and have a great 2010!
william
My - what a year it has been. Thanks for being there, and, I hope you feel we were there for you. One year ago, CorasWorks didn’t have an online Community at all, we were coming off a new customer acquisition binge, we were running on CorasWorks v9, SharePoint 2010 was no where in sight, and, we were all staring at a very gloomy looking 2009.
In January of 2009, Gary Voight, our CEO sent an email to customers and partners. In it, when looking forward to 2009, he said “Beyond the current financial crisis we do have several challenges, but the most significant is helping our customers profitably expand the use and value of SharePoint.“
During 2009, we knew that new customer growth would be constrained and that our customers really needed us to help them be productive. So we focused on helping our customers succeed. It was definitely the year to make the switch. Between the Community, our products, our services, and our partners efforts, we have delivered innovation, education, and support to help our customers better use our products to leverage their investment in SharePoint. In case you’ve missed a few things, here is a rundown of what went down, with a bit of the rationale, and, some color coding to spice things up:
January – We released v1 of the CorasWorks Community to the world. It was basically Forums, Blogs and a place for downloads. But, it was built on a very flexible architecture – CorasWorks on SharePoint. We had the base to start.
February – We started to release initial apps built on v9 of the Workplace Suite to the Community. On February 19, 2009, we released v10 of the Workplace Suite and v1.3 of the Toolset. With the v10 release, we started the cycle of releasing the Suite with the Toolset at the same time. The v10 platform was designed to be able to move customers forward with Ajax Forms, Rich Internet Apps and much more. The plan was for v10 to be designed to be able to bridge customers to SP 2010 – both technically and from a user experience. Fortunately, Microsoft made us part of the Technology Advisory Program in January of 2009 – so we were able to plan way ahead (and, the plan has worked).
March – We started to release core v10 apps such as the Department Dashboard and Central Configuration in the Local and One Touch Editions, and, the Our Workspace app with tutorials to be used to demonstrate simple collaboration on the new v10 platform.
April – On April 29, 2009, we released v10.1 Workplace Suite & v1.4 of the Toolset. Our customer transition to the v10 platform was heating up. We included license management in this release. It was a hassle to our customers, we heard, and we took it out in v10.2. Thank you for shouting!
May – We released our Help Desk and Work Order Approval apps – representing reference app designs for Departmental LOB apps and Business Processes, respectively.
June – We went to v2 of the Community adding the Resources section. Since that time the Resources section has grown to have more than 500 items, including more than 120 videos.
July – We expanded the Community (v2.1) to add a formal App Store with ecommerce for our customers and partners. We began working with a new cadre of App Publishers to build apps for the App Store based on CorasWorks. Our goal with Apps is simply to eliminate the need for our customers to design and build themselves. Even with CorasWorks this takes time and knowledge. With enough Ready-for-Work apps, at low cost, from quality publishers, that are DLL Free, that all work together - customers will be able to focus on customization and integration and vastly increase productivity.
August – We released v10.2 of the Suite/Toolset – our current shipping version. We also released the CorasWorks AppEngine as a runtime/customization environment for Apps – providing a low cost way for organizations to run apps and leverage the extensive set of core CorasWorks capabilities. The first wave of App Publisher apps on v10 hit the App Store addressing classic business problems like Purchase Request, Time Off, Help Desk, Software License Management, etc.
September – CorasWorks released our Project Portfolio Management solution which is quickly becoming a cornerstone app for customers, and, is a reference architecture for project solutions. We also initiated our new Community Update (bi-monthly now) to inform customers and partners of new updates within the Community. We announced technical integration partnerships with other SharePoint ISV’s including Syntergy for Replication and AvePoint for backup and administration.
October – We had a great time at the SharePoint 2009 conference where we released CorasWorks for SharePoint 2010. This product, built for SP2010 Beta 1, put us 9 months ahead of where we were in the SharePoint 2007 product cycle. It also laid the groundwork for our v10.3 release in January 2010 that will bridge customers from 2007 to 2009 without requiring code changes. We also announced our joint venture with Fpweb.net to take CorasWorks Apps to the cloud (launch January).
November – We opened up our App Publisher program to new partners and began our formal App Publisher onramp. We also announced our new push of CorasWorks for the web, leveraging the Toolset, in a webcast with Microsoft and highlighting the really-webby Community Services Suite from Spirit (release January).
December – We launched our new online Web Based Training 5 modules and 27 videos to broaden and make it easier for “builders” to learn to customize and build with CorasWorks. We began launching new waves of App Publishers and their apps ranging from Conference Room Scheduling to Collaborative Hubs to Sales Force Management – many for Free. And, I did the research and wrote this article 
So, all in all, quite a bit of activity. The Community is taking off and we are thrilled with the interaction and engagement. In truth, it was a building year. We’ve had to learn how to be responsive with the online community. I’ve heard that these efforts did help our customers in 2009. And, we did just fine. But, what it has really done is highlighted how much more is needed to really blow out our customer and partners success with CorasWorks on SharePoint. We have a long and continuous path now towards plug-and-play business productivity. The good news, is that we feel that the whole system and community to deliver this value is now in place for great results in 2010.
2010 starts tomorrow. We will be hitting January big – with the v10.3/1.6 (Suite/Toolset) release - the bridge from SP2007 to SP2010. With the launch of CorasWorks in the Cloud. With the launch of lots more Ready-for-Work apps from many more partners and CorasWorks. With the introduction of CorasWorks Building Blocks – a whole new genre of apps for builders that have grown out of what we learned this year. And, plans for a lot of improvements in the Community and our content.
Now, I go to celebrate. Monday, I’ll be back at it. Talk to you in 2010.
william
Increasingly, CorasWorks is being used by people new to SharePoint and outside of the IT department. In order to make CorasWorks training more available to a broader audience, we’ve added online, structured Web Based Training (WBT) to the Resources section of the CorasWorks Community. This makes it easier and more convenient for all of your “builders” across your organization to learn how to customize, connect, and build with CorasWorks on SharePoint. They simply need to register as a member of the Community (anyone can) and then they can access the WBT.
There are 5 WBT modules with 27 videos in all. It is a total of 3 hours of training material. The training targets the starting “builder” using the Workplace Suite v10. It is an excellent primer for power users in your business groups to learn to customize apps on their own. It is also is a great starting place for “builders” that are building apps with CorasWorks.
To access it:
- Go to the CorasWorks Community http://community.corasworks.net
- Log-in or click Register (link at the top) to register for the community
- Go to the Resources tab
- Go to the Video Library resource and select the view (in the upper left hand corner of the display) named Video Library – by Training Module .
The modules are:
- WBT – 01 Introduction to Workplace Suite v10 (6 videos)
- WBT – 02 Data Displays General (4 videos)
- WBT – 03 Using the Display Wizard (8 videos)
- WBT – 04 Calendar Displays (4 videos)
- WBT – 05 Chart Displays (5 video)
Most of the videos in each module have a short quiz at the end to test what you learned – good luck earning your gold star!
william
Our App Publisher partners have shown some Holiday spirit by publishing some very useful and FREE collaborative apps for SharePoint to the CorasWorks App Store. Last week, they published Conference Room Scheduler (by Crucial Systems) and Idea Hub (by Future Structure). Here is the skinny on these apps.
Both apps are in the collaborative apps genre. They are generally addressing the need for people across a SharePoint environment to collaborate. Thus, they have a broad user population and would probably be implemented with permissions for a lot of people.
Crucial’s Conference Room Scheduler solves that common problem of people scheduling conference rooms. It is a clean, simple app where people can centrally schedule the conference rooms. It can also be used to collaboratively schedule other resources like equipment, trade show booths, company vehicles, etc. The key is that it is a centralized resource that gives everyone the visibility they need. It is an easy win for a SharePoint environment.
The Idea Hub is an innovative collaborative app by Future Structure. They’ve coined the term “Hub” for this style of app where you collaborate around something such as Ideas. The key is that all of the lists and libraries in a site are available as related content. Thus, for each Idea you can add 10 different kinds of content and work with all of the content related to the Idea instead of jumping from content type to content type. It basically inverts the idea of content in a SharePoint site to be related to a single thing like an idea. It also lets you fire off emails with links back to Ideas or related items – this drives the idea of a collaborative Hub and Spoke model. Definitely, one to try out. I have started using it for all kinds of things, even beyond ideas, because it is so easy to use and to get and keep people engaged.
Both of these apps run on the Workplace Suite. The Idea Hub also uses the Workplace ID Generator field to generate unique ID’s that are key to the relational design. The Workplace ID tool is currently in the CorasWorks Toolset and the AppEngine, but, not the Suite. Come 1/1/2010 it is being released to the entire SharePoint community for free.
william
This week R3 Business Solutions released v2 of its Time Off Management app and its Budget Change Request Management app. Both include a set of Snaplets to enable organizations to distribute key pieces of each application across the SharePoint environment, in order to make work convenient for users. Snaplets are web parts, based upon a special central configuration enabled by CorasWorks, that make them distributable with full fidelity. This enables you to distribute application functionality to say 20 places across an environment, but, to be able to make one change in a central place and all 20 instances of the Snaplet Web Part are updated. In this article, we provide an overview of Snaplets and three videos that cover the business benefit, how to distribute Snaplets, and how to centrally customize them once they are deployed.
A Typical Scenario for Snaplets
People are adding business apps to their SharePoint environments. They drop the app into the environment somewhere such as in a department site collection. In order to use the app, users then navigate to the app and do their work. This is how we historically have thought of apps - you go somewhere to use them. However, in the broad, distributed work environment that is SharePoint, in many instances there is a better way.
Let’s look at a Help Desk app. You could drop the Help Desk app into the IT Department Site Collection. In general, Help Desk engineers use the app. Historically, our engineers spend a lot of time doing data entry of new requests and fielding calls and emails about status. So, now we tell users that they can go to the app and enter their requests. What we find is that the users don’t do this, because it is inconvenient, thus, the engineers continue to do data entry and respond to status inquiries.
Enter the Snaplet. The CW Help Desk apps use Snaplets. You simple snap off the end-user, self-service UI, and distribute it to all of the locations where users could possibly work. From there they can see their Requests: new ones, old ones, and the status. From there they can enter new requests and pop off emails to assigned engineers and make comments etc. Their work, from wherever they work, is connected to the app. What you find is that users start to enter requests because it is convenient. They reduce separate emails and calls to the Help Desk because they can see the status in real time, wherever they work. This is a typical example of the productivity benefit of distributing application functionality across the SharePoint environment.
Below is a schematic of how this actually lays out. In this example, we have two apps, the Help Desk in the IT Dept and a Time Off Management app in the HR department. Both are good examples of apps where distributing the functionality to where users work makes sense. The Green and Red dots show where the apps’ Snaplets are distributed to. So, you have Snaplets for both apps distributed to 4 department dashboards in their own Site Collections, to the Portal, to an Employee Services Console (where they self-serve), and to Personal Consoles such as their My Sites (people can self-service and drop the Snaplets into their My Site). You distribute the end-user self-service Snaplet. But, you may also distribute Snaplets for Management Reports and Snaplets for Review and Approval. Any functionality in the app can be converted into a distributable Snaplet with full fidelity.
Technically, how do Snaplets Work
All apps built with CorasWorks have displays, views, forms, and actions in some combination. So, when you go into an app, the user has a typical app UI. Any UI in CorasWorks can be converted into a Snaplet for distribution. This is done by creating a Snaplet web part. The Snaplet “encapsulates” all of the functionality of a particular UI display of an app. It is a connected, extension of the app. It is created by using centrally configured capabilities driven by point-and-click builder wizards: Central Views, Central Actions, Central Forms and Global Links. To the user, there is no difference between the UI within the site of the app and the UI that is available via the Snaplet – this is what we mean by “full fidelity”. In addition, once you create the Snaplet it can be used within the app as well as being distributed. The key is that the Snaplet is centrally configurable. Imagine you have a Snaplet for end-users to manage their Time Off requests. You want to add an action so that end-users can fill out a custom form for Time Off requests for personal days. You just add it centrally in the app and any instance of the Snaplet now has that capability.
Video 1: Business Productivity through Snaplets – Self-service Help Desk (6:52 minutes)
In this brief video we will show you how Snaplets are used to distribute the end-user self-serve functionality of the CorasWorks Help Desk and show you how they add business value by putting functionality at the fingertips of users where they normally work.
Video 2: How to Distribute Snaplets – Time Off Management app (7 minutes)
In this video, we’ll show you how easy it is to distribute Snaplets using hte pre-built Snaplets that are part of R3 Business Solutions v2 of the Time Off Management app.
Video 3: Central Customization of Snaplets – Business Links as a Shared Central Resource (7 minutes)
In this video we’ll show you how to customize a Snaplet that has already been distributed. We use a business links “central resource”.
Summary
Most of us are familiar with business apps. And, we are familiar with the distributed, collaborative environment of SharePoint. CorasWorks Snaplets and the capabilities that drive them, make it possible to have the best of both worlds – the structure of business applications with the ability for people to work wherever is most convenient. The result is increased business productivity with a minimum of maintenance. The best part is that it is very easy to do by leveraging CorasWorks Builder Wizards.
Enjoy!
William
Our Project Portfolio Management app was released in October. It has been rapidly adopted by our existing customers and new customers. Most users are drawn to it for the standard “Out of the Box” capabilities for solid project management and flexible portfolio management. That is great. But, the key differentiator is how it can evolve to meet your needs. In this article, we’ll cover 10 “outside of the box” ways that YOU can enhance and extend PPM using the standard point and click wizards of CorasWorks. They are things that may not have occurred to you at first, but, tend to be very powerful ways of leveraging PPM in a SharePoint environment.
First of all, let’s add some context. CW PPM is designed to leverage a SharePoint environment - so it is a bit different. By its nature SharePoint is a distributed environment. The UI structure is distributed and the content is usually distributed. Second, the PPM is usually just one app within this environment. Not only does it typically not live alone, but, it is only practical to use PPM as an integrated part of your work environment. Third, out of the box, CW PPM allows you to have many projects sites, located anywhere in the environment. And, you can have many portfolio dashboards, located anywhere connected to any project sites.
This is the backdrop for thinking outside of the box about PPM. You’ll find it powerful to think of it more as a system, then, just one app. Now, let’s look at 10 ways that you can enhance, extend and integrate PPM as part of your SharePoint work environment.
1. Centrally upgrade the distributed PPM System – PPM has a single Application Configuration Site (“ACS”). it can be located anywhere and is accessed by a CW Global Link. This is part of CW’s “One Touch” architecture. This means that when you want to upgrade the basic functionality of project sites or portfolio dashboards, distributed across your environment, you just go to the ACS site, make your change and all of the parts of the PPM are updated. You make your changes using the Action Wizard or the Central Views wizard. Say you want to add a new Email action to your 100 project sites that allows users to send contracts to legal for review. You create it in the ACS, attach it to a Central View, and you are done. No need to touch the 100 project sites. This means that upgrading in-process project sites is now possible and practical.
2. Hybrid Project Site/Portfolio Customization – The ACS is the baseline for your PPM system. But, a site owner can also customize any project site or portfolio dashboard to meet their specific needs. Thus, you can have customized hybrids of central ACS functionality and localized changes. This is done with the Display Wizard that lets you clone a Central View, and then, customize it. Thus, you have a consistent baseline of functionality with the ability of site owners to customize, enhance and extend their instance. Of course, they can then re-templatize their changes for the next project. NOTE: You can also prevent this or limit who can do it using the CorasWorks Lock Down functionality – your call.
3. Role-Based Portfolios – When thinking PPM we typically think of a manager/executive with a portfolio of projects – to keep tabs on the status. The CW PPM portfolio dashboard contains functionality at two extremes – for the manager wanting a high-level dashboard and for users to be able to do their contributing work on multiple projects form one place. As such, you can create instances of portfolio dashboards for different roles. You may have one for members of a team to do work on their 4 projects, another for a department manager, another for a portfolio by say partner or product, another for a program manager for related projects across departments, and, the PMO’s dashboard with just high-level metrics, risk charts, etc. These changes are done using our Display Wizard.
4. Connect to Central Resources – You can centralize resources in the PPM ACS or elsewhere. An example is a library of standard processes, an employee list, or a list of vendor contact information and rates. Each of these can then have a CW Snaplet that is centrally configured and that you can drag and drop into your project site on demand. You can build up a catalog of drag and drop Snaplets for use by project owners or portfolio users.
5. Push Info In and Out – Project Sites have data. Often, you might have documents in a teamsite, such as the business case, that you want to add to a Project Site when you set it up. You do this by adding a CW action to the teamsite/workspace which lets you pick a project to push the documents into. You can standardize this because you know the schemas in the project sites. You can also force the contributor to fill it a bit of metadata in the process. To push documents out of a project site, you just add an action to push to any other sites. You can also push any other type of information such as tasks, issues, meetings. This is all done using the CW Publisher action type.
6. Integrating with External Data – You often have external data sources with information that is useful for projects. Examples are vendor information, accounting codes, facility locations, etc. You can set up central resources, using a CW Data Provider for all of these external data sources. Then, you create Snaplets that project managers can drag and drop into their sites for instant external data integration. Just add them to your Snaplet catalog. If needed, you can also add read-write functionality to edit or add information to the external data source. The PPM administrator can centrally configure all of the aspects of this – the end-user just decides whether to use this or that Snaplet.
7. Other SharePoint Application Integration – Projects don’t work in a vacuum. Imagine you want project managers to create Purchase Requests or Work Orders from within a project site (two off the shelf business apps by CW and partners). You can add a Snaplet from the app to the project site, and viola, you can now kick off those downstream workstreams from within the project site. As a portfolio manager, you may also want to look upstream at the potential projects managed in a PMO or activity within your Help Desk system. Just connect them up with displays or actions or Snaplets.
8. Implementing Resource Management at a Manageable Level – PPM manages resources and effort at the project level. These are attached to tasks and phases. However, in more structured environments people want to manage resources (primarily people and their time) across projects. You can see this in a portfolio dashboard. However, often the level of granularity is too detailed. One approach is to raise the Resource Management to the Project Allocation level vs. the task level. You create a Central Resource of Employees and you “schedule” them to work on a project for a set of hours. Thus, you can see at a high level who is committed to what projects for how much time – a level that you can manage instead of trying to manage resources at the task level. You can also add a time frame to allocations. So, provide easy resource allocation visibility and let people negotiate the details of their commitments.
9. Add a PMO (to come) – At this time, project initiation, review and governance is not in CW PPM – out of the box. It is coming in v1.2, probably next month. Thus, you will have a process for initiating projects and managing them as a separate module. A nice, clean process that is easily connected to the rest of the PPM system.
10. SaaS PPM (to come) – So, how about running PPM in a Software as a Service model. CW will be launching its CW in the Cloud service over the next couple of months. You can bring up PPM just in a Saas model for internal users. Or, for an external user base. And, you can integrate your PPM in the cloud with your PPM in your Intranet on premise. This is done through remote data connections. On premise, SaaS, or both.
Hopefully, these 10 items give you a flavor of thinking outside of the box about CW PPM. A key is that most of these YOU can do on your own when the need arises. For support on any of these items, ping our support at support@corasworks.net or post to the Community forums. We’ll be fleshing many of these out in future blogs and Community Resources (videos, articles, etc.).
william
Woodforest Bank is a regional bank in the South with 5,000 employees serving customers in 15 states through 700+ branches. They recently created a Contract Management Approval Process using CorasWorks. In this article, we’ll take a look at their solution and at their actual end-user documentation that they have provided to us.
Most of the resources that CorasWorks provides, be it documentation, articles, videos is targeted towards people that are deploying, building, or supporting applications. We don’t typically go deep into end-user training. However, our customers often do. They create more detailed end-user facing documentation and/or videos to make the apps successful with their end-users. The documentation from Woodforest Bank is a good example of a best practice.
About the App
Woodforest Banks’ app is to manage the process of requesting, submitting, and getting approval for contracts with external vendors. It is part of their Portal. It is a classic CorasWorks business process. It’s got the main request form. Its got the displays. It has the end-user actions to automate the work, such as emailing and approvals. And, it has the workflow. These elements are the keys to any business process.
About the Documentation
They have provided us with documentation of their application. There are two documents. The Overview document provides a high level overview of each major part of the process. The Procedures document details each step. This is where documentation really meets the end-user. It is nicely done and a good standard for these types of apps. Each document has the workflow diagram for the app at the end.
This type of documentation is important for a business process app. For collaborative team sites/apps, end-users pretty much figure it out – by its nature it is ad hoc. However, a business process app is, well, a process - and details matter. The very process of documenting it sets your standards.
This level of documentation is most important at the initial introduction of the app. First, as above, it documents the process. It is then reviewed and debated. This is the most time consuming part. Second, this documentation gets the first time users up to speed quickly and effectively.
In speaking with Victor Chataboon, Senior Architect, Infrastructure Platforms that drove this app “The app from start to finish was about a 3 week process. About 2 weeks was spent figuring out the data and the process, involving end-users and getting agreement. It took just a few days to build it out. Then, a few more days to document it. We did some training and rolled it out to production. Its worked very well for us.”
The Next Step
According to Victor the next step will be to integrate the Vendor “lookup” with their external systems. Right now it is a list in SharePoint. Using the Toolset they plan to hook up the app with vendors in an external system so that they maintain their single source of truth across the organization. This is a classic next step. First, you build the app to get the process right. Then, you do a bit of integration with external systems. (See our white paper Enabling Application Evolution that tells the story of how one app evolved through 5 stages).
Well, thanks to Woodforest for sharing. If you’ve got some apps to share, ping me at wrogers@corasworks.net.
william
Last Thursday Microsoft and CorasWorks did a joint webcast entitled “X Design Pattern: Where Contributors and Consumers Cross Boundaries”. It was part of the TechNet series on SharePoint for Internet Business. This article provides an overview of the webcast and access to the recorded webcast, the presentation deck, and separate videos of the live demonstration.
Organizations in the SharePoint community have historically used SP for primarily Intranets. Increasingly, they are looking to extend SharePoint to more robust web facing scenarios. This webcast was about using CorasWorks on SharePoint for “business interaction” scenarios that are web facing and outside the firewall. These are often the core business drivers for organizations to go to the web. They go beyond one-way (“passive”) public facing web sites. They cover scenarios that integrate your “external workforce” with your internal users. Examples are extended business processes, application portals, extranets, and communities of purpose.
This webcast was a kick off of our go to market to start driving packaged applications and standardized frameworks from CW and partners for Web facing scenarios. These efforts are targeted at reducing the time, risk, and cost and increasing the flexibility and robustness of solutions that leverage SharePoint on the web.
The webcast provided the following:
A top down overview of Business Interaction scenarios and how they fit into a “web” strategy
- Presenting the core business value of these types of scenarios which is to leverage your external workforce in solutions where external and internal workers work together seamlessly
- We introduced the X Design Pattern which is at the core of these scenarios and how it supports Cloud-to- On-Premise deployments and the dual roles of contributors and consumers for each
- We presented 3 case studies where organizations have used the X Design Pattern for an Application Portal, an Extranet (business network), and a Community
- We provided an overview of the CorasWorks Data Integration Toolset and how it supports the X Design and business interaction scenarios (today on SP2007 and into SP2010)
- We did a live demonstration of a Community Extranet in the Cloud integrated with an on-premise Intranet – the Omega Product Community
- We introduced a pre-packaged solution (to be released to the CorasWorks App Store and to CorasWorks in the Cloud in December), the Community Services Suite, by Spirit EDV-Beratung that we used in the live demonstration for the Community Extranet
Click here to view the recorded 58 minute webcast. In addition, click here to download the presentation deck in PDF format.
Further, we have separately prepared a set of 3 videos that cover just the live demonstration where we show the Omega Community on the Extranet in the Cloud. They are:
william
On November 18th, we’ll be doing a TechNet webcast sponsored by Microsoft that is part of their SharePoint for Internet Business Series. It is called X Design Pattern for Web Sites: Where Contributors and Consumers Cross Boundaries. In it we’ll be demonstrating how organizations have created valuable business leverage, by leveraging SharePoint and CorasWorks in web facing solutions.
The abstract is as follows:
Historically, Internet sites were built for external users to consume passive content. Now, there is an added ability for internal contributors to provide managed content. In this webcast, we present customer cases studies of Internet sites, extranets, and communities, and we demonstrate how the X design pattern provides the ability for internal users and external Web users to act as both contributors and consumers. The key to this functionality is the layer in the middle where information and the process flow can be managed in both directions, mashed-up, manipulated, and analyzed. We introduce you to the CorasWorks Solution for Internet Sites, which is a packaged solution that extends Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2010 to enable organizations to accomplish this without requiring custom code development.
The webcast will review a number of case studies from some of the largest organizations in the world and smaller companies where CorasWorks has been used to build web-facing internet sites for Communities, Extranets, and Application Portals. You’ll find that they all follow a similar design, that we call the X design, that empowers organizations to bring external users and internal users into work processes and business networks that create valuable business leverage for organizations.
It will introduce you to our Solution for the Web, which comprises the CorasWorks Data Integration Toolset running on Microsoft SharePoint 2007 (and very shortly SP2010) with SharePoint for Internet Sites and productized, plug and play web app services from CorasWorks and our partners. CorasWorks is extending our model that has been so effective for organizations in the Intranet app realm, to the web, to vastly reduce the cost and risks of designing, building, and maintaining robust and effective web facing solutions.
It should be a lively and useful event for those considering web facing solutions on SharePoint. Click here to register with Microsoft Technet.
See you then,
william
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