If you want to manage your work flow effectively and streamline your business processes, Microsoft InfoPath 2010 can prove to be an important tool in your hands. Apart from being loaded with rich features like hyperlink insertion, picture buttons, time and date pickers, filtering options etc, this tool can help you to create forms and gather data. Using user-friendly layout sections and diverse styles, you can develop and design interactive XML-based data entry forms with the help of InfoPath 2010. You may even use it to instantly modify SharePoint list forms. Let us take a look at how InfoPath 2010 can help your business:
Design forms
Unlike traditional toolbars and menus that usually require several steps to create forms, you can use the Ribbon interface of InfoPath 2010 to create forms fast. Since the Ribbon uses a tab structure to display commands, which are organized by tasks that are related to a specific activity, creating the forms that you want can be done in quick time. InfoPath 2010 also helps you to craft sophisticated forms quickly without writing any code. You will just need to use a few clicks to add validation, actions or do some formatting to create your own form. Thanks to the InfoPath Filler, people filling out forms can now use a cleaner user interface as compared to the precious versions. If your business needs forms that support digital signatures, forms for SharePoint lists etc, you can use InfoPath 2010 to create them easily. Publishing your forms with a single click also becomes easy with the use of Ribbon Quick Access toolbar or the Backstage view of Microsoft Office.
Create collaborative workflow solutions for SharePoint
If you need SharePoint workflow solutions to be used at the enterprise or departmental level, you can create them using InfoPath with little or no code. You can build these solutions from an existing library or list (modular solutions), add capabilities with code (extensible solutions), and publish them using the SharePoint site template or the Windows SharePoint Services solutions, which can be moved from server to server or from site to site (portable solutions). You can even enjoy richer web forms, thanks to controls and functionality available in InfoPath 2010 browser forms like combo boxes, date and time controls, and filtering. You can also manage your InfoPath forms on SharePoint Server 2010 without any hassle.
Create enhanced forms and connect them to LOB systems
If you need to create forms for specific business-processes, you can employ codes to enhance InfoPath forms using SharePoint Server Sandboxed Solutions and Visual Studio Tools for Applications. Since InfoPath 2010 works well with BCS (Business Connectivity Services) of SharePoint Server 2010, you can link forms with line-of-business (LOB) information, which in turn would help in streamlining development of solutions with deep integration of external services and data.
Use InfoPath 2010 today to streamline your business processes.
Converge Point (www.convergepoint.com) is a leading SharePoint Consulting firm focused solely on SharePoint and InfoPath technologies. Our expert SharePoint consultants help organizations with SharePoint Implementation, SharePoint Integration, SharePoint Intranet, SharePoint Extranet, SharePoint workflows, Custom SharePoint Web Parts and SharePoint Branding.
If your business plans to use Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 environment, it would be wise on your part to have an insight into effective capacity management. This way, you will have adequate knowledge for sizing, planning, and controlling service capacity to make sure that the minimum performance levels as specified in your SLA are exceeded.
Providing IT services to your clients at a reasonable cost and still meet performance levels defined in your SLAs is what good capacity management is all about. Remember that capacity management is an ongoing process, since you will need to change the implementation procedures based on how your content and usage get affected by time. In other words, you will need to plan for change and growth, so that your SharePoint Server 2010 based environment can go on delivering an effective business solution. So, here are some steps that will help you to carry out successful capacity management for your SharePoint Server 2010 environment.
Analyzing the model
You will need to analyze your existing solutions and estimate the expected demand and targets before modeling your SharePoint Server 2010-based environment. You can do this by gathering information about your data requirements, user base, throughput targets, end-user latency etc, which will help you to have a clear idea of the SharePoint Server features that you would like to deploy. You should also have a clear idea of your dataset and expected workload for proper sizing of SharePoint Server 2010. In other words, to implement this solution, you should be able to explain dataset characteristics like content distribution and content size, as well as describe the characteristics of the workload that includes operations used most frequently and the number of users. You may also analyze your IIS Logs to know more about key metrics about an existing SharePoint Server 2010 deployment. This way, you will be able to handle the workload distribution well as you would have the knowledge about how many users are active, how heavily the system is being used by them, kind of requests that are coming in, and the kind of clients from where they originate etc.
Choosing the right architecture
To offer services at reasonable cost and meet performance standards, it’s important to decide on the architecture when you install SharePoint Server 2010. So, based on what your business needs are, you may use a single server or link multiple servers to a SharePoint Server farm, which has clustered or mirrored database servers and offers discreet application servers to handle various services. You should also ensure that clients can access data in quick time through the network. Having proper disk management in place is another important factor. It’s not just enough to have adequate space for your data. Rather, you should also evaluate the on-going demand and growth, and make sure that your storage architecture is not creating bottlenecks in the system or slowing it down.
Testing and Optimization
This is a critical stage of effective capacity management. Before deploying the new architectures, test them to see if they can help you achieve the desired performance and capacity targets. This way, you can also identify bottlenecks, if any, and deal with them before they affect users in a live deployment. When you are upgrading your SharePoint Server 2007 and plan to bring architectural changes, such tests can help you make sure that the new SharePoint Server-based environment works well and can be optimized to its full potential.
Maintenance and Monitoring after deployment
You need to monitor your server to find out bottlenecks fast and maintain system performance. For this, you should understand the key indicators that will help you identify which particular regions of your farm require attention. You should also learn the right way of interpreting these indicators. In case you find that your farm is operating beyond the defined targets, you can adjust your farm by modifying your topology, removing or adding hardware resources, or changing the way data is stored.
So, be ready to monitor your SharePoint Server 2010 environment and modify in its early stages, as and when the need for adjustment arises. Once the environment comes to a stable point, you may use the defaults settings as you will no longer need detailed monitoring.
Converge Point (www.convergepoint.com) is a leading SharePoint Consulting firm focused solely on SharePoint and InfoPath technologies. Our expert SharePoint consultants help organizations with SharePoint Implementation, SharePoint Integration, SharePoint Intranet, SharePoint Extranet, SharePoint workflows, Custom SharePoint Web Parts and SharePoint Branding.
To optimize the use of a SharePoint Server 2010 environment, the roles, procedures, and responsibilities related to your business operations should be formalized. Here are some cues to help you implement SharePoint 2010-based solutions to maximize business results:
Document Sharing & Collaboration
In today’s work environment that’s highly connected, documents created and used by multiple users, editors, and stakeholders are becoming the rule, rather than the exception. If your business needs to ensure easy channels of communication and collaboration between end-users but reduce the responsibility on administration required to support it, you can opt for SharePoint Server 2010. You can use the co-authoring functionality of Microsoft Office 2010 with Microsoft Word 2010, Microsoft PowerPoint 2010, as well as Microsoft OneNote 2010 documents on SharePoint Server 2010. Thanks to co-authoring, collaboration of server-based documents becomes easy and your business overheads, which were earlier linked to traditional document sharing via attachments, decrease. So, if your business needs multiple users to work on the same document, you can now ensure that work is done productively without any user intruding on another’s work or locking the others out. You won’t need any additional server setup to use this functionality as it is the default state for data stored in SharePoint Server 2010. What’s more, administrators can manage the sharing and collaboration functionality with the use of same tools and technologies that they have already used to manage SharePoint. This way, not much impact would be there when you decide to use SharePoint 2010.
Project Management
Your business has got a lot of information scattered everywhere in the form of spreadsheets, documents, e-mails, presentations, and more. Most of the data is usually stored on different computers and at different locations, making it difficult to manage the same. However, with the enhanced document and record management capabilities of SharePoint 2010, you can now manage your projects and data effectively. SharePoint 2010 allows users to put related documents in a set, share workflows, metadata, homepage and archiving processes. So, whether your business need to manage rigid processes like regulatory submissions or deal with informal process management where teams have to merge several file types in same process, you can do all that with SharePoint 2010. Some other features of SharePoint 2010 that will help you manage your projects include allotment of unique document id to files that make it easy to search them, easy process to rate and add notes to documents, defining rules on a folder for further routing of the document, and usage of metadata by combining structured taxonomies and keywords, among others.
Dashboards & Reports
Thanks to SharePoint 2010, you can create rich, context-driven dashboards that help you to put data and content at a place, and get an overall view of your business performance at all levels. In other words, creating business intelligence dashboards and publishing them is an easy task in SharePoint 2010 environment. You can use the Dashboard Designer, which can be launched directly from the browser, and use it to create Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), reports, scorecards, analytic charts and grids, filters, and dashboards.
Business Process Optimization
SharePoint 2010 has a new service architecture, multi-tenant features, and other improvements that have made it capable of handling larger volumes of content and an increased number of users as compared to its earlier version. You can reduce downtime by using its enhanced recovery and backup utilities as well as its improved support for high-availability features of SQL Server. You can analyze feature usage and find misconfigurations and other problems with the help of improved logging and log analysis tools. The considerably expanded PowerShell interface will help your business handle most administrative procedures, which in turn would encourage standardization and efficiency.
So, say hello to SharePoint 2010 today!
Converge Point (www.convergepoint.com) is a leading SharePoint Consulting firm focused solely on SharePoint and InfoPath technologies. Our expert SharePoint consultants help organizations with SharePoint Implementation, SharePoint Integration, SharePoint Intranet, SharePoint Extranet, SharePoint workflows, Custom SharePoint Web Parts and SharePoint Branding.
