Meet Our Authors
- Bob S
- Dee Anne Kotzer
- Gabe Y
- Gerry V
- Jane H
- Jeff Tincher
- Kelly Kilpatrick
- Marge R
- Mike G
- Neall A
- Peggy S
- Sheri T
Software Assurance Packaged Services
By Gerry V
In the “product off years” at Microsoft (no new OS, no new Office), internal focus often shifts to other components of Software Assurance that can add value to the investment since there is no compelling argument for upgrade rights. It is no surprise then that 2008 is bringing us new choices in what Microsoft calls “Packaged Service Offerings.”
In a nutshell, these are Microsoft-funded consulting packages provided to SA customers at no charge, with the goal of allowing those customers to explore new technologies for deployment at their Enterprise. The newest is SDPS – or –SharePoint Deployment Planning Services. SDPS provides the client with bundles of consulting days for anywhere from 1 to 15 days (length is driven by size of licensing agreement) where a certified Microsoft Partner will provide anything from Requirements Gathering for a SharePoint Deployment right up to a full-blown Pilot on site. Springhouse consultants are currently engaged in a number of these and the initial feedback has been outstanding. If SharePoint is anywhere on your radar, consider opening the discussion to see if your enterprise qualifies for SDPS.
Considering a migration to Office 2007? Springhouse is working with Value Prism and Microsoft to beta test Microsoft’s latest packaged Service, Office System Business Value Planning Services – or - OSBVPS. The idea of this bundle is to help customers identify, unlock, and capture the business value of Office System. This service will deliver a current state process analysis, future state process design, a high-level business case for the proposed solution, as well as a high-level adoption/implementation plan and a proposal for additional services to implement the solution. The Springhouse team will engage some candidate enterprises at no charge for this service in the coming months. Please reach out immediately to gvogler@springhouse.com if an Office 2007 migration/implementation is under consideration to learn more.
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Filed Under Microsoft, SA Benefits, SharePoint Designer, Software Licensing |
If you are a SharePoint Developer you’ve might have run into an issue where SharePoint Designer workflows don’t have enough uumph to allow you to fully build out the workflow to meet business requirements. Over on Codeplex.com is an add-on that gives a developer a handful of additional tools to use in SPD.
Not that this plugin is all that new, but maybe you are new to SharePoint and Designer and running into this issue. I found this set of Workflow activities earlier this year and have installed them at two client sites to improve the functionality of SPD Workflows. The name of the add-on is Useful Sharepoint Designer Custom Workflow Activities. Click to view more and Download.
How does the SPDActivities help you? Well for starters if you need to send an email from a workflow, your only option out of the box is to have the SharePoint system account send the message. This is ok if you don’t require the recipient to have to respond to the email or have the response sent to a mailbox that someone is checking regularly. With the new Send Email Extended activity you will now have the ability to send an email from another account/person by filling in the information for display this address as sender. See below image.
When you click on the display this address as sender link a window will appear where you can manually enter in the email address you would like the workflow to send from or you can click Add Lookup and select a field from a list or workflow data. This comes in very handy like I said before, like when you need the recipient to email back to a specific person or mailbox. I used this feature at one of our clients so the workflow would meet all of the business requirments.
You also get to choose if you want to send the email “non-urgent” or “urgent”. I haven’t had to really use this feature but could see where this might come in handy. So I suggest if you haven’t done so already that you download and install these additional features for SPD. There are a lot of other additional features in the package, not only for email, but improvements to copying list items and more!
Some other cool plugins from Codeplex are:
Podcasting Kit for SharePoint (PKS) is an accelerator for social media, using podcasting and social networks to deliver the next generation knowledge management experience to Microsoft Customers.
A SharePoint Solution Package (WSP) creation tool for WSS 3.0 & MOSS 2007 No more manually creating the manifest.xml file. No more manually specifying the DDF file.
The Community Kit for SharePoint is a set of best practices, templates, Web Parts, tools, and source code that enables practically anyone to create a community website based on SharePoint technology for practically any group of people with a common interest.
Filed Under SharePoint Designer |
