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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 |
SharePoint Designer Governance - Robert Bogue (MVP)
By Jeff Tincher
Here is a great post I ran across on Robert Bogue, a SharePoint MVP, blog site. Robert discusses the need for governance with SharePoint Designer, a great tool for certain users, a dangerous weapon for others. Robert goes on to write:
I talked about what good users for SPD are and what bad uses for SPD are – but I never came right out and made any recommendations for how to put a governance framework around SPD in your organization.
….
The primary challenge when looking at SPD roll outs and governance, in my experience, has been a misunderstanding of what the tool does. It’s a data view web part creator, a workflow creator, and an HTML/CSS editor.
The full article can be read here on ThorProjects.com
Filed Under SharePoint |
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