Summary: Examine new capabilities built into the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Enterprise Edition, which enable business process automation and simplify the business process. This article is part 1 of 2.
Overview of a Custom User Site Provisioning Solution
This article examines some of the new capabilities that are built into the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 Enterprise Edition, which enable business process automation and simplify the business process. This article demonstrates the tight integration between the Office SharePoint Server 2007 portal, including Microsoft Office InfoPath Forms Services and the Business Data Catalog, and the various other 2007 Office system applications and features, such as InfoPath 2007 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007. In addition, the solution that accompanies this article shows how accessing and manipulating various SharePoint Server components programmatically—such as the Member group and user permissions, and Business Data Catalog and legacy line-of-business (LOB) data sources—with the built-in SharePoint Server APIs enable this type of business process automation. The automation was developed primarily by using Visual Studio Tools for Office 2007 Second Edition and the Visual Studio 2005 Extensions for Windows Workflow Foundation. Additionally, you can develop traditional .NET Framework console and Windows Forms applications to make use of the SharePoint Server APIs and 2007 Office system APIs that will also facilitate the automation and simplification of business processes within the enterprise.
Employee SharePoint Permissions within the Enterprise
Most organizations have an approval process in place that allows employees’ managers to approve any costs that are associated with using new IT resources implemented in the enterprise. Usually the employee who requires access to the new system initiates the process, which spans several approval cycles by various managers, as well as a long delay and many e-mail messages. This is often a monotonous process, which consumes not only the time of the employee, but also that of the approving manager.
This article presents a solution that integrates Active Directory domain controllers, LOB data, InfoPath Forms Services, and workflow with the 2007 Office system to support the submission and automation of such requests. The solution uses employee information contained within the Active Directory domain controller and the human resources database to support the submission of the request. The data pulled from these two sources provides all the employee’s relevant information and the approving cost center manager’s information. In this scenario, an employee uses a solution based on InfoPath 2007, and the Business Data Catalog and InfoPath Forms Services features of MOSS 2007 Enterprise Edition to submit a request for permission to create SharePoint sites within the enterprise SharePoint portal.
The Business Data Catalog is a new, powerful feature of MOSS, which allows developers to surface LOB data up to MOSS from disparate legacy systems and LOB systems that exist within the enterprise. By default, the Business Data Catalog can connect to Oracle, CRM, and SAP databases, and other systems without extra development. The new and powerful InfoPath Forms Services feature of MOSS is a browser-based, thin-client run-time version of InfoPath, which allows users to read and complete InfoPath forms through the browser when the forms are integrated with MOSS.
The solution also allows the employees’ cost center manager to review the requests submitted, and approve or reject them. After the cost center manager reviews the request, the custom workflow and custom workflow activity, designed with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2005 Extensions for Windows Workflow Foundation, automatically sends out the appropriate e-mail messages and adds the appropriate permissions for the employee within the SharePoint portal.
To clarify the overall process of this custom permission request solution, the following diagram depicts the entire process flow logically and all of the various pieces and steps that make up the process.
Figure 1. Overview of entire permission request process
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The Request InfoPath Form
The main user-centric piece of this process is the employee request form. This request form is an InfoPath form that the employee submits with the relevant data needed to review the request. Many of the fields on the form are pre-populated when the employee creates a request, to ensure data integrity throughout the process and to eliminate the amount of data that the employee is required to provide.
Figure 2 shows the request form that is used by the employees. The form pre-populates the following fields when the user creates a request:
Employee NT ID
Employee Full Name
Employee Email
Employee Cost Center
Cost Center Approver Name
Cost Center Approver Email
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