Microsoft

This white paper describes how Microsoft developed the Application Templates, identifying best practices for how to work with core capabilities within both Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services and Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007, with the goal of empowering customers and partners to create their own applications.

The Apply Styles task pane displays each style according to the rules of the style, so you can quickly identify the style you want to work with just by looking at the style's visual appearance.

Use the CSS Properties task pane to quickly see all of the styles that the current selection in your Web page uses, the order of precedence of those styles, and all of the properties and values of those styles.

With the Manage Styles task pane, you can apply, modify, rename, and delete styles; attach or detach external cascading style sheets (CSS); select all instances of a style; and go to the code that contains a style's rule set.

When you design a workflow, you often want to collect information from a participant in the workflow, and then use that information for making further decisions. For example, you might want a workflow to ask a participant to review a document, and then have the workflow perform different actions depending on whether the reviewer approves or rejects the document. To accomplish this, you add the Collect Data from a User action to your workflow.

Your workflow can collect and store information from many people by assigning them a task to fill out a custom form. Those submitted values are stored in the Tasks list, where you can view them later. For example, each time that a document is added to your library, you might want several workflow participants to review the document and record their comments in a form. Those comments can then be viewed in the Tasks list by the owner of the document. To accomplish this, you add the Assign a Form to a Group action to your workflow.

When you design a workflow, you often want to assign work to a participant in the workflow. The simplest scenario is when you don't require any information from the participant — you just want to know that the work was completed so that the workflow can continue. For example, you might want several participants to review a document, but you don't need the workflow to collect their feedback or any other information; you simply want to know that the work was completed. To accomplish this, you add the Assign a To-do Item action to your workflow.

Microsoft has developed forty application templates for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 to provide out-of-the-box solutions to address the needs of specific business processes, such as coordinating a Help Desk. The purpose of this article is to describe how Microsoft developed the application templates, identifying best practices for how to work with core capabilities within both Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Office SharePoint Designer 2007, with the goal of empowering customers and partners to create their own applications.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 allows non-developers to create custom workflows in a straightforward way by using the workflow designer it provides. During the process, the user "glues" together different activities that represent the steps for the workflow. There are numerous activities one can use and the list is extensible. Developers can use Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 to build additional activities and deploy them, so that they are available in Office SharePoint Designer 2007.

This article introduces the concept of secondary workflows and provides instructions for creating one. The example workflow in this article, which is created on the Tasks list, sets the due date value for each new task that is produced by a specific workflow running on the Shared Documents library, and then sends a reminder message if the task is not complete by its due date.

You can add a toolbar to a Data View so that users can filter, sort, or group the data in the Data View by using the toolbar in the browser. You can also turn on filtering and sorting on column headers in a Data View, so that users can filter or sort the data by clicking the column headers, just like a list view.

If your Data View uses a list or library as its data source, you can add the SharePoint list toolbar to the Data View so that you can work more effectively with the underlying list or library. The SharePoint list toolbar is the menu bar at the top of a list or library that provides various options to work with that list or library.

You can change the number of records that a Data View displays in the browser. For example, you can have the Data View display all items or only a certain number of total items. You can also set up paging so that the Data View displays items in sets of a certain number. If you add paging to the Data View, you can navigate between pages in the browser. You can also change the number of records that a Data View displays in Design view, so that you can see a quick preview of how the Data View will render itself with a certain number of records.

This article shows you how to set up your workflow to send an e-mail message. It also explains how to use workflow lookups both to address the mail and to include dynamic content in the message body, including how to insert or build hyperlinks. Finally, this article shows you how to format the content of the message, along with providing other information about working with workflow-generated e-mail messages.

This article describes how to check workflows for errors in Office SharePoint Designer 2007. You can also find troubleshooting information for workflow error messages that appear in Office SharePoint Designer 2007, and for error messages that appear in the browser for workflows created in Office SharePoint Designer 2007.

Learn how to move around on a site and customize the navigation.

See how to copy files to different libraries, and then manage the copies after they are created.

Learn how to poll team members or customers to find out what is on their minds.

Learn how you can control access to what users or SharePoint groups can access on your SharePoint site.

Learn how to manage SharePoint groups by adding or deleting groups, adding or removing users from a group, and changing group settings.