SharePoint Server 2007 Revealed

Experience 11:
Deja Vu: Creating a Departmental Subsite
I covered this experience in my previous article, but before we continue, let's create a site for the people who will write the check for your SharePoint Server license: your Finance department.

Go to SharePoint Server's Home tab; choose Site Actions, Create Site; and configure the site with Finance as the title, finance as the URL, a Team Site template, and unique permissions. Either add a real user account or create one for testing. I use Penny Xavier, budget manager, as an example.

Experience 12:
Report Libraries: Excel Services and Dashboards
Use Microsoft Office Excel 2007 to create a simple worksheet that contains some numbers. We'll use this to create a performance indicator that will appear on our SharePoint page, so make sure that one cell has a value that you can compare against another cell's "goal" value. For example, create a spreadsheet with a grand total value in cell C7 and a goal value in cell C8.

At the Finance site that you created in Experience 11, click View All Site Content, Create. Select a Report Library and call it Reports. Click the Upload button and upload the spreadsheet you created. You'll be prompted to fill in document properties such as a filename, friendly title, description, and whether you wish to maintain version history for the report.

Like other SharePoint Server features we've looked at, SharePoint Server's Excel Services packs power. Calculations are actually performed on the server and heavy-duty crunching can even be offloaded to Windows compute clusters. However, for this experience, our budget manager, Penny, just needs to see the data to know whether the business is on track.

In the Reports library, click New and choose Dashboard Page. Enter a filename (I used finance.aspx), title (I used Finance Dashboard) and a two-column vertical layout, and select Create a KPI list for me automatically. The Finance Dashboard will be created.

In the Excel Web Access [1] Web part, select Click here to open the tool pane. The page will enter Edit mode. When the Web part's properties panel appears on the right, find the text box labeled Workbook and click the browse button. Locate the Excel worksheet you just uploaded, then click OK on the Web part's properties panel. Because we have only one worksheet to upload, click the close button on the Excel Web Access [2] Web part. Click Exit Edit Mode under Site Actions, and SharePoint will refresh the page, showing your Excel worksheet embedded in the page, rendered by the Excel Web Access Web part and Excel Services. This view is available even to users who don't have Excel installed.

Experience 13:
Key Performance Indicators
Although Budget Manager Penny might like seeing numbers, decision-makers often want a quick visual cue as to what is, and is not, on target. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) can help. In the Finance Dashboard, click the New button under Key Performance Indicators and choose Indicator from data in Excel workbook. On the Finance KPI Definitions: New Item page, enter a friendly name for the indicator (e.g., Business Performance). Click the Excel-like icon next to the Workbook URL field and browse for your report. After you've selected it, you'll be able to select the cell containing the indicator value (the "actual" value) and the cells containing the goal value ("desired" value) and the value at which a warning should be triggered. Click OK to create the indicator, and the KPI you just configured will appear on the Finance Dashboard.

Experience 14:
Create an Expense report and Workflow
SharePoint Server facilitates moving your business processes and forms online. Let's set up an online expense report submission and approval application, using InfoPath 2007, another application in the Office System.

On the Finance home page, click Site Actions, Create. Select a Form Library and name it Expense Reports—all other defaults are fine. Now we need to open InfoPath 2007. In the Getting Started dialog box, select Customize a Sample and choose Sample – Expense Report. Change the header to match your company name, then click File, Publish. The Publish command lets you save the form to SharePoint, but first prompts you to save a copy locally.

The Publishing Wizard then appears. Choose the option to publish the form to a SharePoint Server and click Next. Enter the URL of the Finance site (e.g., http://wss01/finance). You don't have to enter the full URL for the Expense Report library—in fact, it doesn't seem to help to do so, as you'll be prompted for the library soon, anyway.

Click Next and ensure that you select the options to enable the form to be filled out using a browser from a document library. Click Next again. Choose Update the form template in an existing document library, and select Expense Reports. Click Next two times, skipping the Column Name page, which we don't need. A summary page appears. Click Publish. After the form is published, click Close on the final page of the Publishing Wizard.

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