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By: David Slonosky
SharePoint, the most interesting Microsoft product ever. Not the most well-known one. But the most interesting.
Its interface is cobbled together from FrontPage remnants and bits of other GUI code taken from the World Wide Web. If your site looks anything like mine at work, it is a somewhat functional piece of work with poor formatting because someone untrained (guilty!) was ordered to build and maintain a SharePoint site “for the team!'.
I don't think anything short of a total site remake is going to make my site at work pretty now. But, while working around the SharePoint functionality, I came across a neat thing in SharePoint, how to build a workflow.
See, someone from a different department had tasks, which they were requested to fulfill by someone from my department. These said tasks being tracked through Outlook involved a lot of e-mail tracking through searches…which is at best annoying.
Then said person from my department departed for a different job. Leaving me in charge of assigning said cross-departmental tasks.
“Self,” I said to myself, “there is no way I am going to play chase the e-mail archives with this. There must be a better way.” And there was! It was through SharePoint and workflows.
Workflows allow you to set up a repository to hold a set of tasks. You can define steps and statuses inside the workflow. You can assign e-mails that need to be notified as the workflow progresses along. Other people can choose to get notified along the workflow. It's brilliant!
I loved it. The person in the other department loved it. No more hunting e-mails, instead you went to one SharePoint site and checked along a list of tasks to see their statuses and who was assigned to what. Brilliant!
So even if your main site looks like someone took a URL shaker and sprinkled it generously over your page, take a look at workflows and you will find at least one reason to love SharePoint.
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