I need to be able to determine when an item is approved so a task can be assigned to various people to review it.

How can this be done?
Cheers,

Your very last sentence is the real challenge: “Defining and configuring site collection quota requires less effort then defining enterprise wide content types, retention policies combined with offloading the SQL server.”

Content management (content types, metadata, information management policies) is completely foreign to some (most) users. Giving them a shiny new SharePoint site, then throwing all the features at them at once, would certainly present an adoption challenge. As such, I think the SharePoint maturity of the organization factors heavily on the answer to the problem.

The requirement is honorable but the solution presents a myriad of challenges, let me summarise.

Defining a retention policy means, the information has an expiry date. An expiry date means that information can be ‘removed’ after that date. The remove part is where the complexity enters. I’ve experienced where companies implemented this approach and very soon discovered that information were deleted because of the content type it belonged to that should never have been deleted in the first place. In the real world very few companies have zero information on a server where new fresh rules can be applied to newly uploaded content with well defined content types.

When companies already have a lot of information and retention policies are applied the variance within that becomes unmanageable. Then the next solution/idea would be to add ‘intelligence’ to removing the data from the live environment i.e. by generating tasks using workflows in which users are notified that a document must be archived.

Initially, this sounded like a wonderful idea, but what happens if you apply those rules to document libraries across the whole site from the get go? Thousands of documents on that environment belonging to the same content type will require archival on the same day.

This creates the same mess that the company were stuck with initially – how do wet get to everything to clean-up.

I’m interested in hearing other people’s thoughts on this.

Thank you for the intelligent post!
-

Don’t agree at all on the short-sighted / draconic view on the IT departments. They are the ones that have to make sure that your environment stays in the air, they are the ones that get yelled at when the system goes down and isn’t up and running soon (guess that this huge content database actually needs a long time to restore, and yes the backup only happens once in a week as your database is so big that the backup isn’t able to finish during the night…oh yes, and then there is also the SLA). They are also the ones managing the thirdparty solutions you add to the environment. Not to mention that the money for this maintenance usually comes from another budget than the project itself. Personally I prefer the approach where you check with IT what is currently possible and what the roadmap is for the future. You then talk to the business what it is that they want and then provide a roadmap to get there. Which might mean that business will have their limitations due to the current IT limitations. It’s then up to them to tackle those challenges, either through providing additional budget/resources or by using the environment in a different way.

Content analysis is paramount in delivering value solutions in SharePoint, regretfully much companies don’t want to invest in this and use SharePoint only as a file server and treat it as such. And thus do not create any added value for their organization.

IT should be an enabler and not an obstacle for people wanting to collaborate. IT does not own the content!

SPList myList = myWeb.GetList(“/Lists/MyList”);
SPQuery qry = new SPQuery();
string caml = @”1;
SPListItemCollection myItemColl = myList.GetItems(qry);
SPListItem myItem = myItemColl[0];
object wfStatus = null;
wfStatus = myItem["WorkflowOnNew"] != null ? myItem["WorkflowOnNew"] : null;
if (wfStatus != null)
{
switch (wfStatus.ToString())
{
case “0″:
wfStatus = “Not Started”;
break;
case “1″:
wfStatus = “Failed on Start”;
break;
case “5″:
wfStatus = “Completed”;
break;
}
// Now do what you want with wfStatus, just remember you’ll have to do “.ToString()”
// on it because it’s an object.

P.S. I didn’t do all the possible combinations of status numbers, this was just an
example to get you started. Find those at
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepointworkflow/thread/f5de7947-f49b-420a-b8d8-d44ad6b7769f/
and various other places around the ‘net.

}

I am getting fatal error while downloading Virtual-Machine-Setup-Guide.docx. Can you please help me.

Thanks

Kan

Sorry for the delay in getting back to you on this. What I would do is take a step back and think about the use cases some more and then build the solution that will really work best for the users to solve those particular problems. IMO, the top-of-column filtering stuff usually makes less sense to users when they have specific goals than when they just “might like to filter sometime”.

All that said, how would I build it based on what I know? I’d ditch the SPD-generated filtering and write my own XSL in the DVWP to add some dropdowns at the top of the page only for the columns that people are really going to filter on. For instance the date/time column I see in your screenshot may not be one which is useful to filter on, where Material clearly is. To do this, you’ll have to get your hands dirty with the XSL, but you’ll probably be providing your users with a better solution. You can do the dropdowns and a ‘Submit’ or ‘Go’ button at the top of the DVWP in the same DVWP (you already have all the items) or you can create separate DVWP(s) for them.

This blog post of mine may be of help:
http://sympmarc.com/2008/01/03/firing-an-event-when-a-user-selects-a-value-from-a-data-view-web-part-dropdown/

Finally, since it sounds like you will be using this DVWP on multiple sites based on their URLs, I’d store the XSL in a central place (I usually use a Document Library in the root site if it’s WSS or the /Style Library/XSL Style Sheets folder if it’s MOSS) and use xsl:import to pull it into each DVWP.

Hope this helps.

M.

Distinct Values in a DVWP: http://sharepoint.strident.co.uk/archives/572
Date filtering: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sharepointdesigner/archive/2008/02/25/filtering-and-formatting-with-date-values.aspx
Query Strings + DVWP: http://www.sharepoint911.com/blogs/laura/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=81

-Raymond

I have also some others, concerning my company. Will add them to my post later this week.
Thanks for reading and sharing :-).
And i’m happy that I “reminded” you to write yours down :-)