InfoPath and "Cloud" woes

I was recently forwarded an article from a professional colleague that brought a little bit of a dark shadow to the promised land of "the cloud".  I'm a big fan of InfoPath for its ability to empower Power Users to build what they need; especially the ease of accessing web services.

Regrettably in Office 365 it is not possible to make use
of your SharePoint User Profile Service web service with InfoPath Forms Services (InfoPath forms in a browser on SharePoint).  This prevents your online forms from gathering information about users from just the place that was designed to let you do so in SharePoint.  Due to security concerns, Microsoft will simply not allow it.  This is a negligible issue that could be evaluated, in an on-premise implementation, for acceptable risk but the decision is out of your hands when using cloud services.  InfoPath will be replaced in the future, but currently I believe that it has no peer except for 3rd party vendor software.  Please read here for the article about the scenario and further resources.

Add Extranet Security with Registration Approval Workflows

Extranet Collaboration Manager for SharePoint 2013 (ExCM) allows you to create users in three ways:

1. Manually

2. Invitation Registration (via e-mail)

3. Anonymous Registration (potential users visit the Extranet site and click “Sign Up”)

The most common of these is via invitation. When using invitations, there is most likely an existing business relationship with the invitee and the general thinking is that “if you’re invited, you’re approved.” However, there may be certain scenarios where you want to add an approval step for invited users as well.

In addition, there may be instances where you need to implement Anonymous Registrations for user creation. For example, suppose you didn’t know ALL of the email addresses for potential site users. By using Anonymous Registrations, a user can visit the site, fill out the registration from, and create a new account herself. The downside to this is that since your SharePoint Extranet site is available worldwide to anyone with an Internet connection, there is a possibility of invalid or unnecessary account creation.

By turning on approval in ExCM, ALL registrations (both invitation and anonymous) are required to be manually reviewed by someone and either approved or rejected…thus adding another layer of security to your site. However, this could become a very tedious task for approvers since they would have to manually check for new accounts periodically and determine their approval status. By creating a basic workflow, you can email approvers when a new registration occurs and let them know it’s ready to be reviewed.

In 2013 you will first need to activate workflows. Go to Site Settings > Site Collection features and activate "Workflows":

Who ya gonna blame?

Yesterday I wrote No Pain, No Gain to talk about the fact that its HARD to have good systems.  That's because systems are the combination of people, procedures and technologies, and no matter what the software platform, or whether on-premises or Cloud, it just takes a lot of hard work for both IT people and Business people to have good systems.  That's fundamentally the reason some businesses have good systems and some don't.

One thing I intended to mention in the article, but forgot, is to make the point that when something is hard and takes a lot of work to do well, some people (me included at times) will look to find someone (or some thing) to blame, rather than just buckling down and working hard to get a good outcome.

With that said, I think IT people, as a group, have been "thrown under the bus" a lot in the last few years.  I think it has come first as a result of some Business people being unable to accept the fact that good systems require hard work, and that means for them too, not just IT.  So, it is easiest to just blame IT.

No Pain, No Gain

I recently read this blog post on Sharegate's blog:

Move to Office 365:  Did SharePoint Become the Reason?

The very first line of the post says this:

"It's been a long and exhausting road with SharePoint"

It inspired me to leave this comment, which I realized I wanted to make into a blog post.  So, here it is:

For business people, "IT" has been a long and exhausting road for 30 years or more.  And, one of the rarely spoken truths is that one key reason is because it is "hard to create and maintain good systems".

Systems are the combination of people, procedures and technologies.  It is really hard for organizations to combine those three things and come up with something that is really good.

Display a Security Trimmed Listing of Sites Using SharePoint Search

Depending on where you live, and how frequently you travel by car, you might have come across vast areas taken over by kudzu.  I’m always amazed at the vast land area kudzu can quickly take over.  I’ll bet if you stared at it for a while, you could actually see it grow.

As SharePoint grows in your organization, so do the number of sites each of your users has access to.  So how do you go about showing a listing of sites the user has access to, especially if their sites are separate site collections or even web applications?

If you don’t provide something for the users, it might be easier for them to find a green crayon in a field of kudzu.  You need something to help users find their sites besides relying on them to have well organized bookmarks. 

Configure Host Headers for SharePoint Web Applications

My friend and I were driving down the road the other day when he turns to me and tells me that there is this website with links to great extranet security products for SharePoint and even links to SharePoint Training. I had to check this out for myself! “What’s the site?” I ask. “Oh, its http://216.215.157.252” To which I reply “Cool, I’ll look that up as soon as I get home… if I remember it!”

There is a reason we have DNS: it is so we can make things easier to remember. There was no way I was going to be able to remember http://216.215.157.252 unless I put it into a song (is 86753O9 going through anyone else’s head right now?)

You see, despite what Juliet may tell you, names are important. Sure a rose by any other name would still be as sweet, but the florist still gives me strange looks when I ask for a dozen #F80000 roses. You do not go around treating people as if they are storm troopers and asking "TK-421, why aren't you at your post? TK-421, do you copy?", so why would you treat your SharePoint web apps like they are storm troopers?

Give your SharePoint web apps names by configuring Host Headers.