SharePoint Composites
Do-It-Yourself Business Solutions

New and Improved

• Business Connectivity Services
• SharePoint Designer 2010
• Workflows
• Access Services
• InfoPath Forms Services
• Sandbox Solutions

Almost all companies need custom solutions that meet the needs of their specific lines of business. To satisfy these requirements, decision makers turn to developers or IT staff to build these solutions. Some decision makers even reach outside the company and hire external contractors or vendors to build these solutions. Often, this process results in a bottleneck at a single point within the company: the IT staff.

With SharePoint Composites, people can create solutions using out-of-the-box SharePoint components and tools to deliver business collaboration solutions without having to write custom code and without involving the corporate IT team. Companies can then increase productivity and promote teamwork by letting users and decision makers create SharePoint-based solutions.

SharePoint Composites helps IT teams focus on higher priority initiatives and improve the return on existing application investments. The company IT team benefits from this approach because out-of-thebox solutions are easier to maintain, require less management, and let administrators deploy and maintain a predictable infrastructure to support such solutions.

Business Connectivity Services

In SharePoint Server 2007, people could work with external data using the Business Data Catalog (BDC). With this powerful capability, people gained advanced search solutions and could supplement information in SharePoint lists with data from external line-of-business systems. SharePoint 2010 builds on the BDC and introduces Business Connectivity Services (BCS), helping people integrate external data into SharePoint solutions with both read and write operations.

People can easily connect a SharePoint Composites application to external data by using Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2010 to create an external content type, which they can use in SharePoint lists or throughout the application. People can also use the external data within Office client applications such as Word, Excel, and Outlook. For example, custom task panes in Outlook can use data from external line-ofbusiness applications to add details to a selected contact card, such as the company’s recent orders.

Figure 28 SharePoint Designer 2010 navigation with external content types and data sources

Not all users are connected at all times. For people who need to work with company data while disconnected from the network, SharePoint Workspace 2010 offers a rich offline experience that gives them access to SharePoint content from almost anywhere at almost any time, whether online of offline. People who work with SharePoint solutions in a browser will have an almost identical experience in SharePoint Workspace 2010. When a user is connected to the network, SharePoint Workspace automatically sends updated data to the server. If SharePoint Workspace detects the user is not connected to the network, it caches all of the changes offline. When the user connects to the network, SharePoint Workspace automatically updates the server with the changes.

Figure 29 SharePoint Workspace 2010 with InfoPath forms

SharePoint Designer 2010

Many people already know SharePoint Designer as a very powerful and useful tool to customize sites in SharePoint. Because of it being so powerful yet easy to use, companies have struggled to balance and control the level of access business users have to SharePoint Designer. To address this need for control, SharePoint Designer 2010 in SharePoint 2010 allows SharePoint Server farm administrators to control the use of SharePoint Designer from the server within Central Administration or to limit users to specific capabilities. Site collection administrators can further limit what business users can do with SharePoint Designer 2010 within a specific site collection. With these controls, SharePoint farm administrators can define the operations that users can perform with SharePoint Designer and ensure the sites, workflows, and data connections are edited only within specific permissions.

SharePoint Designer 2010 includes the Office Fluent user interface, making it simpler to use and easier to discover the different functions it offers. In addition, new and powerful capabilities of SharePoint Designer help people create and manage data connections between their SharePoint sites and external data sources, using the new Business Connectivity Services in SharePoint 2010.

Access Services

Business users often use Microsoft Office Access to create data-centric applications using tables, views, forms, and reports. Access applications are often designed for individual use or to be used by only a few people at the same time. These applications gain importance within the company as more people use them. Because Access is not intended to be used by many concurrent users, the applications begin to experience scale-related problems. When the importance and popularity of Access applications grow, companies eventually must redevelop them into Web applications. Depending on the complexity and size of the application, redeveloping applications can become very difficult.

SharePoint 2010 addresses this problem by helping people create applications in Access 2010 and publish them to SharePoint sites with Access Services. Access applications published to SharePoint sites are almost identical to the Access client applications. Access tables, reports, forms, and macros are all deployed to SharePoint sites, allowing more people to use the application in the browser interface.

Figure 30 Access Services rendered within SharePoint 2010

Workflows

To streamline work and boost productivity, companies must be able to automate business processes using workflows. SharePoint 2010 allows people to create workflows in Visio 2010 and then export them to SharePoint Designer 2010 to add business logic and additional rules. Using Visio, people can more easily express the intent of the desired workflow process. People can export workflows developed in SharePoint Designer 2010 from one SharePoint site into another SharePoint site, allowing those workflows to be reused and for people to develop and test custom workflows in a trusted environment before deploying them to a production system. In SharePoint 2010, workflow visualizations with Visio Services help people determine the status of active workflows by showing the entire workflow execution plan with indicators of the current stages of workflows.

The design of SharePoint 2010 also lets people export workflows to Visual Studio 2010. With this capability, professional developers can add custom code to enhance workflow capabilities for specific business requirements.

InfoPath Forms Services

With Microsoft InfoPath 2010, business users can design sophisticated electronic forms to quickly and costeffectively gather information required for an immediate business need. It is possible to customize forms with features such as calculated fields, setting default values, conditional formatting and screen tips, all without writing code. When used together with SharePoint 2010, these forms can be used for information stored in SharePoint lists.

On the server-side, InfoPath Forms Services in SharePoint 2010 help people seamlessly render InfoPath forms within different clients, such as Web browsers, Office clients, and SharePoint Workspace. This provides business users and IT with a robust component for form and process automation that is scalable across different scenarios.

It is now much simpler to use the capabilities of InfoPath forms to add form-filling experiences to SharePoint web pages, populate SharePoint lists, and use business connectivity Services in SharePoint 2010 to connect forms to line-of-business systems. As an example, it’s easier than ever to host your forms on Web pages using the new InfoPath Form Web Part. In SharePoint Server 2007, users who wanted to host their InfoPath forms on Web pages had to write ASP.NET code in Visual Studio. Now, without writing a single line of code, it is possible to simply add the InfoPath Form Web Part to a Web Part page and point it to a published form. The Web Part can be used to host any InfoPath browser form that has been published to a SharePoint list or form library, and it can be connected to other Web Parts on the page to send or receive data.

Sandbox Solutions

While SharePoint Composites provides multiple options for creating robust, no-code solutions with out-ofthe- box components and tools, companies often need custom-code solutions. Custom-code solutions are the most powerful option when creating business-collaboration solutions; however, they require a server administrator to deploy the code to the server. In large SharePoint Server farms that host sites for thousands of people, poorly performing code can affect many more users than the solution was built for.

SharePoint 2010 addresses this challenge with sandboxed solutions, which contain custom code and can be deployed by either a server administrator or a site collection owner. Administrators can designate thresholds in CPU utilization, memory use, database query times, and other areas so that if a sandboxed solution exceeds a threshold, SharePoint 2010 will automatically disable it. Sandboxed solutions cannot harm the health of SharePoint Server farms because resource monitors and controls allow SharePoint 2010 to disable expensive and poorly performing custom code. This removes the burden on the corporate IT team to vet, deploy, and maintain custom code for a small subset of users in a large SharePoint deployment.

Developers who create sandboxed solutions are limited in what they can do with the SharePoint Server object model. For instance, a sandboxed solution deployed by the site collection owner cannot interact with the hosting Web application or with the SharePoint farm; it has access only to the current site collection and the sites within that site collection.

While site collection owners can deploy custom code without relying on the IT staff, SharePoint Server farm and server administrators must be able to establish boundaries and controls around custom-code deployments. SharePoint 2010 offers resource monitoring and management capabilities for sandboxed solutions to help companies keep poorly performing code from affecting SharePoint Server farms.