Using Office 2007 and SharePoint 2007 for Business Process Management and Workflow Systems
Chat Topic: Using Office 2007 and SharePoint 2007 for Business Process Management and Workflow Systems
Date: Tuesday, June 06, 2006
Please note: Portions of this transcript have been edited for clarity.
Gary (Moderator):
Welcome to today’s chat. Our topic today is Using Office 2007 and SharePoint 2007 for Business Process Management and Workflow Systems
We are pleased to welcome our Expert for today’s chat. I will have him introduce himself now.
Introductions
Tim Kelly (Expert):
I am Tim Kelly. I have worked about five years in supporting conversions from legacy mainframe and midrange systems running process management applications to SharePoint, .NET and Office applications. Thanks for joining today!
Gary (Moderator):
Let’s begin the chat. We welcome you to begin submitting your questions for our Experts. If you have attended previous chats, you may be accustomed to prefacing your question with a “Q:” There is no need to do that any longer. Our new chat system will automatically preface your question with a “Q:”
Tim Kelly (Expert):
Please feel free to ask any design, architecture, or other questions on incorporating SharePoint 2007 and other new Office 2007 technologies into your environments or business needs.
Start of Chat
Tim Kelly (Expert):
A: Anyone working with using SharePoint technologies with Office products on the front end, in call center, or other key business scenarios at this time?
Tim Kelly (Expert):
Anyone porting functionality from older or legacy applications to .NET web based or Windows Server System products?
Tim Kelly (Expert):
Q: Since a form of workflow is being added to WSS, how does this workflow co-exist/interact with the workflow in BizTalk?
A: Excellent question, what SharePoint 2007 becomes in conjunction with BizTalk 2006 and WSS, is a traffic cop and repository of results that occur from data movement with BizTalk and execution of process especially with Windows Workflow foundation.
Tim Kelly (Expert):
Q: If we develop work flows in separate applications, WSS, BizTalk, what will be the points of interaction? Web services? Or some other new technique?
A: JBK, primarily we are using Web Services and UDDI publishing to glue everything together, in most cases data from disparate sources comes in via mapping in BizTalk, we process data in SharePoint 2007 and .NET web applications, and then provide results back out as needed via Web Service XML formats, or Office Docs, etc
Tim Kelly (Expert):
Q: Tim: The ability to pull a form in response to a specific client activity- is that using an existing ability within SharePoint or was that an added routine?
A: RJ the ability to parse a form's response can be server based and exists today with custom .NET coding adjustments, and is built into SharePoint 2007's use of Windows Workflow Foundations.
Tim Kelly (Expert):
Q: What are the types of forms handled by the new Forms Server 2007?
A: The primary form is an InfoPath form, but it will accommodate any ASP.NET based forms, or other HTML or database driven forms, in addition it will allow uploads of forms created in other Office products, or generic forms, like Adobe based ones, that non Windows clients may need via browsers.
Tim Kelly (Expert):
Q: Can you give a short statement about what's new in the Groove addition? We have people here who have looked at the original Groove, did not get a good impression of it, and are skeptical of the new addition to Office 2007.
A: Groove's positioning is to bridge corporate communications across all domains, so in my testing I have not seen a huge change with the Groove of the past, except that now embedded with a WSS or Portal, you can bridge the ugly firewalls of chat and communications which sometimes creep in.
Tim Kelly (Expert):
Anyone excited about or using already the new document management features of SharePoint 2007?
Tim Kelly (Expert):
Q: Can you give a short statement about what's new in the Groove addition? We have people here who have looked at the original Groove, did not get a good impression of it, and are skeptical of the new addition to Office 2007.
A: jbk, definitely an original thought there you have, and one that would work well in my area of converting CICS and other legacy apps.
Tim Kelly (Expert):
Q: Does WSS 2007 take advantage of the XML column type in SQL Server 2005? That's one key feature for a content management application...
A: Most definitely
Tim Kelly (Expert):
Q: In the previous SharePoint versions you were only able to control the access to a document thru a document library, has that change in SharePoint 2007 where you can have security down directly to a specific document the document within the library?
A: David I have not tried that yet, so don't know.
Tim Kelly (Expert):
Q: For the version control feature in the current Sharepoint you can only see when it was change and by who the item was change. Is this any different in the 2007 version, for example can you see what was change in an item?
A: There is now a linkage to what changed inside the doc, with standard high lighting.
Gary (Moderator):
Thank you everyone for joining us today.
If you would like further information on this topic please visit the following URL:
http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/community/article_bpm_kelly.mspx
We hope you join us for our next chat on June 20, 2006. To add an appointment to your calendar please use this URL:
http://www.microsoft.com/communities/chats/vcs/06_0620_Office_Exc2007.ics
We will post the transcript from today’s chat on:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/community/chats/trans/default.mspx#EPJAC
Tim Kelly - MS Word (Expert):
Thanks for coming everyone!