Saturday, June 23, 2012

SharePoint Sucks – And Here’s Why...

What would you do when you see this message?

unexpected-error

A) Stay calm, try to copy the correlation ID, notice that you can’t copy it and still stay calm, write it down on a piece of paper and track it in the ULS logs

B) Open your browser, go to a search engine and type “SharePoint sucks” to let off steam

If you have chosen option B, you’ll probably encounter the funny blog series of Bjørn Furuknap. Give it a read, they are a bit outdated but there’s still a lot of truth in it.
Ow, btw, I didn’t search after “SharePoint sucks” – it was a colleague who mentioned the blog series. He has probably chosen for option B. Ok, to be honest, there are days that I hate SharePoint too. I have some sort of love/hate relationship with it.

Let me end this post with a funny quote of Bjørn Furuknap.
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve said quite a lot of things about SharePoint that may lead you to think I hate SharePoint. I don’t. Quite the contrary, I love SharePoint. Yeah, it sucks, but so does my wife, and I’ve married her twice.

Sunday, June 17, 2012

Quick Tip: Approval Workflow - Due date for all tasks

Within the association form of the approval workflow you are able to set the “Due Date for All tasks”. This setting specifies the date by which all tasks are due.

What if you want tasks to become due on a specific time on a specific day? In the user interface of the association form you are not able to specify a time value.

DueDateForAllTasks

Although it is nowhere documented, it is possible.

For example, if you want to terminate all tasks on the 18th of June at 13h30 you can set the following value in the textbox:
2012-06-18T13:30:00

Use the following structure to set a time value:
yyyy-mm-ddThh:mm:ss

I know, it’s not really user friendly, but it works. You can probably use SharePoint Designer to tweak the association form to implement some extra logic.

One of the best references online about approval workflows in SharePoint 2010: All about approval workflows