My IT Heroes: Part I

Why write about my IT Heroes? Somebody has to dammit. Because my IT Heroes aren’t the the Linus Torvalds, Tim Berners Lees, Bill Gates' or Steve Jobs' of this world. No sir!

My IT Heroes are those dedicated, tireless, unsung heroes who spend every spare minute of their lives, posting solutions, contributing to forums and updating their blogs for the benefit of those of us too lazy, slow witted or just too plain old incompetent to figure things out for ourselves. Most importantly, they’re people who share their expertise for free; when it’s quite evident they could be charging for it. They’re the sort of people who’ve got me out of more than a handful of sticky situations where I’ve contemplated hanging up my IT hat, getting a paper route and moving back in with my parents.

Pinal Dave: IT Hero, Legend

First and foremost amongst these, has to be, in my opinion, the irrepressible, unsurpassable,
unbelievable, unrivalled SQL Authority: Pinal Dave.
Now, I love SQL. Who doesn't? But no one loves SQL like Pinal Dave loves SQL. And you can take that to the bank, bucko.

According to his online resume, Pinal Dave (pronounced ‘Pinul Daway’), ‘has written over 2200 articles on the subject on his blog at http://blog.sqlauthority.com. Along with 8+ years of hands on experience he holds a Masters of Science degree and a number of certifications, including MCTS, MCDBA and MCAD (.NET). He is co-author of three SQL Server books -SQL Server Programming, SQL Wait Stats and SQL Server Interview Questions and Answers. His past work experiences include Technology Evangelist at Microsoft and Sr. Consultant at SolidQ. Prior to joining Microsoft he was awarded Microsoft MVP award for three continuous years for his contribution in the community.’

But Pinal's work is not just a digital paean to relational databases and all their splendour, worthy as that may be an exercise in itself. First and foremost, Pinal’s site is a community asset and go-to place for those of us lacking his mad skills on the SQL front.

By his own admission he started his blog as a repository for scripts and solutions he was working on, and only found out later that these where visible to others on the net. Spurred on by unexpected feedback on a SQL script he was working on, Pinal has over the subsequent seven years, gone on to co-author 10 books on the subject. Pinal's site is like an Aladdin's cave of scripts, solutions levels of enthusiasm for his subject matter that make you want to get out there and build SQL scripts all day long.

Its people like Pinal who remind you that you're not just someone toiling away in an industry or sector, but that you're part of a community of people who are - by and large - creative, intelligent, filled with curiosity and dedicated to solving problems and fixing things. The SQL Authority blog epitomises the sort of thing that great about the net, community building, collaboration, knowledge sharing. The sort of thing that don’t get much attention from the media because it’s not about making a gazillion bucks, or wildly sensationalist.

In a recent post celebrating the seventh anniversary of his blog, Pinal thanked everyone who had visited his site and made it such a success over the years. No Pinal Dave. THANK YOU.

White Paper Service Desk Excellence Contribution (or, 'How I Failed to Win the Nobel Prize')

I was recently approached to contribute to an industry White Paper on Service Desk Excellence in the UK. Not quite as prestigious as being awarded the Nobel Prize, I know. But it was nice to have my opinion elevated to the same level as the folks at NTT Data, the Rank Group, 365 and O2, amongst others.

The paper was aimed gathering information about what makes an effective and excellent Service Desk, with a particular focus on:

• Individuality & Uniqueness
• Motivation & Reward
• Appraisal & Staff Satisfaction
• Development and Progression
• Culture & Environment
• Communication & Customer Satisfaction.

So, if you're interested in getting a snapshot what some of industry leaders are doing to drive excellence, innovation and development within their Service Desk environments, look no further.

You can access the White Paper on Service Desk Excellence via this link.

Enjoy!

Copying Data Between SharePoint Lists

Why would you need to do this you ask? You just never know. For a real world example where this came in handy, see the following post: Hiding List Data from Unauthorised Users

In SharePoint Designer, on the site you list resides in, click on 'workflows' and choose list you want to copy from from the 'list workflow'  drop down list. Once you have named the workflow saved it, click on the 'edit workflow' option, and choose 'Copy List Item' from the list of available actions.

Choose the option to copy the current item to the list you want to copy to, as per the screenshot below.

Next, go back to the settings page for that workflow and tick the 'start workflow automatically when an item is created' box.

Next save a publish your workflow.

Test the workflow by creating a new item in your first list. Next, go to your second list and check that the item has been copied across to this list.

Hiding List Data From Unauthorised Sharepoint Users

We recently implemented a Share Point list for managing IT Purchase requests, and one of the requirements was, understandably, that the person requesting the item could not see all the purchasing information (supplier, quotes etc.) that the office administrator needed to add to the list.

Although you can create different views of a form for submitting and editing a list item, there's no out of the box option for restricting different views of a form or list to different users or groups.
The solution we implemented, which works pretty well, was to create two separate lists and copy the information between the two.

So, in this scenario, we wanted to enable staff to request a quote for additional IT equipment not supplied as part of our standard service offerings (let's say for instance, a 40inch monitor for a meeting room, or a high-end MacBook). Once the quote had been obtained, and the details where entered into the list, an approval workflow would kick in, sending an email to the relevant budget holder and an appropriate person in IT to approve or reject the purchase, and then email the requestor and the person responsible for IT purchasing of the outcome.

End to End Process:

• The person filling out the form fill in the details of their request and adds a budget holder and recipient for whatever item they are requesting, or marks themselves as the budget holder and/or recipient. Alternatively, if you want force any request to be authorised by someone's manager, you can use the 'find manager' action within the SharePoint Designer workflow to kick of the approval process with them. This depends on your Active Directory being up to date, and also assumes that a budget holder or senior member of staff will never request something for themselves.
• The recipient and budget holder details are automatically populated with the details of the person filling out the form (see Anne Stenberg's incredibly helpful blog here for instructions on doing this). These fields are hidden from view, unless the person filling out the form chooses selects ‘no’ from the ‘Are you the intended recipient?’ drop down and/or ‘no’ form the ‘Are you authorised to make purchases for your team or department?’ drop down.
• The recipient is directed to a holding page here once they have completed the form. They also get an email confirming their submission.
• An email is then generated to the IT Administrator asking them to get a quote from a supplier. The workflow pauses until the ‘supplier’ field has been filled in.
• Once the quote details have been filled in, an email is sent to the budget holder name on the form.
• If the budget holder rejects the quote, the process stops there. If the budget holder approves the quote, an email is sent to the Head of IT for approval. If the Head of IT rejects the quote, an email is sent to the budget holder informing them of this, and the process stops there.
• If the someone within the IT Approvers group approves the quote, an email is sent the budget holder, and another to the IT Administrator telling them to raise a purchase order.

The Setup:

• Create a list that people will submit their requests to.
• Create a second list in the same site, with field names and types exactly matching the first list. To this list you can add the additional field that you want to hide from people submitting to the first list.
• Customise your forms in InfoPath.
• Create a workflow on the the first list to copy the details across to the second list, and email the person submitting their request to let them know it's been received and is being actioned.
• Create an approval workflow with the budget holder and the IT Approvers group.
• Update the list view in SharePoint Designer.

This workflow resides in a document library that is not trusted

There's a first time for everything, and after extensive testing on an list requiring approval from within Outlook, one of our testers got the following message: 'This workflow resides in a document library that is not trusted'. We tried all the obvious things, adding the site to the 'Trusted Sites' section in IE, checking browser settings/ versions etc. and just couldn't get the bottom of it. The fact that the tester was working on a pretty non standard PC build for our organisation ( Windows 8, Office 2013, IE10) turned out to be a little bit of a red herring. The solution that got us there in the end was to out the full URL into trusted sites ( i.e: http://sitename.domain.com) instead of just that site URL (i.e. http://sitename.com) .

Various forums had unresolved threads on this topic, so thought it would be worth putting out there. You just never know.

Ending a Sharepoint Workflow on First Rejection:

I' m just going to come right out and say it: SharePoint's out the box approval process leaves a lot to be desired. There, let the chips fall wherever the hell they will.
They're not customisable, and the emails they send out to approvers and the person kicking off a workflow are vague and obscure at best, and completely meaningless to anyone not familiar with SharePoint.
Luckily, SharePoint designer provides a pretty user friendly interface creating workflows that can be customised to meet most of your requirements. For a primer on pimping a basic SharePoint workflow, it's pretty difficult to beat Bobby Chang's post on nothingbutsharepoint.com
All very good, the only problem I had after setting up my first workflow following Bobby's method, was that I wanted any person reviewing the item for approval to be able to reject it, and  for that to end the worflow, rather than requiring everyone to complete the workflow before its status moved from 'in progress' to 'rejected'.
To achieve this, add an action ahead of the approvals process (using the set 'workflow variable' option from the actions dropdown' list)  to set 'cancelonrejection' variable to 'yes', as in the screenshot below