SharePoint 2010 and Nintex - How to create a temporary collaboration workspace - part 1

My company, Wortell, migrated to SharePoint 2010 pretty quick after the RTM release. Our CTO, Office 365 MVP Danny Burlage, wanted to introduce a temporary collaboration workspace. This workspace could be used for working on short assignments or brainstorm sessions. We created the site and let the users create sites and left them pretty much alone.

The problem was we had no idea if sites were used or not. There were also sites created for testing SharePoint 2010 functionalities. This was not really what we intended. The site, unfortunately, kind of "died a slow death" and was not used anymore.



I was part of the migration team of our internal portal and still feel responsible for the use of the portal. I sometimes work with Nintex Workflow 2010 and stumbled at documentation about automatic site creation. You can find it here. I read it and thought it would work perfectly for our collaboration space. I wanted to take a different approach and thought about the following scenario:

• The user goes to the collaboration space
• The user fills in a form and applies for a temporary site
• The site gets created by the Nintex Workflow with the appropriate metadata (name and permissions)
• The user gets an e-mail after two months for renewing the temporary site
• When the user decides to renew the site, a new e-mail is send two months later. This repeats until the user decides to delete the site.

This scenario can be perfectly set up with out-the-box SharePoint 2010 and Nintex Workflow 2010. In this article I want to show you the end result and in the follow up article I will explain the configuration. There are some fields in Dutch but I will translate when necessary.

Donny needs a temporary site to store documents for a brainstorm session about a new idea, let's say about a consultancy training roadmap. Donny goes to the collaboration site: 

Donny sees the site application form and the current sites. There are a couple of fields that need to be filled:

Naam van de site:
The name of the site. This field is also used for the URL of the site.

Beschrijving:

The description of the site.

Eigenaren:

The colleagues who need full control over the site.

Leden:

The colleagues who need to modify content such as documents or tasks. 

Lezers:

The colleagues who need to read content.

Donny completes the form:

Donny can enter multiple colleagues. He clicks at the Aanvraag versturen (send request) button. The site is created:

You can see the name of the site in the URL and the description under the name of the site. The permissions are also set corresponding the form:

The workflow is now waiting for two months to send a notification:

Donny will receive an e-mail after two months and has to decide if he wants to keep the site. Let's say Donny declines, the site will be automatically deleted by the Nintex Workflow.

This is pretty cool right? :-D In the next article I will show you the configuration :-)

Posted in: Nintex Workflow 2010, SharePoint 2010