SharePoint 2010 and Nintex - How to create a temporary collaboration workspace - part 2 ~ Blog moved to www.jasperoosterveld.com

In the first article of this series I showed you our internal collaboration workspace. I hope you liked it and are interested in the configuration part :-)

The apply for a site list

Let's start by creating a new custom list with the following columns:

Column name	Type	Extra config.	Required
Site name	Single line of text		Yes
Description	Single line of text		Yes
Top site	Single line of text	Default view: URL of the collaboration home site	No
Owners	People/Groups	People only Allow multiple selections	Yes
Members	People/Groups	People only Allow multiple selections	No
Visitors	People/Groups	People only Allow multiple selections	No

The column Top site contains a default URL. This default URL is the site where all the temporary sites will be created as sub sites. This field will be used by the Nintex workflow and should not be changed by the users! This field cannot be available in any of the views or the form. I don't use the default Title column so we have to hide it. To do that go to:

Go to the List Settings
Click at Advanced Settings
Choose under Allow management of content types for Yes

Now we can edit the default content type:

Click at Item under Content Type
Click at Title
Click at Hidden

We can now start with building the application form.

The application form

You can probably see that the application form has an InfoPath look and feel. This is actually an ordinary SharePoint list. I just modified the new item page with InfoPath. You don't have to do this but I just like working with InfoPath ;-) To change this, choose in the ribbon for List and Customize Form:

We don't need the Attachments row, so select it and click at Delete. You have a couple of interesting options:

Themes

Click in the ribbon at Page Design and you have a lot of themes you can choose from.

Logo

Click in the top left corner and go to Insert and Picture. You can now add a company logo (or another picture) you want to show to your users.

Submit button

I prefer to use a submit button instead of the ribbon. Click at the bottom of the form, go to Home and insert a button control. Move it to the center of the form. Double click the button and change the following settings:

Label:

Submit request
Action:
Submit

You should also delete the Top site row. There are two important things you have to do:

1.) Double click Title in the Fields section and deselect the Cannot be blank option.

2.) Go to the Control Properties of the fields Site name and Description and make sure the option Cannot be blank option is set.

For some reason the controls don't really inherit the settings from the list. You can update the list by clicking at the Quick Publish icon. This is located at the top left corner next to the Save button.

To show this new form to the users we have to use the InfoPath form web part. This web part can be added from the Forms category. You have to configure the following settings:

List or Library:

Select our newly created list

Show InfoPath Ribbon:

Submit Behavior:

Open a new form

Title:

Temporary workspace apply form

The users are now able to submit a request! We can go on and configure the workflow.

The workflow

To set up the first part of the workflow I used these instructions from Nintex. I want to apply the following extra steps:

The user gets an e-mail after two months to decide about renewing the temporary site.
When the user decides to renew the site, a new e-mail is send two months later. This repeats itself until the user decides to delete the site.

I provided a screenshot of the extra actions, created after the Nintex instructions:

Sorry about the position of the workflow picture but I had to create two separate pictures so you can see the actions. The labels are in Dutch but I will explain everything in detail. Keep on reading :-)

Calculate date

You have to select the Use date when action is executed option. By selecting this option the workflow is going to use this as starting point (actually the list item created date) for the calculation. In my example I entered two months. The calculation is going to add two months on top of the starting point. I used two months but you can also use days or years. You have to store the calculation in a variable. You can create one by using the ribbon. I called it EindDatum (EndDate).

Pause until...

This action will be used to pause the workflow according to the time frame we set in the previous action. Make sure you select the workflow variable created in the previous action.

Assign Flexi Task
Now it starts to get really interesting! The next action is the Flexi Task. This is a pretty cool action within Nintex Workflow 2010 because you have the reminder and escalation option, but more important there are two default outcomes. The flexi task has a couple of options that need to be configured. These options can be found by using the ribbon:

Action

I have to assign the task to the creator of the site. You can use the address book icon to connect Assignees to the Owners (Eigenaren) list column. I would advice to use Allow delegation and Allow LazyApproval. The assignees are able to delegate the task to someone else and with LazyApproval they can approve or decline the task by just replying 'declined' or 'approved' to the task e-mail. This is pretty cool stuff!

The default outcomes are Reject and Approve. You should change these names:

Reject --> Delete site
Approve --> Renew site

The next step is configuring the Task Notification. The owners will receive an automatic e-mail from the workflow and here you can configure this e-mail. You can create a subject and the actual message. The cool thing here is that you can easily refer to workflow or item properties by clicking at Insert Reference:

This is a really easy tool to create your own custom messages. There are two more configuration settings I want to show you before continuing. You can create reminders and even escalate the task! These are the reminder settings:

You can setup the amount of reminders and even specify the time frame! Choose between days, hours or even minutes, I think people won't appreciate a reminder every minute ;-) so be gentle. These are the escalation settings:

You can choose between delegating or completing the task. You can be in control here, why not delegate this task to yourself as site owner. We will continue to configure our workflow under the delete site outcome.

Delete site

I want to make sure the workflow deletes the correct site. You have to connect the Parent site to Top site list column. You can use the address book icon and go to Item Properties. You also have to connect to URL name to a list column, called Site name.

The workflow will delete the correct site after the creator of the site decides it's time to delete it. Now we are going to configure the renew site option.

Set a variable
I want the creator of the site to receive an e-mail every two months to decide if the temporary site has to be renewed or can be deleted. To execute this, the workflow needs to loop every two months until the site gets deleted. How do we configure this? The loop action needs a condition to start so we can use a variable. You need to add the set variable action:

You have to create a new variable to store the outcome of the previous action (Flexi task). You can call it DeleteSite (SiteVerwijderen). This variable needs to be a Yes/No type. Configure the task according to the above screenshot. We will use this in the loop action.

Loop

You can see this action is easy to configure because we are using the variable from the previous action. You can configure it according to my screenshot. The loop will start when the variable equals No, because the site creator decided not to delete the site.

The final part of the workflow is pretty easy because we can copy the following actions:

Calculate date
Pause until
Assign Flexi task
Delete site

This will look like this:

We only add a new action under Delete site (Site verwijderen). You can see the small loop icon under the End workflow (Workflow stoppen) action? This means the loop will start from the beginning! So if you don't add an End workflow action the loop will start again, we don't want this :-)

This ends the configuration. Don't forget to configure the workflow to start after an item is created and you can publish it :-) I hope you enjoyed these two articles.