Book Image

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Business Application Blueprints

Book Image

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Business Application Blueprints

Overview of this book

SharePoint is an incredibly powerful platform that can support a wide variety of business scenarios. In many cases it needs to be configured or extended in order to deliver fully featured business solutions. While some books merely talk about the capabilities of SharePoint in general and leave you to figure out how they apply to your situation, this book takes a different approach. Each chapter provides easy-to-understand, step-by-step instructions along with screenshots to help build exciting SharePoint business solutions that extend the platform. By the end of this book the reader will be a SharePoint developer to be reckoned with. This book will dive into a diverse set of real-world scenarios to deliver sample business solutions that can serve as the foundation for your own solutions. This book draws from the author's extensive experience with SharePoint to leverage the platforms underlying services to provide solutions that can support Social Collaboration, Content and Document Management, as well as project collaboration. Each chapter represents a new business solution that builds on the overall platform to deliver more complex solutions and more advanced techniques. By the end of the book the reader will understand how to leverage the SharePoint platform to build their own business solutions.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Business Application Blueprints
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Check out of office workflow activity


To support the workflow we will now create a custom workflow activity that can connect to the user profiles and perform a series of actions. Custom workflow activities are a great way to expand the capabilities of a SharePoint workflow allowing you to connect to additional farm services such as the User Profile Service application, Business Connectivity Services, or even managed metadata services. It can also be used to integrate with other systems directly for cases where Business Connectivity Services is not available or is not desirable. Another advantage to building custom workflow activities is that you can group multiple steps together into one reusable activity.

Approach

The CheckOutOfOffice activity will accept a username and perform the following steps:

  1. 1. Check the user's profile to see if they are Out of Office, with a delegate specified.

  2. 2. If they are:

    • Log the delegation decision in the workflow's history

    • Log the task information to the Master...