Enabling an approval process into team lists. In a typical business process where employees require approval before continuing a certain action, such as completing a purchase of airline tickets, SharePoint approval process provides a nice solution. Let’s say you have a SharePoint Task list where employees populate it with items that each denote their progress…

Creating a portal for collaboration. Workspaces provide a collaborative portal for team to engage in a project. To illustrate how to create a new workspace, I’ll begin with a test document in my team site. To create a new workspace, I’ll use the context menu by right-clicking the document and selecting to create a new…

Using Document Libraries to collaborate on Office documents. As illustrated in my Custom List article, there are many options available to create various types of list. In this article I will show how to create a library, which is similar to a list, but may also contain attachment. Again, I will use the Site Actions…

Using SharePoint Designer to create custom workflows for sending alert emails. When collaborating on SharePoint lists, some team members may need notification when actions are performed on lists. For example, let’s pretend a user wishes to be notified via email when an item is added to a list. To illustrate this functionality, I will begin…

Using custom lists as the building block for automating business processes. Perhaps the most widely used feature in SharePoint is the list. While there are many predefined lists, being able to define one from scratch yields much needed flexibility. In order to illustrate this feature, I’ll begin by selecting Site Actions -> More options. This…

Creating a team communication space. Blog provide a very efficient method for teams to collaborate on ideas. To illustrate this tool, I’ll begin by creating a blog using the Site->Actions menu. I’m given the ability to name my new blog, provide a web address, as well as more options which I won’t use for this…

Enable active notifications to automate business processes. Within any business process there are many different types of lists acted upon by team members. I will illustrate how to set automatic notifications on lists so that team members are notified when an action is awaiting their attention. To begin, on a task list, I’ll select the…