I'm on contract with a very large company that will remain nameless for the moment, working on the editorial staff for their intranet home page. I help keep the company's many, many employees informed about what's going on in the company and elsewhere in the world. This is managed through SharePoint and InfoPath.
SharePoint is a system to assist/promote content management and collaboration. InfoPath, as Microsoft puts it, lets you "collect and manage data with ease. Extend the reach of your business with rich electronic forms."
First, in the integration of SharePoint and InfoPath, we have the daily employee photo feature I'm managing. Basically, employees send in pictures of themselves on vacation, on business trips, at office parties, at business events, and we publish one each day. The photos are collected via an InfoPath form on the SharePoint powered intranet portal, and then stored in a SharePoint data store for access.
Now, before I got there, someone wrote some very bad submission instructions that tell people to submit their photos in a format we don't use which can make their photos look bad (which is why we don't use it!) and at a size much smaller than we need. These are the instructions on the photo submission form.
In my many years as an editor, processing user submissions, I have never been so happy about users ignoring the instructions and doing what they damn well please. The people who actually follow the instructions end up sending in stuff we can't use.
So I asked to get the submission instructions changed. No problem, you'd think. I'm on the team that controls this site, approves and edits every page on it. This should be easy.
Not so much. See, the submission instructions are part of the InfoPath form rather than part of the SharePoint page, so any editing of the instructions has to go into a backlogged queue for an InfoPath developer to handle. "Collect and manage data with ease"? If I have to wait weeks for a developer to get around to changing false and misleading form text that's causing users to submit bad data, I don't consider that collecting data with ease.
But that's the collection part. Let's look at the management part.
Here's how the workflow goes...
Step 1: User fills out and submits a form that not only gives bad instructions, but is missing fields for data we require. We ask users to put it all in the text field for the photo description, but most forget. If we put in separate fields for that data, we'd get it almost every time.
Step 2: I get an e-mail telling me a photo has been submitted. It gives me the date and time of the user's submission, the description the user provided for the photo, a link to the archived InfoPath form and a link to the SharePoint catalog of the archived InfoPath forms.
Step 3: I have to click on the link to the catalog and hunt for the form by date because the only place the submitter's name and contact information appears is in the catalog. It's not in the archived form, it's not in the alert e-mail. It's only in the catalog.
Step 4: I must use the link to the InfoPath form (either from the e-mail or the catalog) to launch a separate InfoPath reader program and open the stored form.
Step 5: There is no photo preview in the stored form display. Just a link I can use to open or save the attached file.
Once I've decided we want to use a photo, and found out the submitter's e-mail address, I've created a form letter in Outlook that lets me politely ask for the most commonly left out information (which is mostly the data we don't provide form fields for).
But if you think that's all, just wait until I describe how we manage a set of rotating blurbs in SharePoint... in part II.
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