Automated Reality

In trying to develop some new electronic forms for my company, I ran into a sticky problem that I thought should never have existed. I was creating a form in InfoPath which would be used for evaluating an employee's performance. The key goals of the form were to be totally disconnected during the completion process and then send the document to a document library in MOSS. The form had a series of fields that would be propagated up to the library and these would be used for tracking and monitoring of reviews being completed.

Once the form arrived in the document library, I wanted to be able to filter list of forms by reviewer using the [Me] filter. The problem comes in that the [Me] filter will only work on Person or Group fields within MOSS and InfoPath can only propagate single line text fields. All my research found ways to get InfoPath to connect to MOSS to retrieve lists of users or to build custom views for the library. I thought there should be a better solution.

Enter Windows Workflow! As I thought about ways to resolve the issue, I realized that if the person completing the form could add the alias of himself and of the evaluatee, I could have a lookup process kick in as the form entered the library. The final solution involved the following:

• Creating fields for the user completing the form to add the email alias (this should be the same as the windows logon and can be used in looking up a user in MOSS)
• Propagating the alias fields to the document library
• Adding a corresponding Person/Group field to the document library for each alias
• Adding a Workflow to the library through SharePoint Designer to process the lookups. This is done by adding a Set Field in Current Item action in the workflow to update the Person/Group field through a Workflow lookup. The corresponding alias is used to set the field.

And that's it. Now when the document is submitted to the library, I have the appropriate user name to filter by.

OK, I didn't do too well the first time out on the blogging circuit. I got 2 posts and then stopped. But I've decided to try again using some new tools and some new content ideas. So without further ado… we'll take to the online arena again.