SharePoint 2010 – How to create a company notification system part 3

This is the last part in a series of three about creating a company notification system. You can find the other articles here:

Part 1
Part 2

In this article I want to show you how to create new forms for the list and how to set up the workflow.

New forms
To create new forms I have to to start SharePoint Designer, click at Lists and Libraries and Notifications. The following screen will appear:

SP2010CompanyNotifcationCenterPart3_1

I want to create three forms:

New notification:
The employees should be able to create a new notification but only with the fields they are allowed to see.

Edit notification:
The employees should be able to edit their notification but still only see the fields they are allowed to see.

Review notification:
The reviewers should have their own edit form to review the notification.

So how do we create these forms?

New notification
I click at Forms and New Item Form:

SP2010CompanyNotifcationCenterPart3_2

I call the form: New notification and set it as default. I can now click at the new form and all the columns are displayed:

SP2010CompanyNotifcationCenterPart3_3

I only want to the employees to see the following fields: reported by, notification date, department, title, description, reviewer 1 and attachment. I select the rows of the other fields and delete them.

Edit notification
I perform the same actions as for the new notification but this time it’s an edit form and it needs to be set as default.

Review notification
The review notification form is also going to be an edit form but should not be set as default. I also have to check ‘Create link in List Item Menu and Ribbon’. In the first article I showed you this form:

SP2010CompanyNotifcationCenterPart3_4

Unfortunately there is no way for me to set the employees field at read only so I just add the warning text. There must be a custom solution for this but again I just want to show you the possibilities of out-of-the-box SharePoint.

Let’s move on to the final part of this solution! The workflows.

Workflow
I need to create the following workflows:

Alert of notification:
The first reviewer needs to be notified when an alert has been assigned.

Change of the notification:
The second reviewer needs to be notified when a notification has been assigned. The employee also needs to be notified of the status of the notification.

Let’s start with the first one!

I click at Workflows in the navigation bar of SharePoint Designer. I choose for List Workflow and connect it to the notifications list. I configure the workflow as following:

SP2010CompanyNotifcationCenterPart3_5
SP2010CompanyNotifcationCenterPart3_6
The design of e-mail messages is so much better in SharePoint Designer 2010. You can easily do look-ups and change the look and feel a bit by using colors. Every time a user is defined in the look-up I configure it as following:

SP2010CompanyNotifcationCenterPart3_7

The display name will be used to ensure a good description of the name (e.g. John Doe instead of Contoso\JohnDoe). This workflow needs to start when an item is created.

The change of the notification workflow is a bit more complex because the following scenario’s need to be applied:

  • Reviewer 1 resolves the notification and an e-mail is send to the employee
  • Reviewer 1 cannot resolve the notification and assigns it to Reviewer 2
  • Reviewer 2 resolves the notification and an e-mail is send to the employee

I was not able to combine these two workflows into one. I am assuming it’s possible but I did not got it to work.
The configuration can be seen in the following screenshot:

SP2010CompanyNotifcationCenterPart3_8
I used three Else-If branches. I also set this workflow to run when an item changes. This concludes this series. I again want to be clear that it was not my goal to create a “perfect “solution with no shortcomings. It’s not perfect, I realize that, but I hope I at least inspired some people to get the most out of SharePoint 2010 by just using the out-of-the-box features.

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