SharePoint 2010 for Developers

Today the 13th May, I did another successful presentations with demos on “SharePoint 2010 for Developers” at dotNetForum monthly session. Actually it’s a very special day to all the techies as 12th was the Global Launch of Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010.

Though it was bit warm without the air condition, there were over 100 attendees. In the two hour session I covered 3 main topics.
. What’s new in SharePoint 2010 (for Developers)
. Visual Studio 2010 tools for SharePoint
. Deploying SharePoint 2010 Web Parts.
With the time constraints, I was unable to cover the 4th topic, “Deploying SharePoint 2010 Workflows”.

My sincerer thanks to all the participants and special thanks to Jinath and Wela.

Business Process Automation with SharePoint and Workflow Foundation

Yeah, I know I’m late on this too. On Friday the 7th May 2010 at ANC auditorium I hosted a workshop on “Business Process Automation with SharePoint and Workflow Foundation. Actually it was my 1st workshop (Free of charge) at NetAssist, a nice crowd of over 90 participants were attended.

This workshop targeted both the Business users as well as the technical users. Started with an introduction to SharePoint 2007, followed by InfoPath 2007 forms and Workflow on SharePoint Designer and OOB Workflows. I’m happy as the Q&A session too went very well, many questions came from the business users. Photos after the brake. Thanks everybody who attended.

SharePoint Designer Workflows does not start automatically in SharePoint

I’ve been playing with SharePoint Designer Workflows heavily  for the past few days. Suddenly I came across the problem of these workflows does not start automatically though I select the option to start the workflow when an item is created or modified in a list or library.
Browse the web and found the reason of installing Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Service Pack 1 which caused the problem. This behavior occurs because a security fix in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 SP1 prevents declarative workflows from starting automatically under the system account.

You could fall in to 1 of the 3 scenarios given below while you faced this problem…
1) The Windows SharePoint Services Web application runs under a user's domain account.
2) The user logs in by using this domain account.
3) The site displays the user name as System Account.

Answer / Solution
Set the application pool to use a different user account than System Account.

Step by Step Guide.
1) Open SharePoint Central Administration.
2) Go to Operations Tab.
3) Under Security Configurations click on Service Accounts.
4) Select “Web application pool” option button.
5) In the web service drop down box select “Windows SharePoint Services Web Application”.
6) And in the Application pool drop down, select the application pool you want.
7) Next select the “Configurable” option button and then type the user name and password of a user having rights to assign to an application pool.

8) Go to command prompt and type iisreset /noforce
9) Make sure to test the workflow log-in in to SharePoint other than System Account.

Happy SharePoint day with Workflow..