I am trying to create a solution in SharePoint 365 (I am new in SharePoint). Below is what I am looking for:
1. A user logs in and opens a form which they fill details and forwards/submits to the supervisor for approval. There are about 20 fields to be filled
2. Once approved, a certificate, preferably in PDF, is generated based on the details entered by the user.
3. The 20 fields are made available for download in Excel whereby the 20 rows form 20 columns in the Excel.
I am not sure if SharePoint with designer or Infopath can accomplish this.
Hope you can assist me to know if this is possible and what extra tools I may need on top of SharePoint.
Your questions is very generic, it might be flagged by some moderator later. Anyway... for SharePoint Online (not SharePoint 365), you will need to write your solution using the SharePoint Framework (SPFx), to achieve this you will need to familiarize yourself with TypeScript, NPM, GULP, Yeoman Generator, React JS, and a to some degree of JavaScript.
The other possible way is to familiarize yourself with the Office 365 architecture, this options might be limited to fully achieve your goals but might be the best option if you are not a developer.
Basically you will need to create a "workflow", you can create using Flow (when a list item is submitted), inside the Flow you will read the fields submitted and send for user manager's approval (reading the property from user profile), and once the "workflow" is approved, you can capture the data, and send to Excel (you can even specify to which Excel flavor you want: Excel Online - Business, Excel Online - OneDrive, or simply Excel).
Once your Flow adds the information your target (Excel file), you add a new step in your Flow to use the "Adobe Sign" to use the create a certificate - you can use this step to get a document from an signed agreement or any other you find suitable there
You have the hard way by coding through SPFx or making your way through Flow (the easy way), it is now up to you, go with Flow, you will achieve this in probably a couple of hours.
Related
Good day beautiful people,
Overall description
I have been assigned to a project where recruiters are using excel file to gather information about new joiners, leavers and people changing positions. Later on it is uploaded to SharePoint where this data is connected to some other files, dashboards and so on. There is also a copy of it, in InfoPath, but the program is working terribly wrong so personally for me this is no-go zone.
My goal
I would like to make this more automated and user friendly, so that's why I wanted to move it to the SharePoint. I want users to have one page, subpage, app to fill up necessary data, edit it if needed and then publish to the SharePoint.
Problem
I have visited tens of pages how to create SharePoint form without InfoPath, how to create SP form with PowerApps but most of these articles provides nothing useful. Just brief overview and I am not that power user of SP to get this done in no time.
Question
Is there a way, that I can make this working within accepted mater of time (few days) so the end result will be exactly what I need?
Make some lists in SharePoint with the columns they need, use that as your data source. Link your PowerApps application to that source, et voila. Recruitment can now fill their data in with what you need, and via Power Automate you can process the data and send it to the correct locations afterwards.
I am trying to create a data entry "app" to collect daily readings across our site. Here are the three biggest constraints:
Software - ideally, we would use some software within the Microsoft 365 Suite, mainly because those are the only approved apps on site. It may be possible to use open source software, but that might raise some flags in terms of security. So my thoughts are to use either Excel or Access.
Cost - ideally, we do not want purchase any additional software licenses. I would try and create something with Power Apps, but we do not have the licensing for an Azure or SQL server to store the data. I could be missing something here though.
Mobile-Friendly - finally, it needs to work on an Android tablet. Currently, we collect readings using pen and paper. The whole idea of this is to move towards using a tablet.
The easiest approach would be to create an Excel spreadsheet, save it on OneDrive, and edit the spreadsheet. I don't love this option because we are collecting 100's of data points each day. This would end up with a very wide spreadsheet that will be cumbersome to navigate.
The other option I looked into was creating an Access database and accompanying form and storing it on SharePoint. However, it seems Microsoft has stopped supporting Access databases on SharePoint.
I have created data entry forms using VBA, similar to this, but these do not work on mobile.
Is it possible to create a data entry form in Excel that also works on the Android version of Excel? Are there other alternatives I am not thinking of?
I am engaged in just this kind of project also. I have written an app in PowerApps, built an Excel spreadsheet and stored it in OneDrive, and am running it (the app) on an iPad. The design differs somewhat from your description of directly presenting a spreadsheet to the user (which I think PowerApps could do) because I don't want users having direct access to the data.
Edit: You do not need Azure or SQL, unless you are storing tons of data. Excel can be a satisfactory data storage location for modest uses.
I found the learning curve for PowerApps to be quite steep, as it's a different paradigm than line-by-line coding.
I think this is a more user friendly way to collect data than trying to run an Excel form, and once you get it made and polished, you'll look like a pro :)
I am by no means an expert but if you need some tips I'll do what I can to help. It sounds like we are at similar developmental stages.
Is it possible to create a data entry form in Excel that also works on the Android version of Excel? Are there other alternatives I am not thinking of?
Microsoft Forms does the job when created from OneDrive on mobile browser. Side note: the form I just created and the response I submitted have now disappeared from my OneDrive.
I also saw some people using Power Automate to save responses from a form into an Excel file (every reponse).
We've a real pain in our project where we ask a team of 50 resources to update a single excel sheet that's placed in a network location and when someone tries to update the data, it's locked by somebody else and they don't update it. So, they end up not updating the data.
I'm looking for an alternate solution like
creating a form in sharepoint/ jira - no sharepoint/ jira developer
getting data in mail - too tedious and lots of rework
creating a custom form and hosting it in local server - might work - any templates on this?
Or, any alternates? I'm out of ideas.
easiest thing would be to create a simple SharePoint-List. All Users can update their data at the same time and the Input-Form will be there automatically. (Can also be exported to Excel)
If you are on SharePoint-Online you could also have a look at Windows Form which provide more flexibility in creating the form.
And if you need even more capabilities you can have a look at PowerApps
I have a requirement to copy all Notes and Activities while converting Lead to Contact and vice versa.
When I Qualifying Lead to Contact I use my custom plugin which is triggered by QualifyLead event. There is no out of the box solution to convert Contact to Lead so I use my custom on-demand dialog. But this dialog unable to run my custom plugin (which will copy Notes and Activities from Contact to Lead).
Please help me to find a way to copy all this stuff from Contact to Lead.
You can create a Custom Workflow Activity with the code of your custom plugin and uses as step inside your on-demand dialog.
You can start from here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg328515.aspx
Another way that you can do this is to simply reference the notes from the Lead in the Contact, Account, or Opportunity entities using an IFrame and some JavaScript as described in http://030bacf.netsolhost.com/WordPress/?cat=69 . Depending on how many records you have, potentially this could even be a better solution since you are only keeping one copy of the notes which will help keep the size of the database more manageable and performance better. Or you could use this solution for the notes and the solution recommended by Guido for the Activity records. I had to make a change to the URL used for CRM 2013 and have copied that part below.
//src="/"+context.getContext().getOrgUniqueName()+"/_controls/note/notesdata.aspx?id="+lookupItem[0].id+"&ParentEntity=3&EnableInlineEdit=false&EnableInsert=false";
// change to this for CRM 2013
src=serverUrl+"/"+Xrm.Page.context.prependOrgName("/_controls/notes/notesdata.aspx?id="+lookupItem[0].id+"&ParentEntity=3&EnableInlineEdit=false&EnableInsert=false");
So we have a client that is wanting to replace all of their forms they use with digital versions where the data entered into them are stored in a centralized database for reporting. One of the main features required is when financial data is entered into a form, the relevant information should be update in QuickBooks. Specifically, instead of filling out a donation slip, putting it into a file for a donator, bringing up Quickbooks and recording the donation they want to have an application where they enter the donation/donator info which is stored in a database and, using the Quickbooks SDK, updates the daily deposit/donations/etc info in QuickBooks automatically.
My boss is trying to convince me to make a custom application to handle the whole thing, but I've been considering trying to pitch an Infopath + Sharepoint solution to him for the form management. However, I have absolutely no experience with either, so I don't know if any kind of integration with Quickbooks would be possible. So would an integration infopath/sharepoint with Quickbooks be feasible, and can you give me tips on where to look for info on how to implement it. Also, hiring a 'SharePoint Developer' is out of the question. So would a VB.Net/C# developer who has experience with web application development be able to address the programming skills required for a solution?
I'm open to any ideas.
I believe a .NET developer could probably handle this situation. You could possibly write code in the Infopath forms themselves, or create SharePoint workflows (using Visual Studio). It would probably be a decently complex and hard to maintain solution though.
I have not expirience with Quickbooks... If Quickbooks has web services to perform operations you are interested in you most likely will be able to make InfoPath form to collect/submit data.
InfoPath alone (as client application part of Office) may be enough - you should be able to quiclky prototype form you have InfoPath installed. For server side rendering of the InfoPath forms you need Enterprise edition of the SharePoint Server - not sure if this task alone would justify the purchase.