SharePoint2010 : Creating Surveys

Creating surveys and recording response in SharePoint is a very useful feature of any intranet or internet facing site. Surveys can be recorded periodically every quarter or monthly based on organizations. This blog post shows how to create a survey and record responses from the audiences. 

• You must log on to your SharePoint site with admin rights.
• Click on View All Site Content and click on Create 
• Select Lists from the left and select Surveys from the list
• Enter the name of your survey and click on Create.

Now that our list is created, it’s time to enter the questions for the survey. 

• Enter your question and click on Next Question until you finish entering all your questions one by one. While filling in the questions, you can select the field type for each question and proceed. You can also branch your users according to their responses, how to do that, we will see later in this post.

Now that you have finished entering all your questions, you should click on Finish which will take you to the list settings page where you can see all your questions listed. Now, you can click on the question you want to put branching on and enter the branching criteria. Finally when all this is done, you are good to test your survey. Click on the survey list from the left hand navigation which will take you to the survey list. Click on Respond to survey for filling in the answer to the questions and submit your survey. Now, if you want the audiences to have only the survey submission rights and they should not be able to view what others are submitting, restrict access to the library accordingly.

Hope this helps

Applying Retention Policy to SharePoint 2010

Records Management is one of the very important aspects of SharePoint 2010 along with document management. Retention can be set either on content types or on folders depending on business case. In this post, I will explain how to set retention on any SharePoint library.
To start with applying retention to your library items, let us create a content type and then we will apply the retention to the content type which will drive the documents throughout their life cycle.

• Follow this post for Creation of custom content types

Now that we have our content type ready, document is in the library with valid value in the metadata field, we can proceed to apply retention to the content type.

Step 1: Click on Library Settings > Information management policy settings (under Permissions and Management)

Step 2: You can see the Vouchers content type listed along with the by default Folder content type. Click on Vouchers content type.

Step 3: Check the Enable Retention check box and click on Add a retention stage

Step 4: To trigger off the retention, our custom column (Voucher Date) which we added while creating the content type will be listed here. Select Voucher Date from dropdown and put 2 years (for the sake of this post). This is where you will put in your business case and fill in the value you want.

Step 5: Once we selected the Voucher Date and entered the number of years, now it’s time to select the kind of action we would want to perform on the item. The Action dropdown will list the available actions to choose from.

Let us declare the item as record after 2 years (for sake of this post).

Select Declare Record and click on OK.

Now you will be directed to the previous page with your event described as below. If you want you can add another stage of retention based on your organisation policy. For example, you would want to delete the item after keeping it for another 5 years after you have declared as a record. So you can add another stage here. Also, you may want to send the record to Record Centre after certain period, you can add that here by adding a new stage.

And we are done. We have now successfully applied retention to our content type.

You can follow the similar way to apply retention to any folder; the process is exactly the same, so I am not mentioning it in my post.

The SharePoint job which works in background to make the retention work is Information management policy job and Expiration policy job. They can be scheduled as per your organization policy going into the Central Administration > Monitoring > Review job definitions (under Timer jobs).

SharePoint 2010 Content Management

Enterprise Content Management(ECM) combines the traditional content management, social capabilities, and powerful search, it is as natural to manage as it is to use. With its simple, “behind-the-scenes” administration, we can configure the content management to our use.

I would like to explain some of the aspects of Content Management in this article.

As we come across managing the content within an organization, we deal with metadata which is the data about data. MOSS 2007 has site columns as metadata which were very useful in organizing and searching data. SP2010 comes up with more such ease of managing your data and meta with concepts with content organiser, in place record management, document id and so on.

Let take Document ID feature first, so in SP2010 whenever any document is uploaded, it is assigned a unique Document ID which remains with the document throughout its life cycle irrespective of which library/site it is in. This makes documents easily searchable and more manageable. With the document ID,we can search it and locate its current position. Its always good to have one unique field associated with our content and this time SharePoint gives it to you by default.

SP2010 makes the use of managed metadata which was there in MOSS2007 but in a very efficient way. For that we first need to understand the concept of Term Store. A term store is a collection of Term Sets which is again a collection of Terms. Now terms are the tags which we define in central admin which can be used across our site collection level or web application level. We need to create a set of terms and name them according to our line of business (LOB). The set of these term sets are called term store. Now lets go to our document library settings and try adding a new field as managed metadata, it will bring you with the option to select yours tags, which are same as what we just defined in central admin now as term sets. We can select single or multiple tags as per the requirement. This makes our content easily manageable and fast searchable.

So we see that managed metadata connects our term sets and the content.

Another new feature In Place Record Management is another important feature by which we can declare a content as Record and it will behave in a specific way we assign. For that we have to initially configure how we want the records to behave and then declare the content (as required) as Record, using an inbuilt ribbon button. This separates that particular content from others and is very useful when we are dealing with archival of documents.

Content Organizer (Metadata driven) can create deep, hierarchical folder structures and manage retention at each folder in the hierarchy(or inherit from parent folder) and route incoming documents to the libraries. So we see that it can act as a post office where all the documents arrive and then routed to their specific houses from there. We can configure our emails to arrive here and based on rules (metadata), we can route our content.