Hi,
In this post I'm going to go over the feature of our Electronic Signature field and how it can help you make your SharePoint-based system become compliant with federal (or other) regulations, such as FDA 21 CFR Part 11.

SharePoint is a great tool for managing all kinds of data: documents, business processes, you name it. Coupled with a Single Sign-on, entering data is a breeze, you don't even need to authenticate yourself, your SharePoint automatically recognizes you based on your Windows login information, which is called Windows Integrated Authentication. But what if you are required by regulations to enter username/password combination each time you need to enter data? Of course you can disable Windows Integrated Authentication, but then you will need to enter your password each time you need to check someone's phone number in the SharePoint people search, your users will certainly not like that. And what about the production floor with multiple employees sharing a single PC, do you really expect them to log off/log on each time they want to update a batch status?

This is exactly why we developed our Electronic Signature field. As any other field it can be added to any document library or list and then attached in its settings to some or all of the other fields there.

Then you can enter your username and password combination while entering data, the combination will be validated online against the Active Directory and a hashed value of the signed fields, your identity, item version and time of signing will be added to the item.

You will be able to see the signature in both views and display/edit form and even validate it in real time.

If you click on the green mark you can validate the signature in real time by recalculating the hash value and comparing it to the stored one.

If one of the signed fields is changed by you or any other user, the signature field (together with the accompanying background event receiver) notices the change and causes the signature to become invalid, unless a new, fresh signature is added. As I mentioned, we have the event reciever running in the background, which catches all updates, even those not made directly using the SharePoint UI, such as updates using web services for those integrated systems you might have.

Try it our now, we have a 30-day fully-functioning version available for download!

I would like to demostrate the ease with which you can build a pretty complex multistage business process using plain old SharePoint together with our own Smart List Pro. The process is a software version approval, where a developer submits a new version, the QA authorize it and the IT department approves its installation. Of course, this could be any other process as well, depending on your business needs.

Smart List Pro extends the capabilities of a regular SharePoint list forms, including tabbed interface, permissions on tabs and/or individual columns, advanced validation and much more.
We can also use our Electronic Signature field that allows you to electronically sign some or all column values, so that it's plain to see whether the values have been changed since being entered by the responsible party.

The process uses 3 tabs: Dev, QA and IT. When entering a new process application, only the Dev tab is visible. When editing the item, the Dev tab becomes read-only and the QA tab is editable. Once the QA decision is made, the QA tab becomes read-only and the IT tab is editable. Once the IT decision is made, all tabs become read-only.

We start with creating a regular custom list. The following columns need to be added to the list:

• Product (text, choice or lookup field) - name of the software we want to approve
• Version (text) - version number
• Dev Team Leader (user) - name of the development team lead
• Dev signature (Infowise Signature field, optional) - signs the above column to make sure they have not been altered
• QA Approval (choice: n/a, Approved, Rejected, default: n/a) - indicates QA department approval status
• QA Approval Date (date) - the date/time when the QA decision was made
• QA Comments (multiline text) - general QA comments
• QA Team Leader (user) - name of the QA team lead
• QA signature (Infowise Signature field, optional) - signs the QA columns to make sure they have not been altered
• IT Approval (choice: n/a, Approved, Rejected, default: n/a) - indicates IT department approval status
• IT Approval Date (date) - the date/time when the IT decision was made
• IT Comments (multiline text) - general IT comments
• IT Team Leader (user) - name of the IT team lead
• IT Signature (Infowise Signature field, optional) - signs the IT columns to make sure they have not been altered

Once done, you can move to creating the tabs and permission. Make sure Smart List Pro is installed and the feature is activated in the site collection scope. Go to List Settings and click on Tabs and tab permissions, which one of the options Smart List Pro adds.

• Create 3 tabs by enterin tab names and clicking on Add. The tabs are Dev, QA and IT (the tab names do not matter of course)
• Select the Dev tab and assign the following columns to it: Title, Product, Version, Dev Team Leader and Dev Signature (if you choose to use it)
• Select the QA tab and assign the following columns to it:QA Approval, QA Approval Date, QA Comments, QA Team Leader and QA Signature (again, if you choose to use it)
• Select the IT tab and assign the following columns to it:IT Approval, IT Approval Date, IT Comments, IT Team Leader and IT Signature (again, if you choose to use it)

• Now we handle the permissions:
  • Select the Dev tab, select Write under Permissions and check only the New form, add the rule
  • Select Read permission and the check Edit and Display forms, add the rule
  • Select the QA tab, select Deny under Permissions and check only the New form, add the rule
  • Select Write permission, check the Edit and Display forms and add under conditions that QA Approval equals to n/a
  • Select Read permission, check the Edit and Display forms and add under conditions that QA Approval does not equal to n/a
  • Select the IT tab, select Deny under Permissions and check only the New form, add the rule
  • Select Write permission, check the Edit and Display forms and add under conditions that QA Approval equals to Approved and IT Approval equals to n/a
  • Select Read permission, check the Edit and Display forms and add under conditions that IT Approval does not equal to n/a

This is it! In 10 minutes you've got a pretty compex form for one of those ubiquitous business needs, something you would spend days building in ASP.NET or InfoPath. You can obviously expand the form, for instance, including permissions based on user identity, create a workflow in SharePoint Designer to send email to the parties and so on, but the lion's share of work is already done.

Try it out for yourself, just download the trial version of Smart List Pro or use our free (but limited in the number of rules) version - Smart List Lite

We’ve all been in this situation – after a good long SharePoint based portal implementation – we start scratching our head to figure out what's the best way to back up the SharePoint farm and drown in the multitude of options – SharePoint native backup, stsadm or 3^rd party products like AvePoint or EMC.
Now, Microsoft makes our life very easy by announcing Data Protection Manager as the main backup/restore application for SharePoint 2010.
Well, you might think that’s just another one of the many methods to protect SharePoint 2010 but DPM hides under its hood some pretty cool features which make it the #1 backup/restore application for SharePoint 2010. Here are some of them:

• Application Awareness – it is probably one of the most important features of DPM, DPM is aware that it's backing up SharePoint and not any other solution when backing up SharePoint databases. The meaning of this is that DPM works hand in hand with SharePoint and as the result of that the backed up data is more consistent as DPM makes sure that all the transactions that are occurring during the backup are taken into consideration.
• Item Level Recovery – DPM enables to recover a single object out of a full farm backup of a wide variety of SharePoint objects, such as documents, lists, document libraries, sites and sites collections.
• Protects SharePoint Search. In a large farm the search index can get rather big. In these situations - backing up search is crucial as in a case of disaster it could take very long time, even days, to index the farm again.
• Better Performance – DPM runs a very light agent which almost does not affect the farm production environment, with very low I/O, as it scans memory blocks to track changes in real -time.
• Self-Healing Backup Process – during the backup, if one of the backup objects, such as server or database, goes offline – DPM will proceed with the backup as planned and try to self-heal and add the offline object during the next planned backup.
• Reduce Storage Costs – DPM aims to use disks as the main backup storage and tapes for archiving. It's very understandable as disks are cheaper and more common than tapes and it's very easy and quick to restore data from them.
  Furthermore, DPM reduces storage costs by minimizing backed up data by backing up only the changed blocks of data, meaning that every backup after the first full backup is approximately 5% (average daily data change on a SharePoint farm) of the whole farm data. That saves about 75% of storage space comparing to differential SharePoint native backup over a one month period.
• Search for Content (across Recovery Points). DPM enables to search the backed up data. It's very helpful if we want to perform an item level recovery, DPM search makes it very easy to locate an item to recover when needed and the time factor is crucial.

DPM is a great SharePoint 2010 backup/restore solution. And the fact it comes from Microsoft is a big advantage over other solutions as it integrates well with SharePoint within the backup/restore processes.
It very important to mention that DPM actually is the main Microsoft backup/restore solution for other Microsoft products such as Active Directory, Exchange, SQL, Virtual Server, file shares, System State and more. So it’s a great new backup/restore product family from Microsoft.

For more information – http://www.microsoft.com/dpm
Try it! There's also a 180 days evaluation download.

While testing some of our products on SharePoint 2010 I came across an annoying problem. Some of our products use custom timer jobs, and when trying to register such a job, say using feature receivers, caused a completely unexpected Access denied exception. I tried to run the code with elevated privileges, no use.

It took me some time, but I finally got it - in SharePoint 2010 you must register the timer jobs only in feature receivers scope to the farm or web application level. Although I can see some logic in it, I still find it extremely annoying that something that used to work smoothly under MOSS would be completely broken under 2010, no matter what the reason is.

Originally posted on "http://www.sharepointjoel.com/"