Solution StudioeBook for European SharePoint and Office 365 Awards 2016

Business solutions on top of SharePoint? Easy with skybow

SharePoint is a powerful collaboration and development platform, but developing business solutions is a costly

and time-consuming job. Even fairly simple processes, such as a request for leave, demand skilled SharePoint

developers and a complex deployment process. This is where skybow Solution Accelerators and skybow Solution

Studio can help: they can be used to design data models and behaviors, implement business processes through

actions and state flows, and put it altogether in a beautiful UI with strong reporting capabilities, reducing the

process of developing business solutions on the SharePoint platform by up to 85%.

The same gains occur in the deployment process: with skybow Solution Accelerators, deploying a solution is as

easy as copying an XML file.

skybow Solution Accelerators are a clockwork of timer jobs, event receivers, and business logic, which helps you

to create structured SharePoint data, define and implement processes using that data, and provide visualization

and reporting in SharePoint, with as little coding as possible. Let your developers spend their time working on

complex business logic in SharePoint – they will never have to do trivial tasks such as developing event receivers

that send emails again.

Data structuring in SharePoint out of the box doesn’t work behind the lookup fields. skybow Solution Accelerators adds fine data structuring, such as master–slave, or master–multiple slaves relations, as well as intelligent data filtering, aggregation, and metadata inheritance based on those relations. We are calling it "case files" – these are your data models, within which all data relations and data behaviors are precisely defined.

Inside each case file, you can define dynamic and truly powerful calculated and default values. It’s possible to create running totals and aggregations across multiple connected lists from multiple SharePoint sites. Think of our request for leave scenario: dynamic and persistent aggregation of leave requests from all of your team members into one filed value, is just two clicks away.

skybow Case Files

Solution Studio

Actions, expressions and stagesIn addition to link actions, there are also conditional actions and scheduled actions. Conditional actions are triggered when data changes – such as, for example, when a new leave request has been submitted and an email has to be sent to the manager. Scheduled actions happen in defined time intervals: you can send a PDF report that contains all leave requests to the manager every Monday morning.

Once the data is structured and modeled, it is ready for processing. With skybow, you will work with actions, stages, and expressions. There are three types of actions available: link actions (manual actions), conditional actions (event-driven), and scheduled actions. Link actions are triggered through user input, by clicking on a link or a button. The set of actions that can be performed is already exhaustive: start a workflow add, update, or delete a list item, send an email, create a document… If all of this is not enough, you can call a web service, execute a PowerShell script, or even call a method from your own code library.

Expressions in these actions are based on C# syntax, but with placeholders. Placeholders can contain SharePoint data, such as field values, but can also hold environmental and contextual information such as security context, lists, sites or site collection context, etc.

By combining those three type of actions with expressions that can be used within them, skybow offers a powerful clockwork of background processing tools, which helps you to build powerful solutions seamlessly integrated into SharePoint. Something we call "stages" will lead your user transparently through the business process: she will always be able to see the status of her leave request.

Solution Studio

The first thing that end users see in a business solution is its user interface: how the fields are distributed over the screen, whether they behave intelligently in edit mode or when adding new data. skybow forms technologies, which include skybow Dynamic Forms and skybow Rich Forms, deliver exactly the experience that users expect. A WYSWIG editor is there to position fields on the screen and add dependent detail (slave) lists or libraries to each list item, even in the edit mode. All that data is tabbed, grouped, and nicely formatted. Of course, all the data validation, calculation, and aggregation rules are fully respected, and values and validations are dynamically recalculated on the form itself, using client side technologies.

Reporting was always that one thing in SharePoint that was not easy to achieve. skybow Document Generation closes this gap: users can create Word documents, with placeholders for real SharePoint data. Repeating sections for data tables, for achieving master-detail relations, are fully supported. skybow Solution Accelerators can then, through a link action, conditional action, or scheduled action, use that template to create a Word document with real data, convert it to PDF if necessary, and store it in a library. This gives you full-fledged reporting from SharePoint, with the tools you know (Microsoft Word) and unparalleled simplicity.

User interface and reporting

Solution Studio

Since many developers might be working on one solution, it is useful to track who did what. skybow Solution Studio offers a comprehensive overview of all changes and changesets, with exact dates and times, and the name of consultant or developer who made the change. Changes can be reverted to the original state either by whole changeset, or by a single change inside the changeset. That way, you can be certain that no unintended changes will happen, and that everything is tracked.

After developing a business solution with skybow Solution Studio, transferring it to a test, staging, or production environment is as easy as copying an XML file. skybow Solution Studio UI helps you export solutions to XML, and import them in your target environment. If you prefer a scripted deployment process, our ready-made PowerShell scripts, which you can use in your deployment process, will do the same thing. Best of all, there are no server downtimes, no solution retraction and deployment, and no maintenance windows. This deployment is so simple and robust that it can be performed without downtime, during working hours, preventing developers from becoming sleep-deprived. :-)

Deployment and solution lifecycle

Solution Studio