The v11 is a mature product that has evolved along with the
Microsoft SharePoint platform. It is designed to be “The Fastest and
Easiest way to add Business Value to SharePoint”! But to be more
specific, CorasWorks is focused on making it fast and easy to manage work
related activities. For instance it is easy to snap in a “My Work”
component to give your employees a one stop shop to see what’s assigned to them,
do the work, and a simple click to close it. Nice and easy!
Customers have built Ticket Systems to manage a queue of work
requests. Another example is a Change Request system that allows a product
team or an IT team to manage change request coming in from the users of their
systems. We have seen systems created with v11 for from managing urgent
need statements in the US Military, for full blown Program management systems,
Demand management, Idea management, Case management, Product Lifecycle
management, etc. and the list goes on and on. We call this class of
solutions that our customers are using to improve their business processes
“Collaborative Work Management”. As a CorasWorks customer the power to do
all of this is on limited to your imagination and your knowledge of how to do
it. This online help is intended to help you with gaining the knowledge
but of course we are always available to help you build your business solutions
to help you build that knowledge and value.
Now let’s take a bit
of a look at what comprises v11:
The Basic
Components
All of the wedges that are on the right hand side of
the v11 diagram fall under the category of CorasWorks Basic components.
Sometimes the term “Basic” makes customer feel that these are limited in
functionality but in reality they reason that we call them Basic Displays is the
method to configure them. Everything in a Basic Display can be configured
through a simple GUI Wizard (see image below) that is intended to give the power
to do amazing things into the hands of people who either don’t have the skills
to work with JavaScript, XML, XSLT, etc. or don’t have the time to do so and
want a quicker and easier way.
CorasWorks
Widgets
In v11 there are 70+ widgets that are pre-built and
designed to be used by site owners. In literally less than a minute a site
owner in SharePoint could add a chart of all of the tasks in their Team Site by
Status or Priority. They can add a calendar view of all of the
announcements and when they were entered, or a My Work that shows all of a team
members items that have been assigned to them or created by them.
In addition each Widget has a rich set of Actions that make it easier to add
new items, close items, or send a quick email about it and as has always been
the case with our Actions, the team member can take these Actions on as many
items as they need to. Go to any page in SharePoint, put it in edit mode
and you will see CorasWorks Widgets for Announcements, Documents, Tasks, Links,
etc. all one click away for you!
Basic
Displays
The Basic Display category is intended for site
administrators who want to build custom Grids, Calendars, Charts, Navigation,
etc., into their sites that are not already available in the CorasWorks Widgets.
Each Widget that your site owners are using is also a
pre-configured version of one of the Basic Displays. One really easy thing
to do is simply add a Widget edit the settings by going to “Edit CorasWorks
Settings” in the web part menu. There you will have the ability to create
multiple views for related content, edit the view that the user sees, etc.
In fact a Widget can become a Roll-up with a couple of simple clicks. In
v11.2 we added in a standard set of views that makes creating you custom
components easier than ever……take them for a spin and let us know what you
think!
Actions
The
Actions framework is more powerful than ever. Actions are really one of
the core reasons that CorasWorks can enable so many variations of Collaborative
Work Management solutions. Actions allow you to snap together the business
actions, processes, and activities together to streamline the experience that
the business user has limiting it to only the information that they need to see,
enter, and update.
The v11 environment also includes a set of
Default Actions for each list/library type in SharePoint to make it very simple
to leverage this powerful framework. Each Widget of course already comes
with Actions pre-configured but you can also add news ones, edit them, or remove
Actions that you don’t want by going to the Actions Selection section of the
Display Wizard accessible through “Edit CorasWorks Settings.”
The
Actions are on the right side of the v11 diagram which means that it they are
part of the Basic Components. But the reason is that they have a nice GUI
based Wizard that enables configuration through clicking versus script.
But as you will learn, they by no means are limited!