SharePoint 2010 includes service applications for managing information that traditionally has been stuck in spreadsheets. The challenge can be choosing which tool best fits your needs. Here’s a rough guide, based on only editing and viewing data in a web browser. From the user’s perspective, no Office client required…

…however, first a licensing note. SharePoint Lists are available in all versions of SharePoint 2010. Excel Web App is available for all versions of SharePoint 2010 but requires Office 2010 licenses to use (you don’t need the software, just the license). InfoPath Forms Services, Access Services and Excel Services all require SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Edition.

Second: This post is just covering services to store and manage structured or semi-structured data typically found in Office . It’s not covering the analytics side, i.e. PerformancePoint and Excel Services, and it’s not covering integrated application features, i.e. Business Connectivity Services or External Lists.

And off we go…

The short version:

• Use SharePoint lists for simple applications with not toooo many columns
• Use InfoPath web forms if you’re creating a lot of columns of the type ‘Multiple Lines’…
• Use Excel Web Apps, if you’re licensed, if you are trying to make a list behave just like a spreadsheet. You know you’re going to need Freeze Panes at some point…
• Use Access Services if you’re creating a lot of columns, need more functions to calculate, more queries to filter and more items to view than a list can possibly handle… and you’re on a budget that excludes more expensive alternatives

Now for a bit more info:

*
Note this refers to the Excel web application that displays the full Excel spreadsheet, not Excel web parts that display a named range of data from a spreadsheet.

Table explanation: X = requirement can be met by the feature.  / = sort of, but another feature can do more or better.  – = not applicable (Excel Web App doesn’t use views to display content). Blank = no, requirement cannot be met by the feature.

Lists

Easiest to use and most common choice for replacing spreadsheets for managing information. Don’t forget lists include calendars, tasks, links, contacts etc.  You can create calculated columns using common functions from Excel, including ‘If’ statements. And you can have multiple different views to manage the data. Different people can edit the list at the same time provided they are editing different items. And finally, if there’s a process involved, you can integrate a workflow to manage the data.

The limits:

• You can only have so many columns before lists become unusable. You have a single form for editing individual items and all columns will be displayed on it. You can use Datasheet views instead to display a limited set of columns. But note: Datasheet views won’t work for any columns containing Managed Metadata, they will be read only.
• According to Microsoft capacity planning guidelines, you can store up to 30,000,000 items in a list. However all views must return less than 5,000 items. And in reality, the number is often far lower before performance degrades.

InfoPath

InfoPath is used to create forms containing semi-structured data, i.e a mix of numbers, calculations, and large clumps of text. The sort of files that could have been created in either Excel or Word because neither really fits the purpose.  With InfoPath you can create web forms for people to fill in and automatically submit to a SharePoint library. You can have multiple views within the form and control which view is displayed when a user opens the form. And you can choose to promote certain properties into SharePoint columns for quick access without opening the full form.

Pros:

• Managing semi-structured data, including lots of text.
• Integrated workflows to manage updates to the form

Cons:

• You can only edit one item in a web form. If you need to edit lots of items at once, you are unlikely to be including lots of text and InfoPath wouldn’t be the right tool.
• The same Microsoft capacity planning guidelines for lists also apply to InfoPath forms libraries

Excel Web App

With SharePoint Server 2010, you can integrate Office Web Applications. They are similar, but not quite twinned, with the Office Web Apps available with Windows Live Online.  You store the spreadsheet in a SharePoint library and open it in the browser instead of the full Excel desktop client.  You don’t get full Excel functionality but it should be more than sufficient for editing content.  Excel trumps lists in that you can use that popular feature – Freeze Panes – to scroll across lots of columns without forgetting which item you are viewing.

Pros:

• Freeze panes
• Bigger range of functions for calculations
• Excel data visualisations can provide dashboard-style analytics

Limits

• In the web-browser, only one person can edit the entire spreadsheet at a time.
• Creating views is a manual effort, it is still just a spreadsheet.

Haven’t found a definitive answer as to how large an Excel spreadsheet can grow and still be opened in the browser.

Access

Access, that client database tool loved by users and loathed by IT usually in roughly equal proportions, has joined the world of SharePoint. You can now create web databases in Access and publish them as a SharePoint site. Forms and reports can be edited and analysed using just a web browser.

Pros:

• You can go column-crazy and choose how many appear in the different forms available within Access, including single item view, multiple items and datasheet views <- side note: lists use Access Services built-in, even in SharePoint 2010 Foundation, to display datasheet views.
• Whilst you don’t get workflow integrated, the query capability offers much more compared to configuring list views enabling different forms to be used for different stages of data update. (You just can’t email reminders automatically when data needs updating).
• Increased capacity compared to lists. Lists can store 30 million items and still be supported but no more than 5,000 items will be displayed in any view. There is no defined limit to the number of records that can be stored in an Access web database, the default is 500,000. But Access queries can contain up to 200,000 items, with a default value of 50,000. But don’t get too excited – see performance note below.
• Better option than Access client databases in networked mode. Access Services in SharePoint uses far better caching mechanisms to lock/unlock items and you don’t need to compact every 5 minutes.

Limits

• Less flexible permissions compared to lists. With lists, you can set permissions per site, list and item. With Access Services, you set permissions per site only.  You can lock columns to read-only in forms but everyone is affected. There’s no concept of a ‘super’ user from the content perspective. Changes to the database schema can only be made by people with Full Control or Design permissions to the site.  And anyone who can view the site can open it in Access 2010 if they have Access installed on their computer. And they can export the table contents to Excel…
• Consider it a replacement only for lists, spreadsheets and simple databases. Lots of limited functionality, such as not being able to do table joins, you have to use field lookups instead (DBAs may howl). Queries can only get so complex and you may resort to doing calculated columns within the table (DBAs – don’t bother howling, it’s no different to a calculated column in a SharePoint list – which is what the table becomes when it is published to SharePoint).

Whilst scale is way beyond SharePoint lists, it’s nowhere near fully-fledged databases (SQL or NoSQL) with web front-ends. The challenge is that it can do enough for users that they inevitably want that other 20% of requirements you said no to.

From a performance perspective, users will experience a significant delay (more than 10 seconds) waiting for a form or report to open if the underlying table or query contains more than 1,000 items. Possibly less – it’s comparable to the delay opening a normal SharePoint list of equivalent size.  The difference is that the delay is due to caching in the background. Once the form opens, editing and filtering is nearly as quick as if working in the full Access client, even if the form contains 10,000+ items. This is where it trumps lists.  If you’re displaying more than 1,000 items, aim for fewer forms and use the Datasheet form which enables filtering without refreshing the query – in effect, you’re viewing a list but without the limit of 5,000 items. May publish more guidelines in a separate blog post.

And there you have it, a rough guide to the different ways you can store and manage data in SharePoint.

References

• SharePoint Editions comparison – Microsoft
• Capacity Planning Guidelines – blog post to be published

Not a million of references for this one, most is based on experience tinkering with SharePoint over the past 12 years. It’s come a long way from that document management add-on to Exchange I first saw in 1999

This post is just a simple tip that I keep forgetting myself when configuring SharePoint lists…

With SharePoint Server 2007, you can easily set-up workflows to require items in a list to be approved. (Go to the list settings, click on Workflow settings and fill in the boxes.) However, if you are going to the trouble of requiring all items to be approved, you probably only want those items to become visible to everyone once they have been approved. The workflow will not control visibility of the items. To do so, you need to go into the list settings and click on ‘Versioning settings’.

Within the list versioning settings, check the button for Content Approval. By default, draft item security will then be set to ‘Only users who can approve items (and the author of the item). That’s all there is to it (assuming you’ve set up the workflow correctly).

Note: creating workflows within the browser user interface is only available in the full SharePoint Server product (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Standard or Enterprise edition). If you are using Windows SharePoint Services, you have to create the workflows from scratch.