SharePoint 2010 Demo: Automating Document Assembly

I captured a quick demo from the solution created in Chapter 7 of our book Pro SharePoint 2010 Development which is available now. Apress is the publisher and you can find in on amazon or other preferred book store.

This chapter shows you how to combine Visual Studio Tools for Office, SharePoint 2010, and the Open XML document format to create a compelling tool for constructing structured documents. For context, we focused on a proposal. Say a sales person starts a new proposal from the SPS library. The Word template they are given is one that has been extended by VSTO to include a custom task pane and backstage extension. With the task pane, the user can perform searches for people which leverages the SharePoint profile store behind the scenes. Once a user is selected, a content control is placed into the documemt leaving a placeholder for the content of a resume. Once saved, code on the server generates SharePoint tasks for each of the requests. When the requested user completes the task and attaches their resume, code on the server merges the resume into the proposal. We then also include a workflow that generates a PDF version of the completed document to be sent outside the company. You can download the video here