WorkPoint Discover

When WorkPoint is deployed for a customer, a set of SharePoint sites containing WorkPoint relevant and other important data often exists. This could e.g. be team sites which has previously been used for Project sites or Office 365 Group sites. It could also be sites that needs to exist in parallel to the WorkPoint solution.

With the WorkPoint Discover feature, it is possible to run through all site collections on a tenant and add them to a business module in WorkPoint. In this way, an identical entity is created in WorkPoint, and the site column for the site points to the existing site collection.

Note that this feature only works in a One-site-per-entity setup, and information pulled from the site collection is mapped to the entity in WorkPoint using automatically created fields. This is a matter for the the following properties (the internal name of the entity field is parenthesized):

• Owner (wpSCOwner)
• SecondaryContact (wpSCSecondaryContact)
• WebTemplate (fra RootWeb) (wpSCWebTemplate)
• Title (from RootWeb) - (Title)
• Created
• Url (wpSite)

Furthermore, a binary property (true/false) is created called "wpCreatedByDiscover", which is set to "true" for entities created by this feature. Discovering site collections can be done in two ways; by full  or incremental crawl.  Incremental is based on the "Created" time for site collections.

It is possible to define a scope for the Discover feature. The scope can be based on the following parameters:

• URL patterns (setting via RegEx pattern): If the URL pattern of the sites is known (if e.g. another provisioning tools were used) the scope for Discover can be limited. It is possible to define both an include- and an exclude pattern.
• WebTemplate: Returns only group sites.
• Owner/primary contact: Returns only sites for which the selected user(s) are either owner or primary contact.
• Time:  Returns only items which were created within a given time frame.

The WorkPoint Discover job can be started manually, or run on a schedule with a given time interval, e.g. every night at 2 AM. The job can run once every hour at most. WorkPoint recommends once per day.

Please refer to the following table to see the license requirements for WorkPoint Discover:

Additionally, utilizing the WorkPoint Discover feature requires a WorkPoint 365 solution.

The WorkPoint Discover functionality also requires the WorkPoint app with tenant rights installed in your App Catalog. You can read more about the WorkPoint app with tenant rights in this article.

Configuration of the Discover function can be done for each business module and is done from the WorkPoint Administration:

1. On the WorkPoint solution, click the "Home" button.
2. Click the cog icon to access the WorkPoint Administration.

3. Click the header of a WorkPoint business module for which you wish to set up the WorkPoint Discover feature. Remember that this business module must use the one-site-collection-per-entity architecture.
4. Click "Discover Settings" from the business module menu.

5. The "Scheduler Enabled" checker can be set to have the Discover job run on a timed schedule. You can, e.g. have the Discover job run once every day at a specific time during closed hours of your organization. For this to work, a scheduled job needs to have been set up. Click the "here" link in the description for this field to navigate to the Scheduled Jobs page and set such a job up. A guide for scheduling jobs can be found in this article.
6. If the "Require Approval" checker is checked ON, each site collection found by the Discover feature must be approved by an administrator in order to be added to the WorkPoint solution.
7. A so-called RegEx pattern can be used to define a URL pattern  site collections must fulfill in order to be added to WorkPoint through the Discover job. An example of a RegEx pattern which catches SharePoint site collections could be the following:

The "project" part makes sure that we find SharePoint site collections including the word "project" in it's URL. In effect, this RegEx helps us search for Project sites in SharePoint so we can add them in WorkPoint.

This pattern will find the following URLs (and more):

The pattern will NOT find URLs such as the following:

8. A RegEx pattern can also be used to exclude certain site collections from being added to WorkPoint. Using this field, you can define a URL pattern. If  the URL of a site collection matches this pattern, it will not be added to WorkPoint using the Discover job. For an example of a RegEx pattern, see pt. 7. You can read much more about RegEx by following this link and this link.
9. Select a site collection template for the Discover job to consider when selecting which site collections to add to WorkPoint. The Discover job will evaluate the site collection template that was used when creating the site collection, and if the template matches the template(s) set in this field, the job will add the site collection(s) to WorkPoint.
10. Select an owner or primary contact of the site collection(s) to be discovered. Discover will go through the site collections of the given tenant and add the site collections with the owner set in this field.
11. Select a time range for the discover job to consider when selecting which site collections to add to WorkPoint. The Discover job will evaluate the created date for the site collections, and if that falls within the selected time range set in this field, they will be added to WorkPoint.
12. Only a subset of WorkPoint features will be active on site collections found by Discover. Here you can select which feature areas that should be active on the site collections found and added by the Discover job.
13. Click the "Save" button to save the Discover settings. You will most likely want to click this if running the job immediately is not necessary, or if previous settings have just been tuned.
14. Click the "Save and run discover" to save the Discover settings and run the job immediately.
15. Click the "Refresh" button to refresh the list of URLs found by the Discover job.
16. Click the checker in the "Approve" header to check all found site collections ON for approval. Alternatively, you can check each site collection in the list individually.
17. Click the "Approve selected Site Collections" button to approve the selected site collections and add them to WorkPoint.

Note that while the Discover job can be started manually by the process described in the End User Guide, the Discover job can also be set to run automatically on a schedule. In that case, the saved settings on the Discover page will be used when executing the job by schedule. You can read more about how to schedule WorkPoint jobs in this article.