User Guide: WorkPoint Discover

1. Introduction

2. End User Guide

3. Notes

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 entity per site collection 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.

In this example, we will use the Discover feature to search for site collections related to Projects, and which are owned by Chris Butler:

1. We want to have control over when site collections found by the Discover feature are added to WorkPoint, so we check the "Require Approval" checker.

2. In this example, we know that Project sites have been named using "Project" in the site collection name. We therefore use the Url Include Filter "(sites|teams)\/Project" to narrow our search to site collections which starts with either "/sites/Project" or "/teams/Project".

3. For "Site collection owner" we choose Chris Butler.

4. We do not know when these site collections were created, so we leave the Time range at "Any date and time".

5. We now click "Save and run discover".

The Web Job Dispatcher in the WorkPoint Administration can be used to keep track of jobs running at any given time, including the Discover Job.

Once the job finishes, it finds the following site collections on the tenant:

6. Of the site collections discovered, we select the ones that we wish to add to WorkPoint.

7. We then click the "Approve selected Site Collections" button.

The Discover page should refresh, and display the following message at the top:

The approved site collections are then added to the business module from which the Discover feature was run:

Meta data for the imported site collections can now be filled in with relevant data, such as Company and Project Manager.

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.