Now, it is a widely known fact that most people around the world dislike Vegemite.

Except of course if you're Australian... We can’t get enough of the black sticky left over bits of the beer brewing process.

Well I can safely say that this month I have something that everyone one will like digesting... With the releases notes out, this month’s O365 action drop adds the long awaited Site Collection provisioning actions.

For those still thinking about Vegemite;

Time to get your mind out of the pantry and focus on these two actions for a minute or two and pop yourself into the shoes of the PMO team or SharePoint Online admin.

Adoption of SharePoint Online has been fantastic within the business - so much so, creating new sites and site collections has become a bit of a chore and bottleneck and the request are starting to bank up.

Enter the self-service function for the PMO to create new Program Management Site Collections as a method to secure their project sites with their own Program Site Collection.

Firstly create a new custom list in the PMO site. Doesn't need to have a great deal of detail...

• Program Title (Rename Title)
• Description (Multiple Line – Plain text)
• Required Access (Multiple Line – Plain text
• Program Owner (People picker)

With the new list created, go ahead and create the Nintex Form for it. Replace the “Required Access” field with a repeating section and pop a people picker inside. Open the repeating section and connect the “Required Access” field, so the repeating section XML is saved to the list.

Publish your form and move on to the workflow. In the workflow we need to setup a quick task to the PMO Manager who would approve any new programs of work. On approval we are going to create the new Site collection (nearly as good as Vegemite), on reject it will be a simple email to the initiator informing them of the rejection of their proposed program.

Expanding on this concept with a Vegemite analogy... For example, I really love Vegemite and peanut butter. Another popular choice is Vegemite and cheese, or just the standard Vegemite, butter on a plain dry biscuit (cookie/cracker). Sorry I digress...

Extending this use case would be to add another list to the site, to register all new Programs of work. Why? Well when the project managers want to create new sites, and you have a “New Project” form and workflow you would have a lookup control gather the Program information to include in this form. This would allow the workflow then to create a new Project Site in the relevant Site Collection (Program). As a side benefit, this would then serve as a bit of a directory for executive and managers looking for particular projects and programs of work.  To add this kind of ability to the above workflow you would simply add “Create Item” and populate the “Programs of Work” list with the relevant data. (Program unique ID, Title, URL and Owner.)

Using the Require Access field, use the permissions actions to assign the relevant permissions to the sites, or to add to SharePoint groups that have permissions.

Another extension you could possibly look to add would be Program Budget / Cost / Value and Finish / End Date. In terms of management of the Program Pipe and knowing when programs have finished and sites can be archived off and deleted for example or marked as read only. A site workflow could facilitate such lookups based on the dates specified for the program / project and could create a weekly roll up report for the PMO. Anyhoo just ideas.

I hope you enjoy these two great actions. I’m sure they are going to be a bit of a hit with the admins.