Full Featured Business Applications Using SharePoint 2007

October, 2007

 

In previous Tips of the Month, we talked about how SharePoint could be used to make paper-based forms electronic, to streamline business processes, to aggregate content from multiple sources, to bring key performance indicators and other critical business metrics to the forefront, and to automate human-to-human workflow. This month's tip examines a company that recently brought all of these components together in a complete business solution with SharePoint as the hub.

The company serves the real estate needs of a multi-national corporation and its various operating companies. During the course of their project delivery process, the company would complete various paper forms; define routine tasks; collect key signatures from both within the organization and from their business customers; and produce a monthly activity report detailing all projects, their respective statuses, key upcoming milestones, and the roles of the individuals on the project.

 

The company saw several opportunities for improvement with their old process.

• First, as the multi-national corporation grew, their real estate needs became greater, resulting in more projects for the company to have to manage and track.
• Second, producing the monthly activity report was a manual process that meant spending extra time tracking down status and other information for hundreds of projects on a routine basis.
• Finally, while the company?s process remained well-defined and routinely followed, document templates for various deliverables changed from time to time, making it difficult to ensure that all employees were using the most recent versions of documents.

 

SharePoint and InfoPath provided the tools and capabilities to help this company significantly improve business productivity. The company is now using a solution comprised of InfoPath to complete their forms, SharePoint workflows for routing documents to the appropriate parties for approval, and custom web parts to aggregate content and allow them to track activity across all projects.

 

At the core of the solution are SharePoint sites for each project on which the company delivers. Sites consist of a series of SharePoint lists and libraries to manage project documents, tasks, and progress notes. A custom web part displays high-level project information for users, while another custom web part displays a checklist of standard documents and forms to complete. The SharePoint sites give project team members a single location where they can find all project-based information.

 

Project forms ? formerly paper-based ? have been converted to electronic ones using Microsoft InfoPath, which has provided several benefits:

 

• First, employees always have the latest versions of forms, no matter how often the form changes.
• Second, carefully-planned pieces of business logic and data validation ensure that no forms are submitted with invalid or missing information.
• Third, key metrics used for various management reports come directly from completed InfoPath forms - not only does information need to be input just one time, the integrity of the reports is ensured.

 

As forms and various stages of the company?s business process are completed, they are routed to senior managers for approval using SharePoint workflows. The SharePoint workflows send emails to the appropriate people to let them know an item has been assigned to them. They also send follow-up emails after a pre-determined period of time when the approval tasks remain incomplete. Finally, they add tasks to the SharePoint sites to allow others to monitor the status of the approval.

 

All of the above components ? when brought together ? allow for the most powerful component of the application: Management Reporting. A Task Tracking Report shows an aggregated set of tasks ? both those assigned to the current user and those that are overdue ? regardless of user. An Executive Summary Report graphically displays the number of current projects, broken down by several different categories, such as region, operating company, and project type. A drill-down component of the Executive Summary Report allows for easy filtering by any of these categories, along with the ability to see lists of matching records. And the custom Activity Report displays a list of all projects and their critical pieces of information. These reports, which used to be produced by hand on a monthly-basis or were completely unavailable, are now created automatically and in real time. Not only does this save employees a tremendous amount of time re-compiling existing information, it also provides more accurate and more timely information to senior managers.

 

SharePoint, InfoPath, workflows, and web parts are all useful and powerful tools. Individually, they can help companies find and use knowledge, streamline processes, enable team collaboration, and manage business performance. When brought together, they can produce a complete solution that transforms the way a company does business.