Only one more month until the big International SharePoint Conference in London! This is going to be a great one, with a format that I’m very excited about. The conference is organized into tracks. These are not just tracks like “IT Pro” and “Developer”. There are actual cohesive sessions within each track, that go together in succession.
The track I’m going to be in is the “Information Worker” track, and the solution we’re building is called “Solution 1 – Building the Travel Request Solution”. This track starts on Monday morning at 9:45 with session header of IW401. Our 4 sessions are then continuous one after the other until 3:45. My cohorts in this travel request solution are Jennifer Mason, Darvish Shadravan, and Matthew Hughes. This is going to be so cool, because we won’t be constrained to tell a whole story in a single one hour session. We will use the four sessions to build one continuous solution!
The Travel Request Solution:
Jennifer and Laura: Part 1: Requirements and Design
In this session, we will start at the beginning of the travel solution, with the requirements gathering. Then, we will start creating the form in InfoPath, with a lot of introduction to InfoPath and best practices in creating a form.
Laura and Matt: Part 2: Travel Request Workflow and Approvals
In part 2, Matt and I will take you through the approval workflow involved in this travel request. We will talk through every step of the workflow, and talk about our own tips and tricks. We will even delve into the task process designer.
Matt and Jennifer: Part 3: Planning and building the user interface
One of the most important aspects of building a solution for users is spending time in the design of the solution to ensure it is clear and easy for users to understand and work with. When building out of the box solutions there are many tools that can help in this process. In this session we will discuss list view web parts, DVWPs, InfoPath Form web parts and how they can be used to build a dynamic user experience for your solution users.
Laura and Darvish: Part 4: Reporting and Business Intelligence on travel requests
Darvish and I will delve into the reporting aspects in this session. Once the travel requests have been submitted into this system, there needs to be reporting. We will talk about the different ways that reporting can be accomplished, and will build out a dashboard for this system.