Often times the projects I get to work on go way beyond the scope of a blog post. This blog post is an example of one of those cases. In this blog post I will just be highlighting some screenshots and reviewing the tools I used, but I won’t really be covering how I created the solution step by step. I will however be covering how to build this step by step in our upcoming book (available this Christmas), so if you are interested in learning the exact steps, then you should plan on picking up a copy J
Overview of the solution:
- A solution that allows users a way to review the current class schedule and register for classes they are interested in attending.
- Users should also be able to easily manage their classes and cancel registrations for future classes.
- Teachers need to be able to easily report on the students who are attending a class or easily report on all the classes a single student has attended. Teachers also need to update the registration status to display what students attended the course.
To build this solution I used all out of the box tools, including:
- Internet Explorer
- SharePoint Designer
- InfoPath
Some of the main features that I used include the following types of items:
So now, here are some screenshots of the solution. I know this is all very high level, but I still think it is good to see the types of solutions that other people are building. If nothing else, it should give you some ideas of things that you can be building yourself.
Home Page
The home page is just a simple list view web part that is using a Calendar style to display the training courses. (We didn’t use a Calendar list because we wanted to be able to customize the list forms).
Register for a Class
Depending on your current registration status for the class a message will be displayed. The screenshots below are of the module popup that is displayed when you click on the list item. On this page we have configured connected web parts that link the training class together with the registration form
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Reports
For our solution we needed to be able to generate several different reports. The reports needed to be easy to read and print. We used InfoPath to create these (and used the form web part to display them).
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Managing Classes
Since we wanted users to see one view for displaying class information and admins another for creating the class information we needed to create a page that allows for admins to access the view. We did this with the InfoPath web part and a list web part. A trainer can select their class in the list and then update the class information within the web part.
Additional Items
In addition to the items above we have a page for FAQs and then a few pages for easy navigation. The FAQs all live in one list and each have a category assigned to them. We then send the users to a filtered view of the list based on the link they click. This allows them to hopefully find what they are looking for quickly. For navigation we have a single Admin page that will allows training admins to easily navigate to the content they are trying to manage. We have restricted access on this page to only training admins and since only training admins have access to the page users who don’t need the page won’t see it in the site navigation.
Summary
Hopefully this blog post will give you some ideas on some of the different things you can accomplish out of the box with SharePoint! If it sparks any ideas, be sure to share them in the comments section so that others can benefit as well!
Jennifer Ann Mason 