With Michael off on holiday and the newest business process in its first testing stages I thought I’d write a quick update on our progress over the last few weeks.
Firstly, we have our staging area. Tim has finished setting up the first two servers for our SharePoint 2010 test area, this is where we will be building the majority of the business process workflows to ensure that they work how they’re suppose to and that the client is happy with it. Once a workflow or business process has been tested, they will be transferred the the live server for use by the university staff. Although Tim had set up the majority of the SharePoint 2010 server, it still needed to be configured with all the appropriate Application Services. Michael and I spent some time reading up on configuring the different Application Services, we then went on to configure them successfully. Service Apps give more functionality to SharePoint 2010, services such as search, Business Data Connectivity an more, these Service Apps will be required for various activities and business processes in SharePoint 2010.
Once our test server was set up and configured we went on to create our first business process, the Staff Training & Development booking process. This process allows the Staff Training & Development staff create new courses on the portal, university staff can then book onto any fo these courses using a booking form, the form will grab data from the courses, including the amount of spaces that are available, the time, the place and it’s current status. The form will not allow the user to submit if the the course is full or if they have not agreed to the terms and conditions. Once the form has been submitted a workflow is initiated, this workflow send emails to the member of staff that submitted the form and to the administrator of the process. The workflow will also recalculate the amount of spaces available on the course and update the field. Users are also able to cancel their position on the course if they need to.
This has been dubbed ‘Phase 1’ of the Staff Learning & Development business process. We took Phase 1 to Tracey & Heather to see what they thought of the process so far. They appeared to be really impressed, with only a few more requests for Phase 2 of the business process. But before we continue on the Staff Learning & Development process, Michael and I will be continuing our work on the Student Withdrawals workflow.
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