Newbie SP2007 Workflow Question

Question

I'm new to SP. I have done tons of reading and am a .Net developer but I'm looking for the best, out of the box, way to do the following (any guidance would be greatly appreciated as I'm always looking for the BEST way to do things):

• Daily personnel accountability by section
• One admin per section would go into SP each morning
• They would have a list of personel in their section (this list can be hand editted--doesn't have to pull from AD)
• They would mark each person on their list as Present, Absent, Sick, etc...
• Reports could then be generated for all sections individually or together for the whole organization. Daily records would be stored so that history reports can be run.
• KPI indicators could be used against this data in a Dashboard for the whole org, then drill down by section, then to detail

I have played around with the lists, the Access grid, etc. But those aren't storing the daily record. Should I think of this in terms of InfoPath forms being submitted each day?

Thanks!

Answer 1

I like the InfoPath idea but I suppose the questions I would have to ask is how important is presentation? How much conditional logic is required? Do authors of this form have InfoPath on their clients? I ask these questions to truly identify if InfoPath is needed as part of this design. I would think you can get this done all OOTB with SharePoint. Here is what I would do as far as inputting the info. Set up two SharePoint Lists. One to store the reporting for if they are absent etc. Essentially all the values that you will be reporting on. One of the columns will be a look up column to the list of the personal and the name of their dept. So this second list will store something like lastname, firstname, dept name. This is the list that will be maintained manually. Now the fun part. Use SPServices, a wonderful set of scripts by Macc Anderson to build a cascade drop down to make it easy for Admins to work with data.

link

There are many options with KPI's so I will leave that one to you to research.