Dynamic organizational chart

Question

I'm in a bit of a pickle and don't really know if can solve my problem with SharePoint. My company wants to build an organizational chart (easy, right ?) that will allow us to know every job that we have and ultimately where we have open positions.

So we want to build a chart just like the one I link to this post, knowing it can be dynamic. By that, I mean that at any point, a regional manager for instance can add a new country organization, a manager can add a new employee position, etc... (we don't care - for now - about knowing who is filling the position, we just want to know the job titles we have)

So first, we want to know back at HQ the organizational structures of each region and country. After this, we want to be able to flag if a given position is filled or not and be able to collate the number of open positions globally (e.g. something like "3 manager positions available | 3 employees positions available" etc... and then go into details for which region, country, it's opened).

I'm in the process of gathering the data on an Excel file. I'm sort of struggling to see how I can then translate this to SharePoint. I checked what I can do with importing my Excel in Visio and then publishing to SharePoint, but it's just a frozen picture, so not really a solution.

So do you think this is even feasible with SharePoint and if so, do you have any tips at how I might tackle this challenge ? PS: We have SharePoint online. I don't know a lot about SharePoint designer, but I can always learn :)

Answer 1

You can create List structure and add data into list from excel and the use Jquery Charts to achieve your organization charts.

Step 1 : List Structure

Method 1 : Flat Structure

You can use single list to save all your organization level details in the SharePoint. So now your column names would be Level 1, Level 2, Level 3 and so on. Now you can even copy paste your excel data to SharePoint list and save data

Method 2 : Normalized Structure

You can create parent child relationship maintained by different list, which would make your data normalized. You need to create Level 1 List and add details in Title column. Create Level 2 List and take a lookup column from level 1 list so maintaining parent child relationship. Normalized structure would be cumbersome for now but it would have long term benefits and flexibility

Step 2 : Drawing Chart

Method 1 : Jquery Charts

Fetch data from SharePoint List using Rest API or CSOM on client side.

CRUD-Operation-to-List-Using-SharePoint-Rest-API

Complete basic operations using JavaScript library code in SharePoint 2013

Create either JSON Structure or HTML Structure depending on Widget or Plugin for Org chart you using.

Few of the reference are below and you can find many more options online...

dabeng/OrgChart

caprica/jquery-orgchart

Google Org Chart

Highcharts Org Chart

Method 2 : SSRS

You can also use SSRS to achieve this but the output is not as elegant as Jquery plugins would provide you.

Recursive Hierarchy Group in SSRS 2008

SSRS Org Charts