I'm a guest to the site and after seeing the great quality of Q&A's believe it's worthwhile to 'put this out there' in the event anyone may be able to assist.
Brief background:
- I have Admin/Full Control of a collection of sub-sites, however the root site is controlled from another office in another country.
- We don't have admin permission to use Designer and much of the more 'bells and whistles' functionality of the site collection has been deactivated.
- I'm by no means an SP Developer and have largely taught myself using SP up to this point.
Current setup:
We have three basic lists set up in each sub-site (let's say List A, List B and List C) holding details for (A) individuals, (B) details about client instructions received for those individuals, and (C) details about specific tasks we need to complete for each one of those client instructions.
List items in (A) and (B) each have unique identifier codes assigned to them and in this way we can use Lookup functionality to bring details about individuals from (A) through into (B) and details from (A) and/or (B) through into (C).
So the relationship is effectively 1x item from (A) can be linked to at least 1x item in (B) which in turn is usually linked to several line items in (C).
We use this application collaboratively with users in offices in other countries to deliver client services, however our office is the central coordinating office. We can give users in the other offices access to List (C) to allow them to input specific details about progress on achieving each of the task items listed there and once completed we can then finalise invoices, etc.
At present, invoicing fee information is recorded in list (C) within the fields of each line item to allow us to track billable work.
The problem:
We need to give access to other offices to update progress on items contained in List (C), BUT we don't want them to view/see fee information fields within those line items.
One possible very low-tech solution is to set up a Global Datasheet View on List (C) viewable by all users (including other offices) which hides billing info and ensure that all other views are Hidden From This Location under the list settings. Which creates a pain for users in our office where we then need to either set up personal views for each person (up to 15 users per client) or grant user permissions to our staff to allow them to manage their own personal views, however most users are not remotely comfortable with SP to this degree. (However, I have noticed if users have web browsers that don't support Datasheet view, e.g. Chrome, they instead see things under Standard View allowing them to select and edit items which then displays the data entry form with ALL data fields for each item).
I'm imagining an ideal scenario would be to set up another list as List (D) which would Lookup details from lists (A), (B) and (C) and which, in addition, would also hold the billing details. List (D) could then be viewable only by our office users. HOWEVER, as List (D) would hold not only certain information from previous lists, but also additional billing information, we don't want to need to manually have to 'copy and paste' details to List (D) each time for each line item (we're talking hundreds of items) and then update these one-by-one.
- How can we set up List (D) to automatically pre-populate (either copy or move items/content from List (C)) itself using a trigger column in List (C)?
- Or does someone have another suggestion? (considering it appears we don't have permissions to set up workflows or use Designer).
Many many thanks!
