SharePoint Connector Usage Scenario - Collecting Data
Scenario
Non technical marketing people creating
website forms for data collection.
Katy is a web marketing manager. She has grown up with the
Internet and digital communications and is a keen ‘social
networker’. She is driven to achieve what she has been tasked with
and can’t see why technicalities should get in the way.
Katy sees setting up a website for communication needs as no
different from being able to create a PowerPoint presentation.
Katy is responsible for managing website lead
generation and creates a lot of forms for data collection. At
present, she uses the ‘form builder’ that is provided with the
Website Content Management System. While this provides a basic
level of form building capability, there are no simple methods for
creating form templates so form production can be quite repetitive
and time consuming and there are a limited number of options for
creating form elements. Although the CMS form builder enables the
output of data in a .CSV file and email alerts to be triggered,
there is little flexibility or scalability in these processes.
As well as using the website CMS, Katy is
familiar with SharePoint as it is implemented as the intranet and
project collaboration tool of choice at the organisation she works
for. Katy has created ‘lists’ in SharePoint for various activities
and would love to have this type of capability for creating website
forms and the ability for form responses to be displayed directly
in the sales management section of the organisation’s intranet.
Process
The organisation Katy works for uses
SharePoint as a basic CRM system and has used some of the freely
available Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) application templates
for its Sales Lead Pipeline management and Marketing Campaign
Planning. navigates to the ‘sales management’ section of her
organisation’s intranet.
1. List creation in SharePoint
- Step 1 - She creates a new Sharepoint ‘list’ titled ‘website
leads’ which will appear on a tab within this section of the
intranet.
- Step 2 - She uses the ‘list building’ options to create the
relevant form fields for a ‘Contact us’ form, including drop-down
lists, check boxes and radio buttons. On another occasion, she
might select an existing list template and modify that as required.
She also creates the ‘view’ of the list that she wishes to use on
the website.
2. List configuration in the Immediacy Manager
Note - As a power user, with nominated administrator
privileges, Katy has access to the SharePoint Connector
configuration options in the Immediacy Manager. In other scenarios,
another nominated administrator may be authorised or requested to
take this step.
- Step 3 - Once the SharePoint list has been created as required,
Katy logs in to her Immediacy Manager account and selects the
SharePoint Connector management console. Using this she is able to
navigate to the relevant SharePoint list and configure it in a
simple two step process to enable 'collection' of data into
SharePoint via an Immediacy driven site.
3. List configuration in the Immediacy Editor
- Step 4 – Katy logs in to her Immediacy account and navigates to
the page where she wants to put the ‘Contact Us’ form.
- Step 5 – She selects the Sharepoint plug-in from the plug-in
options list and this begins the plug-in configuration process. A
placeholder is put into the editable area from which a
configuration option can be selected.
- Step 6 – The plug-in configuration dialog provides a
‘collect data’ option which Katy selects. This
provides a list of the available Sharepoint created forms and Katy
selects the ‘website leads’ option.
- Step 7 – Katy then clicks the Immediacy page preview option to
see the form in place in the webpage.
- Step 8 – Once happy, Katy submits the page to approval within
the Immediacy system.
- Step 9 – Once approved, the page is uploaded from staging to
live.
- Step 10 – When Katy tests the form submission on the live site,
the data is pushed through to the Intranet ‘website leads’ list.
Katy has set up an alert on this list so that selected team members
automatically receive an email with the form submission data.
- Step 11 – Katy can now use the spreadsheet capabilities within
the Intranet list views to evaluate and report on the responses
coming from the website.
- Step 12 – Using additional fields in the original ‘website
leads’ list, members of the marketing and sales teams can add lead
progress information against the original information to qualify
the lead and push it through the sales process.
Other data collection scenarios
- Surveys
- Feedback/content rating
- FAQ question submission