SharePoint Connector Usage Scenario - Displaying Data
Scenario
Non technical communications people creating news
announcements for display on multiple websites
Caroline is a Communications Manager. She is
proficient in Office, content and document management systems,
including SharePoint, and has experience overseeing the development
of web, extranet and intranet sites from a marketing and
communications perspective.
She has been through several iterative waves
of office information management and has a small team, with
big targets. She needs to run things as efficiently as possible
with minimal duplication of effort and as much re-use of content
items as possible.
Caroline needs to get a better flow of news
announcements around the organisation’s intranet, customer and
partner workspaces and external websites.
These announcements are structured items of
information that are broadly applicable for the organisation’s
multiple audiences – employees, customers, partners, suppliers,
prospects, press and analysts.
Caroline wishes to create this information
only once and for it to be automatically visible across multiple
locations.
Process
The organisation Caroline works for has
SharePoint deployed as a departmental collaboration tool and users
are encouraged to add documents and announcements into it navigates
to the ‘Communications’ section of her organisation’s intranet
which .
1. List creation in SharePoint
- Step 1 - She creates a new Sharepoint ‘list’ titled ‘Global
Announcements’ 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 ‘Global Announcements’ form, including a
title, overview paragraph, body and contacts section. 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, Caroline 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, Caroline 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 – Caroline logs in to her Immediacy account and
navigates to the page where she wants to put the ‘Global
Announcement’.
- 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
‘display data’ option which Caroline selects. This
provides a list of the available SharePoint created forms and
Caroline selects the ‘Global Announcement’ option.
- Step 7 – Caroline then clicks the Immediacy page preview option
to see the display output in place in the webpage. The text from
the original ‘list view’ has been automatically reformatted to the
style of the external website.
- Step 8 – Once happy, Caroline submits the page to approval
within the Immediacy system.
- Step 9 – Once approved, the page is uploaded from staging to
live.
- Step 10 – Caroline can now view the ‘Global Announcement’ in
place on the external website.
- Step 11 – The process of adding the ‘Global Announcement’ into
the SharePoint based Intranet, automatically updates all the views
of this announcements list that have been created across the
employee facing Intranet and externally facing customer and partner
workspaces.
Other data display scenarios
- Populating FAQ/knowledge base articles
- Managing ‘Product Comparison’ matrixes
- Sharing of ‘factual’ product information across multiple
views