Chapter 5
Time Off Management
WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER?
- Enabling users to request time off
- Enabling users to view their available time (their “time bank”)
- Building an audit trail that can recalculate time off buckets, (that is, if a technical glitch occurs)
- Providing a dashboard and calendar view of employee time-off requests
- Implementing sensible validation, such as mandatory four-hour minimums when requesting time
- Implementing a simple one-step approval process (employee direct managers)
- Slicing and dicing time off requests by categories (ordinary vacation time, bereavement, personal days, and so on)
The time off management solution continues to introduce new SharePoint workflow capabilities, building upon previous chapters. It also introduces a couple of new technical and business patterns that you can find valuable in a wide array of circumstances, not just for managing time off processes.
WHAT IS THE TIME OFF MANAGEMENT PROCESS?
Everyone needs to take some time off. In small organizations, it’s easy to keep track of who is doing what, and there’s not a real need for an automated solution. Large organizations use dedicated HR platforms such as those provided by PeopleSoft or SAP’s HR module. Somewhere in between the small and the large are many organizations that could use a SharePoint-based solution that helps the human resources department track when employees take vacations and provides an automated approval process.
At the core of the time off management system lays the ...
