Chapter 7
Facilities Management
WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER?
- Understanding the classic four-phase workflow
- Using a “brute force” approach to column level security
- Working with SharePoint’s mobile interface capabilities
This chapter introduces the facilities management business problem and solution. Consider your workspace for more than 30 seconds, and you quickly realize that you take a lot for granted. Someone had to move that desk into the room. The heat and air conditioning work as you expect. Every now and then, someone comes in to clean the place. Beyond this kind of ordinary on-going maintenance, someone is always around to fix things when they break. This can be as simple as replacing one of those super-long fluorescent light bulbs or can be more complicated such as solving a persistently leaky faucet in the men’s room. Your company’s facilities group does more than maintenance and repairs. They also improve the place or execute other special projects, such as moving people from one office to another. This final point is where SharePoint comes into play.
This chapter explains how you can use SharePoint to create a solution that helps the facilities group accept work requests, manage those requests, and generate some useful reports. You learn how to create an approval tree, learn about queues (not lines, but sequenced work orders) and dabble with SharePoint’s mobile interface. Begin as you always do, with a detailed description of the problem.
WHAT IS THE FACILITIES MANAGEMENT ...
