Building a business process in SharePoint

Introduction

Infowise Ultimate Forms is a complete platform to create no-code business solutions in Microsoft SharePoint. It consists of 19 components, all designed to work together. The product allows you to build sophisticated business processes in SharePoint using just your browser. You don't need SharePoint Designer (long discontinued) or Power Apps / Power Automate.

Ultimate Forms components broadly consist of 3 categories:

• Forms - create advanced, responsive forms with tabs, dynamic rules, repeating sections, signatures and much more.
• Business logic - implement processes, alerts, document generation and more.
• Reporting - create dashboard, define KPIs and generate print-outs.

Working together, these components convert any regular SharePoint site into a complete data management and business process automation system.

We designed our product to help you implement any business process in minutes. And with our extensive and growing Solution catalog, you receive a solid foundation.

Vehicle Reservation Form

One of the solutions in the catalog is Vehicle Reservation Form. We designed it to illustrate the concepts of multi-stage SharePoint-based business process.

This process leads the users through 3 stages:

1. An employee can reserve one of the company cars
2. The manager approves the reservation
3. The vehicle supervisor handles the order

You can even administer special requests within you reservation. For instance, preparing a gift basket for an important guest or supplying winter tires. You can view the process live on the solution page.

As you can see, the process displays complex and powerful capabilities. But the whole process of implementation only took just over an hour, using nothing but the browser! And we base it solely on SharePoint list items and documents.

Step-by-step Instructions

In this tutorial I will explain to you step by step how you can build this solution in SharePoint. You can then use the same principals to build any business solution in SharePoint, according to your specific requirements.

1. Make sure you install Ultimate Forms in your environment or create an Online trial. You can accomplish either here.
2. Start by creating a blank SharePoint site.

Configure Lists

1. Create a custom SharePoint list named Vehicle Types. The list will hold the types of vehicles you can book. You do not need to add any columns, the built-in Title column will suffice.
2. Create a custom list named Vehicles. Add a lookup column, named Class, pointing to the Vehicle Types list. You can use the regular lookup field or our Connected Lookup. The latter will give you the option of adding new vehicle types from the Vehicles list, while adding a new vehicle.
3. This is an extremely helpful feature. If your vehicle type is not on the list, you can just add it when you need it.
4. 
5. Create a list for reservation-related tasks. We will use the Associated Tasks content type and call the list Tasks, no need to change any of the default settings.
6. Create a document library for related documents. Call it Attachments, there is no need to change any of the settings.
7. Now we come to the main list of our system, the one that will store and manage the reservations themselves. Create a custom list called Vehicle Reservations.
8. These are the columns we need to include in the list. I will explain the settings for our custom fields in more details.
9. Vehicle column is a Connected Lookup master-detail column. We filter the items in the Vehicles list according to the value selected in the Vehicle Type column.
10. First we tell the column what list to take the values from and which column to show. So far it is almost identical to how the regular lookup field works.
11. Now we configure the Connected Lookup to link to a parent column. We specify the parent lookup column in the current list AND the link column. The link column is a lookup column in the Vehicles list which points to the Vehicle Types list. We called this column Class, as you might remember from before.
12. Our Pick-up Location column is also responsible for color-coding the reservations. We will be using our Color Choice column.
13. It looks and functions similarly to the regular choice field. However, it lets you choose a different color or icon for each option. When included in a view, it paints the whole row in the color of the selected value.
14. We permit the employee to enter multiple tasks for each reservation. They serve the purpose of including and tracking specific requests pertaining to that reservation. We are using our Associated Items column, which can create and manage related tasks.
15. We've already created a list for storing the associated tasks. Now we add the column that will allow users to enter and track the tasks in the context of a reservation. Once we add the column, you define most of the settings automatically when you select Tasks as your source list.
16. Note that the Source view selector specifies what view to use as a template for the view in the field. That is how you specify which fields to show.
17. The system automatically fills out the employee's manager using the information managed in SharePoint profiles. Using our User Property column, we can define what information to get from the user's profile. We can also determine a template to show that information.
18. You can use multiple profile properties and regular text. In our sample form we simply include the Manager property. Find the property in the right box, select it and click on Add to formula.
19. We need to ensure that someone else does not change manager and supervisor approvals. Obviously we can enable versioning on the list and see who made the change in the version history. But this is not convenient and prone to errors.
20. Our Electronic Signature column allows you to instantly know when someone changes the column values. When that happens, the system will invalidate the signature. You will be able to immediately see that in list views.
21. Just add the signature column and specify which columns are to be signed. The manager will sign the values with a username and password. This will make any changes easy to see right away.
22. Document Link column allows you to attach documents to a specific location in the form, as a field. We store the documents themselves in a regular SharePoint document library. So you can utilize all the document library features, such as check-out, versioning and approval.
23. The Supervisor needs to allocate a car for the reservation. You can even manage the cars in database, external to SharePoint.
24. Using our External data lookup column, we can pull the car information from the database by specifying the key. In our case the key is the license plate number.
25. We need to provide the column with a connection string for the database. Then we can select the correct table/view from a list of tables and views.
26. After that we can specify which fields we want to use and even give user-friendly names to some or all the fields. Finally, we can either select the key value or type it in, depending on the requirements.

We have now completed defining lists and columns.

Configuring Forms

Now we define the different tabs that will make up the process. Form Designer is the component responsible for that.

Generally, each stage of the process gets a separate tab and we define permissions based on those tabs, which is the fastest way.

Place a tab control on the design canvas. Make sure there are three tabs: Reservation Details, Manager and Vehicle Supervisor. Rename the existing tabs and add more.

First, we click the tab name and start dragging the columns from the column gallery on the left. For each tab you can specify the desired layout. The tab will automatically arrange the columns.

After that we need to specify the permissions. For instance, the first tab (Reservation Details) is in Write mode in the New form. And we configure it to be in Read in the rest of the forms. This way the manager and supervisor cannot change the reservation details.

Results

This is basically it, the process is ready for testing. We used no custom development and wrote no code.

We can implement the process in either SharePoint Online (Microsoft 365) and on premises, using the same tools. One last thing you might want to do is to define a dashboard as the system's Welcome page. You can use charts and filter web parts of Ultimate Forms.