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This post applies to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and WSS 3.0

Over the past 2 years I have implemented numerous SharePoint solutions to automate business processes. I’ve learned to improve upon certain design strategies each time. It seems as though most of the time, business owners have learned that SharePoint can be used to track information as it flows from one location within the organization to another. In most cases, the information is going through some type of approval process. With the birth of SharePoint 2007/WSS 3.0, we have been able to leverage Workflows within SharePoint to pass information through some type of simple or complicated business process. After some time, I just threw away most of the out of the box SharePoint workflows and task lists. As your organization begins to demand your services using SharePoint, your requirements will get extremely complicated.

Dashboards in my world are usually associated with analysis systems which render results from some sort of aggregated data or cube. This type of dashboard usage is usually associated with business intelligence. However, in my experience dashboards are also useful for tracking the state of data as it goes through a transactional process.

There are a couple of things which have helped me build nice dashboards using SharePoint to track where the state of information is at in a business process. Most of my work is done in SharePoint Designer when creating the Dashboard.

• I usually grab some of the images from the 12 hive that are commonly used by SharePoint services to build KPI lists. Take a look at the 12 hive and you will find all kinds of useful stop lights and other dashboard-like images.
• I create a custom .aspx page with SharePoint designer, then insert a Data view. Once I have inserted the Data view I view the Source of a local list. Then I insert the fields I want as a Multi Item View.
• Now that I have a Multi Item View on my custom .aspx page, I can add images and apply conditional formatting to “Show” the images based on the specific state of the data.

More on how I work with the “state” of the data:

SharePoint can present quite a challenge when you are trying to track the state of data. What I usually do in situations where the solution is difficult to solve is I create additional fields in the list that will serve as switches. Basically, when a specific state has been met in the business process I will design a workflow that changes the data in the “switch” field to another value. For instance, if “Business Owner X” has approved some type of information then change the “Switch X” field from 0 to 1. Then the next time a transaction is made on the system, you can test “Switch X” to see if it has already been executed and prevent a repeat of the process. You can also use this technique to avoid the workflow from executing an infinite loop. Now that you have a switch field that has data within a specific state, you can test your conditional formatting of the image on the dashboard for this specific state.

I know that this blog post is not very visual, but it may help someone.