In this chapter, you will create a solution that can be used for scheduling resources. Resources are people, places (meeting rooms), or equipment such as tools, vehicles, and projectors. In environments in which Microsoft Exchange is available, Exchange calendars are the preferred method for this type of scheduling. However, not all organizations have Exchange as an option, so here you’ll build a SharePoint-only solution using features in SharePoint Foundation and the Small Business P1 plan in Office 365.
The solution you’ll build in this chapter is relatively simple, and concepts demonstrated here might also be applied in environments that use Exchange for departments, teams, or scenarios for which adding resources to Exchange doesn’t fit best practices.
Small organizations have limited resources, but they still need to track people and resources effectively in order to deliver the level of customer service they desire. Many of these organizations have distributed workforces, with off-site staff or staff with no central office at all, but they still need visibility into where people are located and what their schedules look like and the ability to make assignments. They also need to be able to take actions quickly in response to customer needs.
In the past, a single person staffing a phone could be the point of contact for running an organization—scheduling and distributing communications. Now, most of these activities can be performed remotely by more than one person accessing a single calendar or schedule. In the past, a physical scheduling book was needed as the single point of truth, which made it difficult for more than one person to manage schedules, let alone more than one person at separate—sometimes geographically dispersed—locations. Using a SharePoint site, either in the cloud or on an externally facing on-premises server, can allow multiple people to manage appointments while also providing a place for the people doing the work to see the details of their schedules as they are populated.
This chapter focuses on three areas of concern for a small service organization tracking appointments for customers and technicians.
The main business need is to allow more than one scheduler in different locations to see resources’ calendars and be able to assign resources to customer appointments. With a tool like SharePoint, this should be easy. Unfortunately, creating the solution is not quite as intuitive as it should be with the normal tools and list templates that users are accustomed to. Schedulers need an online and easily available “schedule book” that they can work with to capture customer appointment requests and avoid double-booking technicians.
Moving from a manual scheduling book to an online solution also allows the organization to consider stepping up the customer-service experience in other ways. When appointments were made the old way, appointment reminders were also likely sent the “old way”—through manual mailings—if they were sent at all. Expectations now are for immediate verification of an appointment via email. With the schedule online, the organization also wants to automate the appointment verification process where possible.
Finally, daily assignments for technicians were summarized in the past by a single scheduler manually reviewing the calendar and writing up orders for the day for each technician. This could be a time-consuming and labor-intensive process, prone to human error and dependent on the single scheduler being available to hand out the assignments.
Understanding the business needs allows you to prioritize the solution so that it aligns your needs with the capabilities of the tool. With the resource planning solution, we’ll be focusing on the following:
Building a calendar with functionality to determine resource availability and set appointments
Sending appointment confirmations to customers
Identifying daily appointment schedule for technicians
With the resource scheduling solution, everything is based on the appointment schedule. The other business issues will be addressed by building additional functionality on top of that calendar.