SharePoint Development Case Study - Marketing Tool Development

Industry

Information Technology

Customer Profile

The Customer is leading technology provider for small to mid-size companies in California, Colorado, and Nevada, delivering core and specialized technology services.

Benefits

  • Consistent look and feel maintained for a product (1 site collection and 52 sub-sites)
  • Improved productivity, entire application creation happens automatically within hours as compared to weeks in the manual process
  • The minimal administrative overhead for updating the site content and administration of the site

Service Provided

  • SharePoint Branding
  • Custom Web Part Development
  • Product Development
  • Data Export from MS Excel to SQL Server using SharePoint Web Part & Document Library

Technology Used

  • SharePoint 2007
  • NET 2.0
  • C#
  • SharePoint Designer 2007
  • SQL Server 2008 R2

 

The Customer was maintaining the data in different excel files and pushing the data manually into the database. Congruent developed a SharePoint custom web part to export data from excel into SQL server, replacing their manual process with a more efficient solution

 

Customer Situation

The customer had following concerns with their existing SharePoint system –

  • There are multitudes of sites for various products and for each product a database was maintained. Each database was having various tables with respect to the states for which the client was providing the services. The data for each table was maintained in a separate excel file and was pushed to the database manually. This was very difficult to maintain and needed technical knowledge to handle this requirement.
  • The information for each product regarding support, help, etc. was displayed in a web part. The requirement was to display around 300 random rows on every refresh of the web part. This was required to ensure that the search engine crawler/spider does not encounter stale content at any point, thus helping the web portal stay on the top of the search list (SEO).

The customer was expecting a solution to upload/export the Excel file to a specific Product Site and display random rows to a SharePoint web part.

Congruent's Solution

  • Designed and developed a web part which will accept key parameters from the admin user such as Product Name, Version, Type of service (help/support). Once the user enters the parameters, the tool will do the following programmatically –
    • Creation of Database
    • Creation of Data tables (for each database 52 tables, 51 county/state specific and one common table)
    • Exporting the data from Excel files to respective data tables. (The excel files will be uploaded to a document library in SharePoint)
    • Creating Site Template with the specific layout (various web part zones, web parts, links) as per the requirement.
    • Creating Base Site (with SharePoint Branding features using CSS Styling, Themes and Site Template features)
    • Creating 51 county/state specific sub-sites
    • Creating 18 pages for each site/sub-site
    • Mapping the content for each page. (the page content will be stored in SharePoint document library in HTML format)
  • On completion of all the process of creating marketing portal for a specific product, a Log file will be generated (which will have all the details about the process happened in backed, success/failure message) and email notification with the log file will be sent to the site administrator.
  • Developed a Web Part which will fetch around 300 random rows every time the query is executed. The user has to provide Data Base and Data Base Table name in the Web Part properties section which will instruct the system from where to fetch the data.
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