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Tiered
Tiered solutions are the next most common pattern after the Workspace and the Applet. Typically, this pattern is used to bring together information from like sites. In general, it is used initially for most project-oriented workplaces. In a SharePoint context, tiers are a hierarchy of sites that are “physically” located above and below one another in a structural, 2-dimensional layout.
Two-tiered solutions are where most tiered solutions start. However, you can create any number of tiers using a combination of dashboards. For instance, in a large organization you could have:
- A top-level site with views of department information
- Department dashboards with views of business functions
- Business function dashboards with views of specific projects
- Project dashboards with views of sub–workspaces for documents and meetings
Customer Project Management solution – dashboard and project sites
The example of this design pattern is the customer Project Management solution in the Operations department of Breeze. This solution is a 2-tiered design. It has a dashboard for the project team with associated project sites. The information from the different project sites is aggregated, filtered, sorted, mashed up with other data, and presented in various ways within the dashboard. This all happens dynamically. Add new projects and data and the dashboard automatically lights up. Below is a screenshot of the project overview page of the solution.
Some of the core features of these types of solutions are:
- The ability to aggregate or roll-up common data from the individual project sites.
- The ability for a user to select multiple items from multiple projects and act on them in one step.
- The ability for the end-user to select multiple items and email them in one step.
- The ability to integrate SQL Server with SharePoint. In the view above, the projects are related to a customer list coming from SQL Server.
Below is another screenshot of a different display within the solution. It is the Financial tab. It is used by users to enter their expenses for each project. This display shows integration between SQL Server and SharePoint. The customers are in SQL Server. The projects are in SharePoint. And, the financial data in is SQL Server. This is a data mashup display that is rolling up SharePoint and mashing it up with external information.
This display has a number of additional features that empower end–users even when working with SQL Server. As shown above the information is color coded to highlight size. In addition, the end-user can search or create filters and move columns. Further, above is shown a context sensitive menu. This is used for a number of features including displaying, creating, editing, and deleting items expense items in SQL Server. Below we show the form to edit financial information in SQL Server.
Click here to access the dashboard of the Customer Project Management solution.
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