The Client – T-Mobile

T-Mobile is a Fortune 500 cellular phone provider with 38,000 employees. T-Mobile USA is a national provider of wireless voice, messaging, and data services capable of reaching over 293 million Americans where they live, work, and play.

Their Challenge

T-Mobile, like many larger companies, has a central IT department but has many smaller departments who often have IT-related needs which they need to resolve more quickly than their own internal IT department can turn things around. For the specifics of this project, our client had two separate SharePoint 2007 site collections which they wanted to combine into one larger one. In doing so, they wanted to combine two lists which retained similar but separate pieces of information into one, adding easy ability for users to create and edit items from this list. Presentation was a key issue, as the new combined list had more than 90 columns to choose from, only a fraction of which would be applicable to any single user.

To enhance the complexity of the issue for our TechField consultant, this was a SharePoint 2007 farm we were working on which was going to get upgraded in several months to 2013. This meant we were unable to employ any server-side solutions for the client. Everything implemented had to be run from the client. Fortunately, this was a site that resided entirely on the company’s intranet, so making Javascript calls was not an issue.

SharePoint Solution

TechField designed the entire new site from scratch, developed the create and edit screens for the SharePoint lists which were being used, and migrated all of the data from the old sites into the new one. Much of this data was in a different format than what we had in the new site, so we needed to massage this data as well. In the end, there were approximately 4,000 list items which were brought over.

Additionally, both site collection owners had sophisticated reports that they needed to run from Excel, so TechField guided both of them through the process of using SharePoint’s ingrained links to Excel to rebuild these reports quickly and easily. We also created several reports which displayed on the site using Excel Services. There were also some custom alerts that needed to create on the creation of list items which were built using Nintex Workflow.

Finally, as our TechField consultant was the only developer working on this project from start to finish, he created a sizeable design document to be able to refer to whenever T-Mobile wanted to add or change a feature and also heavily documented all of the code so that future users would easily be able to import it into 2013. Our consultant was the lead advisor when it came to lobbying the company IT department to add features to the site collection, and collaborated with them to determine the best approach to expandability down the line.

Technologies Used

As this solution needed to be completely client-side, the programming was all in JavaScript. We utilized SharePoint Designer for this, so in some respects this was an “out of the box” program. We didn’t use many special JavaScript libraries – just jQuery and SPServices, in an attempt to keep things simple enough that future developers would easily be able to fix the product for 2013. Finally, on the site itself, we used Nintex Workflow for a couple of projects.

Results

Despite the initial estimated time to complete this project in roughly 3 1/2 months, TechField was actually able to get it done ahead of schedule and remain on board while the stakeholders trained the staff in how to best use it.  This proved highly beneficial for T-Mobile as they were able to provide us feedback on areas of improvement that we were able to implement and finally push it into production.

The stakeholders were very pleased about our rapid progress, and in addition were satisfied with the look and feel of the site, in large part because we made it a point to conduct weekly and sometimes biweekly meetings to go over the progress made, the design decisions made, and noteworthy briefings. IT was also pleased by the amount of documentation that was created.