The Client – NCAA

The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) is a membership-driven organization dedicated to safeguarding the well-being of student-athletes. To support those efforts, the NCAA and their member schools award more than $2.4 billion in athletic scholarships each year.

Their Challenge

The NCAA needed a way to register, summarize, manage and monitor the grant money that is offered every year to the different member schools across the U.S. The project needed to be implemented within weeks and provide a friendly, easy to use interface for the users of this system.

Our Solution

Due to compressed timelines, we partnered with the Allegient development team and hit the ground running. We implemented SharePoint InfoPath 2010 since it offered a rapid design / development time and no down time when deployment occurs.

One of TechField’s SharePoint consultants was responsible for driving meetings with the NCAA to ensure that the requirements were being accurate and inline to the business user’s expectations. Also, due to several existing SharePoint policies at NCAA, there was the constraint of staying away from coded solutions.

Our TechField SharePoint consultant was in charge of the development of the solution which involved the creation of 10+ InfoPath forms, which in turn would gather detailed, specific information about each grant being captured.   The form included multiple input fields from the user, 15+ data connections to different lists and libraries, and all the business logic was implemented through InfoPath rules. By utilizing Xpath, we were able to implement complex business rules into the forms.

Another element of the solution was the implementation of dashboards that would display summary information regarding the total amounts. SharePoint Designer Workflows were utilized to do processing and summation of data. The utilization of out of the box features of SharePoint Designer was ideal and was compliant with the client’s SharePoint policies.

Results

The feedback from the final implementation and deployment was very positive. The NCAA’s user base liked the user interface, and we were able to finish this project under budget and on time.