With the widespread adoption of SharePoint for intranet and portal services, many organizations store useful lists of information, including announcements, contacts, events, tasks, issues, meetings and custom lists for other types of information to SharePoint. And as workers with the appropriate permission can use Microsoft Excel or Access to view and edit data stored in lists on SharePoint from anywhere, it offers an excellent platform to share information, make use of information that is already published, and provide standardized lists of information that can be used throughout the organization.

Though workers can easily feed their time-sheet data directly in the company’s SharePoint portal, it is not an ideal technique at most time, such as when you are offline, you can’t keep track of your time-sheets. A viable solution is to use a bridging application such as Microsoft Outlook. In fact, as Outlook being the most extensively used application in a corporate environment – all day, every day for email communications, meetings and contacts makes it an ideal platform to prepare time-sheets for projects or for any entity via the calendar or task feature. Unfortunately Microsoft Outlook lacks a direct and an efficient solution to track time and expense in its original state. This is further aggravated with little support for a centralized management and distribution of projects, activities and other meta-data. But nevertheless, many workers resort to capturing time-sheet data from appointments and tasks in Outlook and feeding to an external data source manually (often crudely – using copy-paste technique).

Team TimeSheet for Outlook & SharePoint

Keeping this in mind, we have launched Team TimeSheet for Outlook and SharePoint, a groupware application, that leverages your existing investment in Microsoft Office and SharePoint, to make it very easy for your employees and staffs to prepare time-sheet and other project deliverable in Microsoft Outlook and publish to the company’s SharePoint repository.

With Team TimeSheet system, access to centralized project data are streamlined and automated in Outlook with the integration of the company’s project repository. This enables individual worker to prepare time-sheets, tag project meta-data, enter expenses and other deliverable from the familiar interface of Outlook appointment or task items. Once a time-sheet is finalized and ready, it is published to one of the administrator specified SharePoint list in just a single click. This submission process is seamlessly integrated in your Microsoft Outlook and the whole exercise is transparent to the worker. Managers can then use these submitted time-sheets for calculating expenses, payroll or billing on projects, clients or resources etc – to mention a few.

This is how the published time-sheet #11 looks like in your SharePoint site (mapped to a calendar list). Notice the calculated total cost and other expenses as well as the project fields.

Our time-sheet reporting solution can be adapted easily to track, plan and calculate expense for payroll purposes, billing to clients, or simply to record and estimate expenditure on projects. What set it apart from other time reporting solution is the seamless integration with Microsoft Outlook and SharePoint. And as your workers are already familiar with Microsoft Outlook as they use most of the time, the advantages are maximum user adoption, minimum training time and administrative costs, and more importantly, streamlined process of reporting for all employees. The end result is a highly accurate and scalable solution for the organization.

We have provided 4 video demonstrations on Team TimeSheet for Outlook and SharePoint, covering administrative configuration, preparation of time-sheets in Outlook, publishing to SharePoint and finally, generating reports and statistics.

Video 1: Configure a Project Data source in SharePoint, Map Outlook fields to SharePoint list fields, add or change drop down list for Projects, Activities, Custom Fields and deploy to all members. Set hourly rates, reporting and notification options for all members.

Video 2: Establish Project Data source connection, choose own Projects and Activities, and reporting behavior in Outlook. Prepare timesheets, record time and expenses against configured projects, publish to SharePoint, make revisions or withdraw timesheet from SharePoint.

Video 3: Work with Team TimeSheet specific views in Outlook calendar and task folder, to ease recording, reporting and updating time and expenses information from Outlook. Present project information in Outlook in an understandable and intuitive way.

Video 4: Generate summarized and aggregated reports on different time interval, analyze timesheets data in multi-dimensional view with OLAP Statistics and Reporting tool and extract business intelligence.

About

Bahrur Rahman is Founder of AssistMyTeam, a technology venture that helps small and medium businesses attain efficiency and reap maximum benefits and value out of their investment in Microsoft. bahrurBlog provides an insight into his strategy, vision for AssistMyTeam as well as general tips and solutions to overcome the challenges and pitfalls SMB experienced when integrating business processes with Microsoft ecosystems - Office, Exchange and SharePoint.