Building No-Code Collaboration Solutions on Office 365 - ESPC 2015 session

Monday, 30 November 2015

I had several conference talks in 2015 on conferences in Bosnia and Serbia where I had presented about Office 365 and SharePoint. However, definitely the highlight of 2015 for me was the session I presented on European SharePoint Conference in Stockholm. My session was "Building No-Code Collaboration Solutions on Office 365" and it was supposed to be a showcase what kind of collaboration solution can be built on Office 365 using only out-of-the-box tools, or even less -> using only web browser.

The session covers real-life scenario of a small business, in this case medical practice, which required a solution for:

  • Managing appointments
  • Managing patient contact information
  • Storing examination findings and patient examination history

As in most cases these SMBs do not have any IT staff, the solution should be zero-maintenance. Platform that is supposed to be used has to be quite robust and error resilient, and the user interface has to be quite simple and common so that ordinary users can become proficient with the solution UI very fast. Based on these requirements, solution was implemented on Office 365 Business Premium using Sites functionality. In particular, we used:

  • Taxonomy/MMS for pickers and patient identification
  • Custom Fields and Content Types for storing all information, but customized to match business requirements
  • Calendar List with customized Views for appointment information
  • Contact List for patient information
  • Document Library for examination records
  • Custom Document Templates in custom content types to provide easy editing and in standardized way

In addition to these features, Skype for Business and Outlook Web Access are used for internal communication and collaboration. In a demo I walked through most important parts of tenant configuration to accomplish these requirements, such as:

  • creating custom termsets and terms
  • creating custom MMS fields and custom content types
  • customizing OOTB lists to leverage custom content types
  • creating customized views
  • customizing document template with content controls and custom fields
  • site branding

Slides are available for view and download on my docs.com page: https://doc.co/25jJ8R Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions or comments about this conference session. Use twitter: twitter.com/panjkov or simply write comment to this blog post.