Exercises

You’ve just been assigned to customize the SharePoint site for your company’s sales team. The team has struggled with having a central location that stores all information related to its various opportunities, contacts, meetings, and tasks. It has had a SharePoint site for a few months; however, the team has expressed some concerns that information is too difficult to find. The following exercises focus on ways in which you need to develop the site to become a more useful tool for the sales team.

1.	After conducting a planning workshop with some members of the sales team, you determine that while the sales manager wants to see all information stored in a single location, the actual sales team members struggle with seeing too much information. As a result, it takes sales team members longer than necessary to look up contact phone numbers. The sales team prefers to only see contacts from their own region. What can you do to make both groups happy?
2.	Whenever a sales person views the central list of contacts, he wants to see specific contacts which he himself has added. How would you accomplish that?
3.	The sales manager wants to see a list of all opportunities that are in the pipeline for his staff. Because he has some concerns about the length of time certain sales staff members are taking to close their leads, he wants to visually identify leads that have the longest duration from the initial point of contact to the expected date of sale. What can you suggest to help address this situation?

Answers

1.	By creating a site column for Region, lists, such as the contact list, can feature custom views that filter items to only show items for a specific region. The sales manager can use a list view that shows items across all regions and each regional office can have its own view that filters out information from regions other than its own. A list-centric column for Region would work specifically for this scenario as well. However, because you can assume this type of behavior is desired for other content lists on the site, a site column may be a better implementation choice.
2.	You can accomplish this by creating a custom view that has a filter to only show items where Created By is equal to [me]. It may also be beneficial to make the custom personalized view the default view so that users can see that view first when they enter a list.
3.	By creating a Gantt view on the list, you can display visual indicators of items based on the date of initial contact and expected date of sale. The sales manager can easily identify the ones that are taking the longest to close.