Clarifications on choosing SharePoint lists

2
votes

Here is what we are trying to do:

Currently we have more than 250 employees in our company. Each employee maintains a spreadsheet and logs his day to day work. what they do, what project it relates to, time, etc. And one of my co-worker is the one responsible for collecting all these report on weekly and monthy basis and prepare a report to the management (how much time spent on each project, by employee, etc.) with a chart. The employees always make some errors and it is a huge pain for us to correct all those. You know it is hectic job. We decided to move everything to SharePoint. We have MOSS 2007 now. We would like to know the best approach to choose for the above task. The main advantage for management is they can view the report at any time and no need to wait for us to create the report manually.

Option 1:

a. Create a separate list for each employee and ask them to log on it daily. The users will log at least 12 entries a day. We will be maintaining these for several years.

b. Create a page in Sharepoint for report and pull the data from all different lists created in above step and prepare the report with chart for management.

Option 2:

a. Create one big list for our company and ask the employees to log on it daily.

b. Create a page in Sharepoint for report and pull the data from the list created in above step and prepare the report with chart for management.

Q1: Kindly let me now which option is best for us. Q2: Any advantages or disadvantages of the options for choose/not to choose it? Q3: Are we going to get any performance issues or any other issues in future?

Let me know at the earliest.

Thank you all.

2
sharepointlistsharepoint-2007
Which SharePoint license do you consider? Foundation, Server, Enterprise? – Eric Herlitz
I have MOSS 2007 (paid version; not free one). not enterprise one. – John
My company has written up 3 posts showing you different options in getting Timesheets in SharePoint, even if you arn't looking at commercial solutions then two of the options listed (Microsoft own 'Fab 40' template and an open source timesheet app that uses a SQL database) could give you some inspiration on how to tackle this. blog.pentalogic.net/2011/10/… – Ryan

2 Answers

1
votes

250 employes * 12 entries a day equals 3000 items per day, or maybe more as you stated.

The most simple solution would of course be a single list but thats also the most likely one to break. If you have 250 operational days / year thats 750 000 entries wich is a bit heavy duty for a list in SP2007 Server.

You could use Personal sites, these sites can have custom lists as well. That way you ensure that the time reporting is encapsulated per user and the entry level of 3000 / year would not be a potential problem anymore.

There are quite a few ways to collect this data and process it, but thats business a business intelligence matter, but it can be highly if not entirely automated.

Anyway, my advice would be keeping the data in the personal sites.

1
votes

Surely the option 1 is much better (despite of all manual list creation routine). But i'd suggest you to implement a more complex and sophisticated solution. Otherwise you will have performance issues in no time due to high amount of records.

I would suggest you take a look at BDC. You could store all you records in a separate database (that means no load onto SharePoint so it will live longer) and use custom reporting (like a page in _layouts) or Reporting Services to build reports on this data. This sounds simple but you should realize that it is a lot more work than creating 250 lists.

Good luck!