The efficiencies of process automation in SharePoint are providing Victoria’s Luther College with a relief from an annual paperwork snowstorm. The private secondary school faced a challenge in designing a more efficient way to handle the registration process which takes place each year as Year 10 students select the VCE subjects they will study for Years 11 and 12.

The College wanted to migrate this from a manual, time-consuming class-selection process to an automated solution that eliminates confusion, reduces paperwork and administrative load, and prevents missteps.

Director of IT at Luther College, Christopher Topp, said “The College was seeking a SharePoint application platform with workflow solutions based around Silverlight and HTML5.”

The College’s IT environment comprises SharePoint 2010, Office 2010, K2 and SQL Server, SQL Server Reports, Active Directory and Exchange 2010. The student subject selection process is now accessed using InfoPath forms on the College’s  SharePoint 2010 platform utilising K2 blackpoint and SQL server via Web services.

“We engaged K2 specialists jEyLaBs as an organisation to work with us and evolve the solutions developed on our platforms. We asked Jeylabs to advise us on the areas we could make better improvements to workflow and productivity, and also from an end user perspective on how it would be better received when introduced to a school environment,” said Topp.

“The results were immediately apparent in terms of increased efficiency and productivity across the organisation. It has been very well received by the staff at Luther College and the solutions have been really low maintenance which also helps enormously.”

As part of the solution, Luther College upgraded from a SharePoint 2007 environment to get better integration with Office 2010. It chose to enhance and improve user interaction through elective printing with barcode scanning, with integrated reporting on the status of the applications and PDF archiving.

The solution has been delivered in a phased approach over a number of years. It allows for automatic roll over of yearly data and archiving of the past year records. Past year records were used for reporting and lookup each new year’s submissions. Initial student records were auto created and teachers were able to manage the subject lists and rules in the SharePoint environment. K2 provided the process automation capability.

Email : sales@jeylabs.com.au