House Services approached the SharePoint Team in IT Services with a unique problem. The new Student Village would have 2000 bedrooms in 4 courts, and needed wardens to be available day and night to support the students. A way was needed to coordinate these wardens 24 hours a day as well as liaise with security and other services It might have been possible to hold twice daily meetings to hand-over information about incidents and issues, and to hold a paper record for each of the courts, but that would take a lot of time and work to maintain. A better way had to be found!
The SharePoint Team examined the requirements, and together with House Services developed the current SharePoint site. A single site solution was chosen for the Village with 4 main discussion areas on the front page of the site, one for each court. This discussion is used as a log for each court, and all incidents are entered into here by the wardens and by the CSO's. More serious incidents are handled using an InfoPath form backed by a workflow. This form is routed automatically for approval and acknowledgement by senior incident managers. Other important forms are also to be found here, and these are stored in document libraries. This along with staff holiday and maintenance schedule calendars means that this site is a "one-stop shop" for everyone involved in the student village administration and day to day running.
This site has to be available 24 hours a day to enable logging of incidents, and thanks to the UWE SharePoint multiple front-end server farm we are able to provide this level of service.