Wisconsin’s 1512 Reporting SharePoint Portal
By David Grassl, Section Chief, Division of Enterprise Technology, Department of Administration, State of Wisconsin
First off, the Microsoft Stimulus360 application templates for SharePoint and Dynamics CRM provided us the basic building blocks to understand the capabilities of these systems. We have since developed our 1512 Reporting SharePoint portal that all agencies in the state use to submit their monthly status reports. We use the workflow capabilities of SharePoint to track the status of each submission. This is helpful for the state as we validate information as it is gathered. The nice part about SharePoint is it allows our IT organization the ability to delegated pieces of administration to our “super” user community. That provided for a more agile development environment as OMB refined their reporting requirements.
The Dynamics CRM software was our biggest challenge out of the gate. We had a hard time understanding how we would leverage that software to meet our needs. Once we installed the Stimulus360 template, we had a base to learn from. Now that we understand the customization capabilities of this software, we have customized Dynamics CRM to manage our 1512 reporting process. It is a central data repository that our Office of Recovery and Reinvestment (ORR) users use to:
- Manage Prime, Sub-recipient, Vendor, and Program information
- Validate data integrity with each month’s status reports, including DUNS numbers
- Understand what has changed on each report month to month through the Data Audit
- Customize a Dynamics CRM 1512 Dashboard to track and approve each 1512 report that we plan on uploading to FederalReporting.gov
- Use the workflow engine to trigger tasks and emails based on business rules setup by ORR
This system has such a strong customization feature we were able to enhance the package to fit our needs with a non-technical resource. Dynamics CRM provided us the ability to make these changes, allow a technical resource to evaluate change and approve, then publish those changes for production use.
The 1512 XML Export feature in the Microsoft Stimulus360 templates allow us to understand how data was structured in SQL Server. With that knowledge we are able to build an interface to provide information to FederalReporting.gov. For example, we were able to use XSD2Code from Codeplex and point that to the OMB XSD schema to build our class diagrams in .Net. Modified the stored proc from the Stimulus360 template and produce the 1512 XML file very easy.
We are now in the final stages of completing our setup of the 1512 reporting and mapping of projects for our public facing site. The Stimulus360 template has provided us with a great starting point as we refine how we want that information to be displayed.
In summary we are very pleased with the Microsoft Stimulus360 template as it has allowed the state to develop a robust solution to meet the requirements of ARRA.
If you would like more information on Microsoft Stimulus360, listen to this podcast from the DSPI, Center for Digital Government:
“The final countdown to the reporting deadline of October 10th for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is almost here! Listen to this edition of the DS50 to hear what is being done to meet this unprecedented level of reporting and how government is using this opportunity to reshape itself. Guests include Jim Davis from UCLA, Michael Locatis from Colorado and Stuart McKee from Microsoft.”
