Following on from Clare’s previous two posts on Native SharePoint Timesheets and Plug-in one, I’ll be running you through the options for creating SharePoint Timesheets for free.

During the early development of SharePoint TeamTime we looked at our potential competition, including the free alternatives. Of those we found, the following three were the most notable:

• Fab 40 – Timecard Management: One of the famous Fab 40 templates (2007 only)
• Built-in Timecard List: A little known built-in Timecard list (2010 only)
• Open Source Project: Paul Beck has kindly published an open source solution (2010 only)

Fab 40 – Timecard Management

The Timecard Management template was produced by Microsoft as a demonstration of the capabilities of WSS 3. In Microsoft’s own words:

The Timecard Management application template helps teams track hours spent working on various projects. The site enables team members to ‘punch in’ on a particular project and ‘punch out’ when they cease work. The system automatically generates the time worked by project, and can show managers who is working on a particular project…

This was one of the favorites out of all the templates we tried. In fact, the punching in and out functionality was a feature we emulated into TeamTime. I’d like to think of TeamTime as a spiritual successor to this template.

Built-in Timecard List

SharePoint 2010 has a built-in Timecard list, that is hidden from normal view for some reason. Although this is by no means a complete solution, it’s freely available to anyone able (or willing) to activate the feature and create it though SharePoint Designer 2010.

Laura Rogers has a very helpful walk-through for creating one of these lists: Out of the Box Timecard and Holiday Lists. Here is a description from her blog:

In SharePoint 2010, there’s a little-known built in feature.  There are list templates that can be used for time card tracking, with a holiday calendar that ties into the time card.

Open Source Project

Paul Beck has published a four part blog series on creating a Timesheet solution from scratch, entitled Timesheet solution for SharePoint 2010. He then went a step further and published his code to CodePlex for anyone to use. In his own words:

A common requirement on Intranets is to have a timesheet template on SharePoint.  There are solution for company timesheets.  I wanted to build a timesheet application that was scalable, reportable and friendly for SharePoint.

If you want to skip the source code, his third article in the series (Part 3 – Installation) has a link to the pre-built package.

This solution is slightly different from the others, as it stores its data in a separate SQL Server database; which may not be an option for everyone.

Lastly

I hope you’ve found our  SharePoint Timesheet series useful. If you know of any better alternatives, please let us know. We’re not afraid of a bit of competition.