Delivering Cost-Effective HR with SharePoint

HR departments often juggle myriad tasks. Recruiting, onboarding, leave tracking, training, compliance documentation, performance reviews, policy management, and more. Many of these tasks rely on paper forms, spreadsheets, or disparate systems that don’t connect. The result is inefficiency, missed deadlines, inconsistent data, and high overhead.

By combining Microsoft 365 (particularly SharePoint) with Infowise Ultimate Forms, HR teams can build powerful, end-to-end HR solutions without custom code. This approach saves time, improves compliance, reduces errors, and scales easily as needs grow.

In this article, we explore how SharePoint + Ultimate Forms enables cost-effective, scalable HR solutions, from simple leave requests to full life-cycle employee management, and offer detailed real-world use cases.

What Ultimate Forms + SharePoint Brings to HR

Unified Platform for Data, Processes, and Documents

SharePoint serves as a secure, centralized space for storing structured HR data, documents, workflows, and policies. With Ultimate Forms, that infrastructure becomes a full-featured HR system. No extra servers or specialty software required.

Once set up, everything from employee records to leave requests, training logs, performance reviews, and policy acknowledgments lives in one place. This removes fragmentation and reduces overhead associated with managing multiple standalone tools.

No-Code Form & Workflow Designer

Ultimate Forms’s drag-and-drop Form Designer lets HR teams build forms and workflows easily. You can add custom columns, attachments, conditional visibility, electronic signatures, approvals, and more — all visually.

This means HR doesn’t need to wait on IT or developers for implementation. Business users can build, test, and deploy workflows in hours instead of days or weeks.

Automation: Approvals, Notifications, Tracking

With Ultimate Forms Actions and Alerts, you can automate many repetitive tasks:

• Submit a leave request → notify the manager
• Submit onboarding form → notify IT, HR, and hiring manager
• Final approval → lock request, send welcome package, log history.

Alerts and workflows can enforce consistency, ensure compliance, trigger reminders, and maintain audit trails. All automatically, reducing manual work and human error.

Flexible & Reusable Templates

Ultimate Forms offers ready-to-use HR templates for common processes: leave request, training, onboarding, policy acknowledgements, and more.

These templates can be customized and repurposed across departments or geographies, a major benefit for multinational or multi-location organizations.

Dashboards, Charts, and Visibility

Because data lives in SharePoint lists, it's easy to build dashboards, calendar views, and charts that give real-time insight into HR operations: upcoming leaves, pending approvals, training stats, compliance status, open recruitments.

This transparency helps HR leadership make data-driven decisions, forecast staffing needs, and identify process bottlenecks.

Cost Efficiency & Lower Barriers

Organizations already on SharePoint can benefit from Ultimate Forms without investing in separate HRMS licenses. Because no coding is required, you avoid developer costs and long project timelines. As Ultimate Forms is a single platform that spans forms, workflow, alerts, reports, and print/export, it consolidates many typically separate tools.

Real-World HR Use Cases Powered by SharePoint + Ultimate Forms

Here are concrete examples of how organizations can use Ultimate Forms + SharePoint to streamline HR operations:

1. Leave Requests & Approval Workflow

Employees submit leave requests through a Ultimate Forms form (Start Date, End Date, Leave Type, Reason, etc.). Managers get notified automatically. Once approved, status updates, calendar entries are generated (via integration with Outlook/Teams), and payroll teams are alerted if needed. Alerts or reminders can notify the employee or team ahead of leave dates.

This replaces paper forms or spreadsheets, cutting down processing time, ensuring approvals, maintaining records, and providing visibility across teams.

2. Employee Onboarding & Offboarding

Onboarding is far more than just creating a profile. It involves multiple stakeholders: HR, IT, facilities, security, compliance, training.

With Ultimate Forms, you can build a multi-step workflow: new hire form → assign tasks (equipment request, access setup, compliance training) → IT/Facilities/HR complete tasks → HR reviews and closes onboarding.
Automated alerts, electronic signatures, and document attachments (contracts, NDAs, certifications) ensure nothing is missed. Offboarding processes (revoke access, retrieve equipment, finalize documentation) can be handled similarly.

3. Training Management & Certification Tracking

Organizations can build a training request and approval system: employees request courses or training; HR approves based on budget or slot availability; once completed, training status is logged, certificates uploaded, expiry or renewal alerts configured.

Dashboards show completed training, upcoming expirations, pending approvals, and departmental training budgets — enabling better workforce development planning. 

4. Performance Reviews & Feedback Collection

Custom forms capture performance review data, self-evaluations, manager feedback, training needs, goals. Workflows route for approval or acknowledgment. After completion, notifications and document generation (PDF review reports) can be triggered.

This streamlines evaluation cycles and ensures documentation and data remain consistent, accessible, and auditable.

5. Policy Acknowledgement, Surveys, and Compliance Tracking

Use SharePoint + Ultimate Forms to distribute policy documents (e.g., code of conduct, privacy, security), then require staff to acknowledge via forms with electronic signature. Responses are stored in SharePoint, with logs tracking who accepted, when, and optional comments.

Use alerts to remind those who did not respond. This ensures compliance and maintains audit records.

Why This Approach Works Better Than Traditional HR Tools

• Flexibility: You aren’t constrained by limitations of packaged HR systems. You build exactly what fits your processes.

• Speed of Deployment: Because Ultimate Forms is no-code and integrated with SharePoint, solutions can go live in days instead of months.

• Low Cost: No new systems, no costly licenses, minimal maintenance overhead.

• Scalability and Reuse: Templates and modular design let you replicate across teams, departments, or locations.

• Governance & Compliance: SharePoint handles security; Ultimate Forms adds audit trails, permissions, digital signatures, and history.

• Unified Data Store: All HR data resides in SharePoint — easy to search, report on, analyze, and integrate with other Microsoft 365 tools (Teams, Outlook, Power BI).

Getting Started with Your First HR Workflow

Here’s a simple roadmap:

1. Install Ultimate Forms in your SharePoint/Microsoft 365 environment.

2. Pick a template (Leave Request, Onboarding, Training, etc.) or start from scratch.

3. Use Form Designer to add columns, build tabs/containers, set up permissions, and define dynamic rules.

4. Define workflows: automate status changes, approvals, notifications, and document generation.

5. Configure alerts and reminders: for pending approvals, upcoming leaves, expiring certifications, and more.

6. Build dashboards and views for HR and management to monitor key HR metrics.

7. Train users if needed — but often the system is intuitive enough for everyday users.

Over time, you can refine and expand to cover more HR processes: performance reviews, promotions, equipment management, internal mobility, and even exit interviews.

Organizational Benefits for HR Leaders

For HR leadership, this approach delivers:

• Faster turnaround times on requests and approvals

• Reduced paperwork and manual errors

• Complete audit trails and compliance support

• Better visibility into workforce data and trends

• Lower total cost of ownership compared to traditional HRMS

• Flexibility to adapt to changing HR policies or organizational structure

Together, SharePoint + Ultimate Forms transforms HR from administrative overhead into efficient, data-driven, and employee-friendly operations.

Final Thoughts

In today’s fast-paced business world, HR teams need tools that are flexible, scalable, and cost-effective. SharePoint combined with Infowise Ultimate Forms meets these needs by offering a full-featured platform for HR solutions — from leave management and onboarding to training, performance, compliance, and more — all without writing a line of code.

Organizations save money, maintain control, and deliver modern HR services faster. For HR professionals who want agility, efficiency, and consistency, SharePoint + Ultimate Forms offers an ideal path forward.