Adding "Contact Us" to a SharePoint site

Whether you are hosting a WSS support site, or a publishing eCommerce site hosted with MOSS WCM, a lot of times you will find the need to allow your users to contact you using a simple "Contact us" form.

Well, this cannot be more simple in SharePoint.

This is how it is done with no development at all:

Create a list named Contact Us with fields: Subject, Body, To.

the To field - can be a user field or a choice field.

If it is a choice field (like: sales / support / partnersprogram etc...) you can do a WorkFlow using SharePoint Designer workflow wizard that sends the email to the manager / mailbox address of that subject.

If it is a user field - you create a view called: MyEmails - and set the filter to show items where To=[Me], so every user gets his "emails". Then you set up alerts to all users for new items in that view so they would get an email whenever a new item was created. (or you can do the WF solution as well).

Simple, Free and Out of the box.

Users will not see the actual email address of the person they are sending the email to, and the email will be sent from the SharePoint itself - so no spam.

You can extend this solution by adding a custom "Contact Us" form to create an item in the home page (use Custom List Form in SharePoint Designer, or Item Editor Plus from KWizCom to do so).

Also - you can use SharePoint to track these issues by adding a "Status" column that the user in charge can mark as "New, Waiting for someone else, Completed", or use the WF to create a task for each issue that is assigned to someone...

Lots of ideas, the nice thing is it is all free and you can extend and improve your solution as you go along!

* If you need help with configuring such a solution, contact me as we offer online training for these subject and in 4-5 hours online training you will be able to create and manage your own solutions even if you don't have any development experience.

Shai Petel,
VP Professional Services
KWizCom