OS EDU - How To: Use Products and Services to Show Office Locations (Best Practice Idea)

1. Thank you to Elizabeth at Air Force Credit Union for this idea! When she showed me how they were using the Products and Services App to show important info on office locations, I couldn't wait to build it out and share with you!*

*Please note that you may find educational and training resources on Products and Services in our Support site (here).

THE BEST PRACTICE IDEA:

Essentially, the idea is to build out a Product Category for Office Locations, and then add each location as a "Product" like below:

You'll end up building out the Product Snapshot with whatever location information would be most beneficial to your organization. We used the General Information and Promotions corner and hid the other sections. Here's a peek at what ours looks like:

We also built out a workgroup page in our portal with a Tabbed Island (left side of the page); each tab is a Product Highlight Island* showing each location. Also we used the Product Comparison Island (right side of the page), comparing our custom fields for each location. (*Info on the content will be noted in the How To section) Top of the page is a Portal Text Editor with some text, icons, and a complementary background color:

You can add whatever else you want to - we put a Carousel Island with photos of the locations. Remember to use Page Tags so users can find this content when searching for the location or the info displayed there.

Another idea we had was to build out a full public page for staff to interact with the people at that location and find more info that could be relevant. This page has a Carousel Island at the top, with a Portal Text Editor (image and a background) on either side. A PTE with a scrolling marquee is below that. Button Islands to Employee Recognition, a Calendar, a Blog, and the office location page above are on the left side of the page. A Dashboard shows goal progress, and a Help Desk for referrals to be submitted is there too. The right side of the page are just User Profile Islands:

These are just some quick ideas we came up with after seeing what Elizabeth had built out. We would love to see what you come up with too, so please share! 

HOW TO:

Custom Fields

To get started, make a list of all the features for each location that you would want for a custom field. Here’s a snip of the Product Comparison Island showing some of the fields we used:

1. Add each custom field by going to Module Tools>Manage Custom Fields, and click the button to add New Custom Field.
2. Under Module Tools>Manage Products and Services: Create a Category named Locations/Offices/Branches, or whatever you want it to be called
3. Create a Product in that Category with the name of the location, etc
4. Proceed completing the rest of the content – managers, sections you want to show (we Hid all sections except General Information and Promotions Corner) – be sure you add something to the search keywords tab!
5. Choose the Custom Fields you created (we did the same fields for each of the locations, so that we could type in a response for each and use the Product Comparison Island).

Product Snapshot

1. Click on Preview Product Snapshot – enter your content for each section.
2. We used the blanks by each custom field to type out a short yes, no, or short detail (see snip below).
3. 
4. Telephone info and directory is a Table in the Comments Section - you could do a bullet list if you didn't want to get fancy.
5. 
6. Using Promotions Corner, we put a location title, and a photo of the location, and driving directions below (Elizabeth had a link to a document with directions coming from all ways for the call center to use - it was awesome). The map below we just pulled from typing in the address in Google – there is an option to get the html, so we just posted that under the rest of our content in the Promotions Corner in the HTML tab.

Finish Building Out the Other Locations

1. Once you have one built out how you like it, use the “Copy” feature of Products and Services (New Product From Existing) to make progress quicker. You can just adjust as needed, but won’t have to start from scratch on each location.
2. 
3. Remember to choose the same Custom Fields for each location, if you want to compare all of them in a Product Comparison Island. :)

You can get creative with this idea as you like, our only request is that you please share your progress/end result in the Community or with your CSM so others can learn from your idea. We want to see how this helps you! 

If you want help with how to build out some of the ideas here, ask your CSM!