Chelyabinsk State University, SharePoint Portal Development and Administration

Challenge

Chelyabinsk State University runs its corporate site, csu.ru, as a SharePoint portal. From 2014 to 2018 I developed and administered it. The work came as a series of modules the university needed and SharePoint did not provide out of the box.

My Role and Contribution

I joined the university's Internet resources support department in March 2014, while studying at the Faculty of Mathematics, Department of Computer Security and Applied Algebra. Over four years my area grew from portal features to the servers underneath them:

• Owned development of applications and add-ons for the SharePoint portal in JavaScript, jQuery and C#, from the first request to production.
• Ran the applicant ranking lists through the admission campaigns: loading the FoxPro exports, writing the display logic as T-SQL stored procedures and functions, and publishing the lists on the portal.
• Designed the class calendar for students and teachers; the university events calendar was later built on top of it.
• Started the mobile portal m.csu.ru in June 2017, with an adapted layout and ranking lists that work on phones.
• Set up and supported servers on Windows Server 2012 and 2012 R2 and administered domain users in Active Directory.
• Designed a Hyper-V backup system and wrote a virtual machine backup tool for VMM in C#.
• Supported and administered the Garant and Consultant legal reference systems.

Events Calendar

The first module is the events calendar, built as a SharePoint web part along the platform's recommended practices. It renders a JavaScript calendar synced with Google Calendar, so events added there show up on the site. Clicking an event opens its details: date, time and description.

The calendar worked well on mobile devices too. The screenshots show it on an iPad: the month view and an event opened by a tap, here a class with its room and time.

Admission Ranking Lists

The second module produces the applicant ranking lists. They run on SQL Server Reporting Services, as a .NET solution on top of SharePoint. In the early version the lists were built from files exported from the FoxPro admissions system. For that I made an admin section: an operator uploads the export, the data is saved to the database automatically and the ranking tables update on their own.

The display was tuned to the admissions office requirements: custom sorting and color-coded text. As a result an applicant could see their own position, whether they were in for a state-funded place and whether they had the right to enrollment.

Mobile Version

Another piece of work was the mobile version of the corporate site, including the staff contacts in the internal phone directory. The task was to adapt the existing desktop layout into a responsive one for phones.

Hidden Email

The last module hides email addresses. On page load the web part shows a "Show email" link instead of the address, so the address is not in the page body when search engines and spam bots crawl it. Editors insert a hidden email from a dedicated button on the SharePoint ribbon.

Accepting Contractor Work

Part of the portal's development was done by an outside contractor, and I took part in accepting that work. The photos show the contractor's commercial proposal for implementing the site on SharePoint Server 2010: project goals, cost and timeline, and the Microsoft stack it was built on. The price and the addressee's name are hidden.

Yandex.Metrica and Audience Analysis

I was responsible for installing Yandex.Metrica on the site and for what came out of it: tracking errors and how visitors interact with pages, then improving the interface so the site is clearer, faster and more pleasant to use. I also analysed the site's audience and tracked its target groups.

The counter I set up still collects data: for December 2025 to January 2026 it shows 130,200 visits and 70,900 visitors, with most traffic coming from search engines.

Outcome

The portal gained four modules on top of the stock platform: a Google-synced events calendar, ranking lists that update from an upload, a mobile layout and spam-safe email addresses. During admissions, applicants could check their standing on the site on their own.