SharePoint Self-Service Portal for Bus & Tram Drivers
The City of Graz provides bus and tram drivers with a mobile self-service portal, built with skybow Studio.
The City of Graz replaced paper-based driver processes and ageing Nintex workflows with a mobile self-service portal built by SOLVION on skybow Studio. Bus and tram drivers now submit service reports, read duty instructions and complete processes directly from their tablet — anytime, anywhere.
For years, the City of Graz ran its driver processes on paper and on ageing Nintex workflows. Together with their partner SOLVION, they built a mobile self-service portal on skybow Studio. Today, bus and tram drivers submit service reports, access duty instructions and complete everyday processes directly from a tablet — during a break or on the road. The result is faster, more transparent, and finally off paper.
Challenge
The City of Graz runs public transport for the city. Thousands of bus and tram drivers keeping the network moving every day. For its driving staff, almost everything used to run on paper.
Before the new portal, a driver's everyday requests lived on a single A4 sheet.
Whenever something came up in daily operations — a request, a change, a problem on a route — drivers filled in a paper "Dienstmeldung" (service report): a sheet with a few text lines and some checkboxes, completed by hand. The sheet was dropped into a mailbox, sometimes scanned and emailed, and physically routed through the organisation for discussion and signatures before finding its way back.
At the same time, the wider City of Graz environment relied heavily on Nintex for its processes. Around 2,000 workflows in total. With Nintex out of support, staying put was not an option, especially for a public institution.
This created several problems:
❌ Everyday driver requests were slow, manual and hard to track.
❌ Paper sheets had to be handed in on site — drivers had to go back to base.
❌ Signatures and approvals meant a sheet travelled from desk to desk.
❌ Nintex was out of support — a growing risk for a public body.
❌ Everything had to stay inside the existing Microsoft 365 and SharePoint environment, without opening up a heavyweight new platform.
The City of Graz needed a modern, mobile solution that fit its existing Microsoft infrastructure. And a way to move off Nintex without locking itself into a costly, oversized platform.
Why is skybow the best fit?
When the team looked at cloud alternatives, the obvious candidate was the Microsoft Power Platform. But for the use cases at hand it was too complex.
skybow was the better fit for practical reasons:
✅ Governance out of the box — teams work inside a safe space, without opening up a new platform.
✅ Stays in the existing environment — fully integrated into M365, no separate logins to manage.
✅ Easy to learn and to train — the City of Graz can be enabled to build and adapt forms on their own.
✅ In support and future-proof — a clear replacement for out-of-support Nintex workflows.
✅ Fast to try — a tangible demo and a short trial let the team see what was possible right away.
"The customer had something tangible in their hands very quickly. What convinced them was that skybow sits on top of what they already use — no separate platform, no extra logins to manage. And it's genuinely easy to train, so teams can take it into their own hands.", Christoph Kubesch, SOLVION
„The real win in replacing a legacy system isn't a new tool — it's that the customer builds and owns their solutions themselves. Right in their SharePoint SE environment, we enabled the City of Graz to build on skybow, with governance out of the box. That's what makes it perfec for legacy replacement."
How SOLVION solved the challenge with skybow
To move the City of Graz off paper and off Nintex, their partner SOLVION designed and built the solution in skybow Studio. The solution is provided by ITG Informationstechnik Graz GmbH, the technical service provider for the city.
The work ran in two parallel streams:
Migrating off Nintex
The existing SharePoint 2019 environment was migrated to SharePoint SE The Nintex workflows were retired. The migration wasn't just a swap of one engine for another — it simplified the processes. Instead of rebuilding workflows one-to-one, SOLVION shifted the focus to the forms and the everyday experience for the end users: the logic now lives inside the skybow forms, triggered either from command bar buttons or handled quietly as background actions.
Nothing was lost in the switch. Around 2,000 Nintex workflows were replaced or reduced this way.
The City of Graz built these forms themselves. SOLVION enabled and trained the city's own users to build on skybow. They are working with the skybow Server Add-Ins for Forms, Automation Actions and Background Actions.
That was a faster, more sustainable path than trying to gather 18 years of process history from every department. The city now builds and owns its own solutions, with SOLVION supporting where needed.
A new cloud dashboard for driving staff
Because drivers are mobile and don't sit at a desk, the driver dashboard was built from scratch as a cloud solution in skybow Studio. It's the first solution of this scope running in the cloud at the City of Graz.
The Driver Dashboard is a landing page drivers open on their tablet — in the morning, on the road, or during a break.
From one place they can:
1️⃣ Submit service reports:
The old paper sheet became more than 35 digital forms covering everyday cases: part-time and parental leave, sick and return-to-work reports, vandalism, incidents on a route, police and rescue call-outs, ID cards, work clothing, improvement suggestions, and more.
2️⃣ View duty schedules:
In one central place, one click from the dashboard.
3️⃣ Read role-based duty instructions:
A bus driver sees information relevant to buses (e.g. a closed road, a broken manhole cover) while line-specific notices (e.g. planned track repairs on Line 6) reach the right drivers.
These go through a multi-level approval: one person drafts, another reviews and releases, and a signature is selected at the end. Each instruction generates a printable PDF at runtime in two variants — one for print and one for display on an info screen.
4️⃣ Jump to everything else they need:
Training documents, and even a managed list of break rooms and WCs along the routes, because a driver on a route needs to know where to go.
Because the forms handle real-world logic — date and time calculations, "from/to" rules, dozens of variants — some are genuinely complex under the hood. The Package & Publish approach in skybow made this manageable: with separate test and production instances and one-click publishing, the team could keep building in one version while another was being reviewed.
The result: drivers complete in a break, from a tablet, what used to mean a trip back to base and a paper sheet in a mailbox.
What the City of Graz & SOLVION love about working with skybow
For SOLVION, skybow stands out for its flexibility and how well it fits an existing Microsoft environment.
The solution slots into the infrastructure the customer already runs — no third-party tool, no separate logins or licenses. It's also easy to train, which is what makes the enablement model work: the customer takes ownership, and SOLVION supports where it counts.
"skybow is flexible, easy to train, and it lets us enable the customer to own their solution — while we step in with expertise where it's needed. For this kind of project, that combination is hard to beat." — Christoph Kubesch, SOLVION
For SOLVION, skybow is a strong fit for:
- Organizations which want to stay on prem with SharePoint SE or 2019
- Public institutions that need to stay inside their existing M365 and SharePoint environment.
- Teams replacing out-of-support systems like Nintex without moving to an oversized platform.
- Organisations that want to build and own their own processes.
Do you want to create your next SharePoint project faster and easier?
More SharePoint business apps
built with skybow
Let's talk about your workflows
We know the feeling of wanting to get started straight away. Let's create the perfect set-up together.