How One Engineer Solved a Problem Nobody Knew How to Fix
Deepak Chanda and the Massachusetts Department of Transportation
When Deepak Chanda joined the Massachusetts Department of Transportation in 2017, he walked into a question nobody could answer: “What inspections are due today?”
It wasn’t that the information didn’t exist. Somewhere inside SharePoint Lists, buried in InfoPath forms, the data was there. MassDOT had 13 to 15 construction districts running simultaneously. Bridge inspections, roadwork, infrastructure projects. Each one governed by strict compliance rules, including the critical 21 day review cycle. Every site visit had to be reviewed, documented, and signed off within 21 days.
But inspectors moving between job sites had no way to see what was overdue, what was coming due, or even how many reviews they had pending. Project managers manually counted overdue inspections across spreadsheets. Districts operated blind.
One inspector pulled Deepak aside during his first few weeks and said simply, “I have no idea what I’m supposed to be working on today.”
That’s when Deepak realized the problem wasn’t workload. It was visibility.
The Problem Nobody Had Solved
The requirement sounded straightforward: build a dashboard using SharePoint List data.
Deepak had never worked with SharePoint Lists before. He didn’t know that all the inspection reviews and sign offs were actually stored as InfoPath forms behind the scenes. The strange part was that some of the most important fields weren’t visible in the SharePoint UI at all. Inspectors couldn’t see them. Managers couldn’t see them. But they existed in the list schema, and SSRS could still read them.
That created confusion before he even started building anything.
Then came the first real obstacle. Nobody at MassDOT, not the internal teams, not Rackspace (the hosting provider), not the documentation, actually knew how to connect SSRS to a SharePoint List. Every attempt Deepak made failed.
He spent days researching, trying every connector possible. Finally he got on a call with Microsoft support.
That’s when he learned they needed special SSRS SharePoint List drivers. Something nobody at MassDOT had used before.
Rackspace literally told him, “We don’t have any guidance for this.”
Seventy Problems, One at a Time
Once Deepak got the drivers installed, he still had dataset failures, permission issues, and broken connections. InfoPath fields wouldn’t load consistently. Every step forward created two new problems.
Eventually he got the first report working. For one site.
Then came the real challenge.
MassDOT had 13 to 15 sites, each with slightly different SharePoint List structures. Deepak had to build dashboards for each site individually. It was slow, tedious, and fragile, because each site’s InfoPath form had different quirks, hidden fields, or naming inconsistencies.
But the biggest hurdle came when leadership asked for one consolidated report combining all 13 to 15 sites into a single dashboard.
There was no way to do joins or unions across SharePoint Lists in SSRS, especially when the lists belonged to different site collections. The usual SQL approaches didn’t work. Deepak tried dozens of strategies and kept failing.
For a moment, he thought he would have to tell them it wasn’t possible.
After trial and error, he figured out a workaround. He created one dataset per site, aligned them manually inside the SSRS report, and connected all datasets to the same parameter so the report behaved like a unified dashboard even though it was stitched together underneath.
It wasn’t elegant. But it worked.
The Button That Changed Everything
Then came another unexpected challenge: how do inspectors actually access the report from SharePoint?
The report sat on the SSRS report server, completely separate from the SharePoint UI where inspectors lived day to day. There was no built-in integration.
Deepak experimented with different approaches and finally figured out a solution on his own. He created a custom button in SharePoint and embedded the SSRS report link into it, making the dashboard feel native inside their existing UI.
This wasn’t documented anywhere. No one had done it at MassDOT before.
But once it worked, inspectors could open the dashboard from the same screen they used every day. No extra navigation. No confusion.
“I Used to Spend 45 Minutes Every Morning”
When the consolidated report finally went live, the change was immediate.
Instead of clicking into each site separately across 13 to 15 locations, inspectors could see all their dues and overdues in seconds. A simple color coded system: green for on track, yellow for due soon, red for overdue.
Before this, if inspectors missed something, construction work would literally get delayed or stopped. Now they could plan their day intelligently.
One inspector told Deepak, “I used to spend 45 minutes every morning checking each site one by one. Now I know everything instantly.”
Overdue inspections dropped sharply. Inspectors began proactively completing reviews before deadlines. District managers gained accurate visibility into performance trends. The 21 day cycle that once felt impossible to manage became routine.
Long after Deepak moved on, the dashboard remained a statewide standard, used by hundreds of inspectors and managers across districts.
The Blueprints on the Car Hood
Around the same time, Deepak faced a different challenge.
MassDOT technically owned Bluebeam licenses. Bluebeam was software designed to let teams review construction drawings together online, almost like a Zoom session with live markup. It was supposed to modernize the entire blueprint review process.
But no one actually used it.
Inspectors and supervisors were still driving across districts just to sit in a conference room, spread printed blueprints across a table, and manually mark them with pens. If the scanner wasn’t working, which happened often, people simply photographed drawings on their car hood and emailed the pictures around.
This wasn’t a rare situation. This was the everyday workflow.
One of Deepak’s project managers told him simply: “We need this to work, and we need it fast.”
That was the requirement. There was no documentation, no internal expert, and even the hosting vendor had no idea how to make the integration happen.
Nobody Knew How to Connect It
Deepak started by requesting access to the Bluebeam software himself because he didn’t even have a working install. Once he finally got it, he realized he had to build the entire integration from scratch.
SharePoint required a very specific configuration. The way Bluebeam launched files depended on a controller that needed to be mapped manually inside SharePoint’s backend XML files. None of this existed in any guide. Deepak had to cobble together information from multiple scattered sources and experiment until something worked.
When he finally got the first test connection working, it immediately broke again. Error messages popped up that nobody had seen before.
One engineer reached out saying Bluebeam wouldn’t communicate with SharePoint at all, so Deepak physically went to their floor to troubleshoot it.
He discovered issues like:
• File names containing unsupported characters
• Permissions that broke when inherited from older folders
• SharePoint locking documents during the checkout process
• Bluebeam silently saving files locally when authentication timed out
• Different Bluebeam versions behaving inconsistently
• Some inspectors launching the wrong Bluebeam profile
Every time he solved one issue, a new one surfaced.
The Human Side Was Just as Hard
At the same time, the human side was just as difficult.
Many inspectors had been working the same way for 10 to 20 years. They trusted paper. They trusted walking into a room with a blueprint. They worried that if the digital system crashed or if they clicked the wrong thing, their entire markup would disappear.
Deepak had to teach them step by step. Not just the technical part, but also build trust.
He created training materials explaining how to:
• Open drawings directly from SharePoint into Bluebeam
• Join collaborative sessions
• Save markups correctly
• Avoid creating duplicate documents
• Use profiles consistently
• Manage notifications and email alerts
• Check documents back in the proper way
These weren’t simple instructions. Some users were opening files from the wrong place or saving them incorrectly. Deepak had to break down the process into very granular screenshots and walk throughs.
Another unexpected challenge was user access. MassDOT’s SharePoint environment was extremely structured and heavily permissioned. For Bluebeam to sync reliably, Deepak had to rebuild parts of the permission model, create new folder structures, and make sure role based access wouldn’t break during document edits.
It was painstaking. The smallest configuration mistake could affect multiple projects at once.
There was also the UI problem. Even after the integration finally worked, inspectors still had trouble finding where to open drawings. So Deepak created another custom button in SharePoint that launched Bluebeam directly with the correct settings, bypassing confusion and preventing users from downloading files manually.
This was something nobody had done before. He figured it out through trial, error, and a lot of testing.
When It Finally Clicked
Eventually, everything finally came together.
Inspectors could open drawings directly from SharePoint, collaborate online, mark up in real time, and save back instantly. No more driving for in person blueprint sessions. No more printed sheets. No more photos emailed around. No more version chaos.
But the real transformation wasn’t the tool. It was the shift in mindset.
Teams that once swore they’d never trust digital reviews started saying things like, “This saves me hours,” and “Now I always know which drawing is the latest.”
Before Deepak’s work, inspectors had to meet in person, carry printed drawings, mark by hand, scan photos, and email them around. Different teams worked off different copies of the same drawing.
After the integration, they could review blueprints remotely in real time, with every markup and correction staying connected to the same document through proper version control. A single source of truth.
By 2019, Bluebeam had become the default way to review and collaborate on drawings at MassDOT, replacing decades of manual processes.
What Actually Made the Difference
Looking back, the messy middle wasn’t one big obstacle. It was a hundred tiny ones.
Configuration issues. Broken permissions. Outdated software versions. User resistance. Undocumented behavior. Constant troubleshooting.
But Deepak didn’t solve these problems by being the smartest person in the room. He solved them by being the person willing to sit on the phone with Microsoft support when nobody else knew what to do. By physically walking to someone’s desk to troubleshoot a file name character issue. By building custom SharePoint buttons when the documented approach didn’t exist.
The dashboard and Bluebeam integration both started the same way: with a problem nobody had solved, documentation that didn’t exist, and a vendor saying “we don’t have guidance for this.”
Deepak made them work anyway.
Today, inspectors across MassDOT still use the systems he built. The 21 day dashboard is still the standard. Bluebeam is still how teams review drawings.
Not because the technology was perfect. But because someone was willing to figure it out, one broken permission and one skeptical inspector at a time.