My boss has asked me to look into setting up a copy of sharepoint on our server and creating a dashboard that allows employees to view their tasks, punch in/out, etc.
At this point, I have VERY little experience with sharepoint. I've seen sharepoint tutorials that seem to be simple non-coding setups & I've seen some that involve creating sharepoint pages from code. What's the best approach for creating this time entry page? Is there something already built that I can just plug in and modify or is it best to code it from scratch? Just looking for some good starting points.
Thanks
Don't code from scratch, you could find a site template (.stp) somewhere which is free or costs 50 CUR and which you can install in your SharePoint server and modify further to your liking.
For example see whether "Case Management" below satisfies more than half of your (boss) requirements or not: http://sp2010teamplates.codeplex.com/ If not, Google for more.