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Team Collaboration with Sharepoint

Hi all,

Today I thought I would jump in and give you guys some brief, high-level insight as to what we use for our primary team collaboration tool here at Exceed – Microsoft SharePoint – and how we utilize it.

Our SharePoint configuration serves 3 purposes:

1. Company Intranet
   Team members can gather company information such as personal phone numbers, HR documents and calendars as well as review corporate procedures and protocols.
2. Project “Portal”
   Team members can gather and contribute information on both past and present projects.
3. Company Extranet
   Select clients are granted access to certain aspects of their project site within our Project Portal.

For this post, I’ll be focusing on list item #2 above, our “Project Portal”.

As Exceed continues to grow, it became imperative to implement a solid, scalable framework to provide our team members with the resources necessary to collaborate, build and support our client’s applications in an efficient, effective manner. With this in mind, we came up with a bullet-list of critical items we felt were necessary to accomplish our goal:

• Must have a central location for formalized technical and non-technical documents such as software requirements specifications, functional design documents, user manuals, admin manuals, etc.
• Must have fast search and indexing capabilities
• Must allow for wiki-style collaborations, as well as forum-style posting for discussions on project features and tasks which may require clarification at any given time
• Must be easy to use and quick to learn

One thing that I couldn’t stress enough was that I wanted to make sure that whatever final solution we decided to implement, we wouldn’t be bogged down with extensive configurations and setup of features we’d never use. We wanted this tool to “invite” team collaboration, not to impede development with further forced workflows.

After researching several possibilities online, we decided to take SharePoint for a test run. After just a few hours of setup, our first project site was ready to go. Based on Microsoft’s “IT Team Workspace Template” found here, we suddenly had a collaborative architecture in place for all the things we required, and then some…

After a few weeks of testing, gathering feedback from our team, and twiddling and tweaking of the pre-defined template from Microsoft, we came up with a core project template of our own, which serves as the basis for all of our new projects to date.

As we developed as a company, we’ve since extended our SharePoint portal site by creating a few web parts to integrate with other in-house SQL applications involved in our business workflows. All-in-all, SharePoint has proved to be an excellent choice for team collaborations, in turn streamlining communications, all leading to happy clients.

‘till next time,
-Chris

“Things may come to those who wait, but only things left by those who hustle.”
-Abraham Lincoln

• by Christian Ugolini
• category Techniques & Practices

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