Overview of Collaboration Features

The project manager is responsible for three key pieces of information for each project:

• Issues Problems or events arising and developing during the project lifecycle.

• Risks Future events or conditions that can have negative effects on the outcome of a project.

• Document artifacts Project charter, proposals, minutes of meetings, progress reports, and other items related to the project.

Every day, organizations around the world generate an incredible amount of documents. A significant portion of these documents is related to project development. For any organization, collecting, organizing, maintaining, archiving, analyzing, and indexing these documents properly is a time-consuming and complex effort.

Windows SharePoint Services (WSS), which integrates with Microsoft Office Project Server 2003 and provides a platform for risks, issues, and document-related features helps project managers handle all necessary document artifacts, business processes, and project teams. All team members on any project team derive the most value from the information sharing.

WSS provides risks and issues tracking features, as well as a document library for each project published to Project Server. Public libraries that are not project-specific can be created as well. Websites that are automatically created for projects can be particularly attractive to server administrators when you consider the manual alternatives.

Using file shares that provide a hierarchical directory structure as a means of organizing project artifacts has some limitations. There is only one path to any given artifact item, and on top of that, users must know the name of the server the item is stored on, as well as the name of the share and directory structure of folders on the server. When you add other data sources such as other corporate websites, email servers, and databases to the mix of information available, artifact search and retrieval becomes challenging, if not impossible. With files stored all over the network, archiving and preserving the valuable knowledge of the company is difficult.

After project-related information grows to a substantial size, the overhead of managing a standalone project website on top of other project work can become increasingly difficult. One key reason why standalone project websites may fail is the inability to effectively provide the information and facilitate team collaboration for even small organizations because of the effort required.

Coordinating the efforts of a project team takes foresight and planningthat is what project managers master. The ideal time to agree on and enable project team communications is right after your project team is chosen. You can select from the online team collaboration solution supported by Project Server 2003 or use other means to communicate.

By publishing project information to Project Server and using the Microsoft Office Project Web Access (PWA) client, you can distribute project information and collaborate online with your project team members, customers, and stakeholders.