Leveraging Team Services at SmallTime

                 

 
Special Edition Using Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server
By Robert  Ferguson

Table of Contents
Chapter  21.   Example Scenario 2 ”Single Business Unit Solution


To reiterate from earlier chapters, SharePoint Team Services is a solution that allows teams to work together effectively, through sharing and collaborating in a limited capacity via a Web site. At SmallTime, a special-projects team has been established to support the company's participation at an industry conference. It is envisioned that the team would need to work together on group deliverables, share marketing and staffing- related documents, and communicate status with one another.

Business Problem to Be Solved

In the past, it was nearly impossible to track all of the discrete activities and "players" from different product support, engineering, technical support, marketing, and other groups involved with successfully participating at a conference. Booth setup and tear-down was often delayed, marketing and messaging materials were not cohesive, special events were planned last minute, and more. Experience gained staffing other shows and conferences had proven a nightmare when schedules and other things changed last minute. In the end, everyone agreed that they needed an approach to keep them all on the same page ”SharePoint Team Services appeared the fastest and easiest way to allow this, as illustrated in Figure 21.1.

Figure 21.1. SmallTime users find SharePoint Team Services a snap to use, even for managing complex projects where a host of activities, tasks , and people must be coordinated.

graphics/21fig01.jpg

SmallTime's project team's primary goal is simply to put on a good show, within budget. The team believes that the ability to share data, organize information, manage documents, and enable collaboration ”all via a familiar, easily accessible set of tools ”will make them successful. The fact that SharePoint Team Services requires no special license is a nice added plus as well!

Support Organization

The project team leader requested that IT, the Information Technology group, create a project Web site using SharePoint Team Services. In turn , IT made the project team leader the "site owner" and requested that each project member responsible for further developing the site upgrade to either FrontPage 2002 or the release of Office XP that includes FrontPage. The team liked the idea of moving to XP best, which natively supports SharePoint Team Services. By doing so, each project team end user immediately had the ability to create and contribute to the new team Web site.

It should be noted that any one of the team members could have created the team Web site, which has also been characterized as a " three-click installation." Also, while the team elected to perform an Office XP upgrade, presumably on their local desktops/laptops, only Web browser access is actually required to use the site (Internet Explorer version 4.01 or later).

Solutions Architecture

SharePoint Team Services provides a solution for workgroup information sharing that requires very little IT architecture support (refer to Figure 21.1). For the team's purposes, the browser-based, Microsoft FrontPage 2002 "development" environment is more than enough ”there's no need for understanding or implementing Web Parts. Any team members with the appropriate permissions can create documents directly on their new Web site, using only Internet Explorer if desired.

Security Considerations

Unlike its more robust sister product, SharePoint Team Services actually offers more choices in terms of its role-based security options. The site owner can choose from a number of customizable roles, and different levels of permissions may be assigned to team members. In this case, though, given the temporary nature of the project and limited number of "core" team members, the project team leader assigned the core team the administrator role, and assigned everyone else author privileges. Sure, more granular roles could be assigned. But that wouldn't be in keeping with SmallTime's philosophy to keep things simple.

Web Site Development Considerations

While dashboard and workspace considerations do not exist per se, development of the Web site is still a real requirement. SharePoint Team Services makes this quite straightforward, using either Microsoft FrontPage 2002 or the SharePoint Team Services Software Development Kit, or SDK.

The core team looked over the different Team Services features and functions they could employ , and in support of their original business-driven goals, decided to take advantage of the following to help them all stay on the same page:

  • Web Discussions, to conduct "conversations" on documents or Web pages regarding their marketing and messaging materials to be displayed and distributed at the conference

  • Preformatted team lists, to enable sharing team information like booth staffing lists, schedules for setup and tear-down of the booth, and more

  • Team surveys, to facilitate democratic decision-making, the sharing of ideas like which special events to promote, and teamwide status updates where feedback would be beneficial or required

  • Local search capabilities (within the team's Web site only), to allow searching for marketing phrases and special key words across the site

Go-Live Considerations

Like any really good Go-Live, getting the SharePoint Team Services Web site up and productive should be a "non-event" more than anything. In SmallTime's case, the core team was using the site in a productive manner within a few days, and other team members realized the benefits of information sharing, surveys, intrateam communication, and more shortly thereafter.

As IT still "owned" the actual server upon which the Team Services site was created, nightly backups and other operations and systems management/administration tasks were already taken care of behind the scenes. The project team took special care to maintain good version control, and were otherwise quite well protected from data loss.

Meanwhile, the team managed their project activities effectively, leveraging the features they needed in a portal product at virtually no extra cost to the organization. And more importantly, the conference came and went without a hitch!

SharePoint Team Services got the job done well for this project team. In the next few sections, we will take a look at other single business unit SharePoint implementations , leveraging SharePoint Portal Server and its inherently more robust feature set.


                 
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Special Edition Using Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server
Special Edition Using Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server
ISBN: 0789725703
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2002
Pages: 286

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