SharePoint 2010 for Project Management, 2nd Edition

What Is SharePoint?

How do people describe SharePoint? In my experience, the definition always gets lost somewhere between collaboration and document management. Here’s a concise and straightforward description of SharePoint:

SharePoint allows individuals in an organization to easily create and manage their own collaborative solutions.

It sounds simple, but let me dissect what it truly means:

Individuals

Does this word specify that SharePoint users have to be technically savvy? No. In fact, as long as users have familiarity with Windows, Microsoft Office, and surfing the Web, they will be in good shape.

Organization

This term implies that SharePoint can be used by a limited number of people belonging to the same group. It also means that there will be varying levels of authority and privileges within the group. As a result, you don’t have to rely on the IT/ IS department to set up permissions in SharePoint—you are empowered to define and manage access to specific information. You will learn more about permissions in Chapter 4.

Easily

Instead of contacting IT/IS, any individual can create, customize, and manage this collaborative tool. Although IT/IS will not be totally out of the picture, SharePoint empowers users to develop a customized automated solution that can appropriately support their needs in a timely manner.

Collaborative

The intent of SharePoint is to support collaborative activities (formal or informal) in which groups engage.

SharePoint has been around since 2001. It has evolved from a simple website management tool to an empowering collaboration platform that integrates seamlessly with the Web, Microsoft Windows, and Microsoft Office. Since it is a foundational Microsoft technology, various organizations—including government institutions, airlines, banks, construction companies, and retail industries—have benefited from its tools and feature sets.

SharePoint does not refer to a specific product or technology. Using the phrase “Microsoft SharePoint” is like using the phrase “Microsoft Office.” It refers to several aspects of collaborative solutions. The key components are SharePoint Foundation (SF) and SharePoint Server (SS).

To distinguish SF and SS, an analogy that I often use is to compare SharePoint to a car. What’s the main purpose of a car? To take you from point A to point B, agreed? Which component of a car is required to do this? The engine, of course.

The main purpose of SharePoint is to empower users with document management and team collaboration tools. SF fulfills this purpose. It is the core “engine” of SharePoint. Without SF, there is no SharePoint. SF (shown in Figure 1-1) is available with Windows 2008 Server or later.

Figure 1-1. A SharePoint site using a SF site template

SS provides extended capabilities to SF. Going back to the car analogy, we can equip our vehicles with accessories such as GPS, a DVD system, voice command, etc. However, these extended features are not required to run a car (taking us from point A to point B). If these accessories are not installed, the car will still work. It’s just that having a GPS might enable us to reach our destination faster without getting lost. SS extended features include Enterprise Search, Personalization, Enterprise Content Management, etc. Unlike SF, SS (shown in Figure 1-2) has separate licensing. Licensing can vary and become quite costly. For more information about licensing, visit Microsoft’s SharePoint website at http://www.microsoft.com/sharepoint.

Figure 1-2. A SharePoint site using SS features

Since SharePoint can be considered a platform for improving document management and collaboration, it can be adopted as a tool to assist most project environments.

In this book, I will show you how to build a SharePoint PMIS primarily using SF. This means that the techniques you will learn can be applied regardless of whether you have SF or SS in your organization.

Dux Quax: Is SharePoint the Only Game in Town?

Don’t get me wrong here. There are a lot of other great products that can be used as a PMIS. There are full-featured enterprise-level products, such as Microsoft Project Server, Clarity, and Primavera; and even open source, web-based products, such as Google Apps and Basecamp.

The challenge with rolling out complex enterprise PMIS toolsets is that it assumes your organization already has a certain level of project management maturity. By “maturity” I mean that you have a Project Management Office (PMO) in place; project processes are being applied, embraced, and continuously improved upon by all project teams; and project artifacts such as plans, reports, templates, and communication mechanisms are well defined and structured. The reason for such a stringent requirement is that these tools must be customized to adapt the processes you currently have in place. A lot of clients I have worked with assumed that implementing such comprehensive tools would make projects run better overnight. Yeah, right. Without sound processes in place, a complex tool is quite a beast to leverage.

As depicted in Figure 1-3, project management maturity should have the people, process, and technology in lockstep.

Figure 1-3. Project management maturity