SharePoint 2010 for Project Management, 2nd Edition

Document Workspaces

Have you developed a project charter from scratch? Did you involve other people in doing so? What are the different types of information needed to support the completion of the project charter? If you want to see some examples of project charters, feel free to download them from http://www.spforpm.com.

In my experience, creating the project charter is an inefficient activity in almost any project environment. Typically, any major collaborative document consists of many separate reference files, templates, whitepapers, forms, and pieces of content. What usually ends up happening is that when trying to complete the document, the team has email messages flying back and forth.

So, how should a PMIS facilitate the collaborative development of such a document?

Ideally, there should be a facility in which a limited number of people can work on the project charter, while keeping the greater stakeholder majority from accessing the document.

In SharePoint, document workspaces do just that; they are sites that allow you to specify who has access to a single document. Document workspaces can be created from within an Office product or from an existing SharePoint site.

Document workspaces are SharePoint sites that can include lists, document libraries, and any other feature that a SharePoint site can have (Figure 5-23). Document workspaces are meant to be temporary—once the project charter is complete, there is no longer a need for the document workspace.

Figure 5-23. A document ...