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MASARYKOVA UNIVERZITA, FAKULTA INFORMATIKY
DIPLOMA THESIS
SharePoint platform implementation
Kristián Farkaš
Brno, 2010
Declaration
Hereby I declare that this paper is my original authorial work, which I have worked out on my
own. All sources and literature used or excerpted during elaboration of this work are properly
cited, credited to the due source, and listed in the complete reference.
Advisor: RNDr. Jaroslav Ráček, Ph.D.
Acknowledgement
I would like to thank to RNDr. Jaroslav Ráček, Ph.D., my advisor, for guiding me thru the
elaboration of this work and providing me valuable feedback and tips how to tackle challenges
and improve the quality of my work.
I would also like to thank to Moravia IT for enabling me to elaborate the practical part of this
work in their organization and allowing me to cite some of the company’s internal information.
My gratitude then belongs to Adam Macharáček for cooperating tightly and patiently on building
up the team site, and to Vít Sedláček for helping me deploy and operate the vendor portal by
providing valuable feedback and taking over the later administrative responsibilities.
Abstract
This work analyzes the requirements of today’s business and non-business environment
demanding highly efficient collaborative models enabling organizations of various sizes enhance
their internal and external communication and collaboration with colleagues, customers,
suppliers, and business partners. The work is elaborated from an executive point of view and the
targeted audience is foremost executives with reasonable IT background. The first half of the
theoretical part elaborates on the most common techniques and practices of collaboration,
sharing information and self management used in organizations. The other half introduces and
describes Microsoft SharePoint, a software platform alternative designed for collaboration,
information and document sharing, reducing e-mail and communication overflow on a
centralized web browser-based platform. The practical part relates to analyzing a selected
department in the specified organization, observing the day by day work routines, processes,
collaborative demands, and potential improvements concluding to designing, building up and
continuously operating a SharePoint based collaboration solution giving a more effective, less
effortful and centralized workspace in return.
Keywords
Collaboration, communication, content management, cooperation, document management, e-
mail, information, information system, intranet, management, sharing information, SharePoint,
task management, team work
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1 Introduction ............................................................................................................................................................... 7
2 Collaboration and sharing information in organizations ........................................................................ 9
2.1 Common techniques and solutions ...................................................................................................... 10
2.1.1 Analogue techniques ........................................................................................................................ 11
2.1.2 Digital solutions .................................................................................................................................. 12
3 The Microsoft SharePoint Platform ............................................................................................................... 17
3.1 Overview ......................................................................................................................................................... 17
3.2 Branding and product outline ................................................................................................................ 19
3.2.1 Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) ........................................................................................ 19
3.2.2 Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) ............................................................................ 20
3.2.3 Microsoft Search Server (MSS) ..................................................................................................... 20
3.3 Introduction to the environment .......................................................................................................... 21
3.3.1 Sites and Workspaces ...................................................................................................................... 21
3.3.2 Features ................................................................................................................................................. 22
3.3.3 Web parts and Web part pages .................................................................................................... 25
3.4 Advanced usability options ..................................................................................................................... 25
3.4.1 Permissions and security................................................................................................................ 25
3.4.2 Templates and content reusability ............................................................................................. 26
3.4.3 Microsoft Office integration ........................................................................................................... 27
3.4.4 Workflows ............................................................................................................................................. 30
3.4.5 Site usage reports .............................................................................................................................. 30
3.5 User interface ................................................................................................................................................ 31
3.5.1 Site layout elements .......................................................................................................................... 31
3.5.2 Visual accessories .............................................................................................................................. 32
3.6 Technical deployment ............................................................................................................................... 33
3.6.1 Server architecture ........................................................................................................................... 33
3.7 Similar products and technologies ....................................................................................................... 34
3.7.1 IBM Lotus Connections .................................................................................................................... 34
3.7.2 Oracle Beehive .................................................................................................................................... 35
3.7.3 HyperOffice Total Collaboration .................................................................................................. 35
3.7.4 Google Apps .......................................................................................................................................... 35
4 Introducing the company ................................................................................................................................... 36
4.1 Targeting focus ............................................................................................................................................. 37
4.2 Getting acquainted with the focus team............................................................................................. 38
4.2.1 Project workflow ................................................................................................................................ 39
4.2.2 Selecting the delegate ...................................................................................................................... 40
5 Implementing the solution ................................................................................................................................ 41
5.1 Initializing the early stage ........................................................................................................................ 41
5.1.1 Breathing with the team ................................................................................................................. 41
5.1.2 Exploring the scene ........................................................................................................................... 41
5.1.3 Defining the general goal and outlining frame objectives ................................................ 42
5.2 Building up the framework ..................................................................................................................... 43
5.2.1 Replacing “Action mails” with “Action items” ........................................................................ 44
5.2.2 Designing a public notice board................................................................................................... 45
5.2.3 Creating a knowledge base ............................................................................................................ 46
5.2.4 Researching important URLs ........................................................................................................ 50
5.2.5 Getting ready for the upcoming requests ................................................................................ 50
5.2.6 Designing the front page ................................................................................................................. 51
5.2.7 Site presentation and launch ........................................................................................................ 51
5.3 Partner sites deployment ......................................................................................................................... 52
5.3.1 Translation partner support site ................................................................................................. 53
5.3.2 Testing portal ...................................................................................................................................... 55
5.4 Further maintenance and development plan .................................................................................. 56
5.4.1 Forthcoming challenges .................................................................................................................. 57
5.4.2 Eventual future extensions ............................................................................................................ 58
6 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................................................ 59
7 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................................................ 61
7
1 INTRODUCTION
Elaborating on information systems as a competitive advantage in business nowadays would be
a cliché and worthless, too. The evolution of demands in the commercial and noncommercial
sectors as well has forced the organizations to get to a status where business without an own
information system is a subject of everyday struggle for survival. Not having information
securely stored in computers yet easily accessible to authorized groups, not having automatable
tasks and procedures automated and executed by tools, and not having large chunks of
information bulk-processed and evaluated by sophisticated applications is a question of higher
cost, time, and resource management. We might perhaps exclude companies running small
business for narrow customer audiences, where the eventual cost of ordering and implementing
an information system would represent multiples of their annual budget, but actually, an
information system would possibly be handy in such family firms, too. One could argue that
business consisting of no more than two or three employees can live without it; as such tiny
groups can develop their own system of work input/output handovers and sharing information
with one or two colleagues on a piece of paper. However, regardless of the mediums carrying the
information, an organized set of predefined actions, notes, processes, etc, can be referred to as
an (analogue) information system.
In a perfect world, there would be a universal digital solution for any kind of organization
independent on its dimension, structure, business focus or even geographic spread. Ideally, it
would be a solution that could be tailored and tweaked to deep details for any organization, and
would be scalable at the same time to respond to the particular divisions’ or subdivisions’
individual wants, all this managed in-house without a call for an external operator or contractor.
Of course, let us stay on firm ground and admit nothing goes that much simple and at least some
basic prerequisites have to be fulfilled. Luckily, we won’t go very far for those; computer literacy,
for instance, nowadays is wide spread and we could hardly find a successful and growing
business built up refraining of modern technology. On the top of that, basic computer
administration will do it, and multiplied by good will to learn and explore possibilities, the
peripheries can be extended far beyond what one could imagine.
In the real world, deploying information systems is often not as straightforward as expected. It is
a long and effortful process not always concluding to the desired result failing on different
8
factors. This paper talks about cooperation and sharing information in the real world and relates
to information and collaboration systems and techniques used in organizations. It thoroughly
unveils Microsoft SharePoint, a complex platform alternative combining features of content
management, information management and sharing, automated actions, etc., and provides a
detailed overview about the platform’s capability and usability. The later chapters apply the
SharePoint theory into practice by describing a site creation and deployment in a selected
organization. After reading this paper, the reader should comprehend the platform’s nature and
philosophy and should be able to determine, if it is an information and collaboration system
alternative suitable for their organization.
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2 COLLABORATION AND SHARING INFORMATION IN
ORGANIZATIONS
Ever since the world began people tended to socialize and group together, as groups have
always been more effective in achieving goals than individuals. Starting way back in the ancient
years, when the cavemen collaborated on hunting mammoths in order to survive, and ending up
today, when people still keep cooperating to survive, in the business world for example.
The fundamental element of collaboration is communication. Subsequently, the means of
communication are the carriers of information series that need to flow back and forth among
individuals or groups leading to completion of particular tasks. In other words, information is
being shared among them.
Just like communication, information sharing has also several means and channels, and they
depend on the characteristics of the information, such as its importance, level of privacy,
targeted audience, validity period, etc. Confidential documents cannot be pinned to a public
dashboard, and vice versa, information essential for a wide audience cannot be publicized in the
chairman’s office where only a few have access to. Hence arranging effective sharing and
forwarding of miscellaneous information among various target audiences might come up as
quite a challenge, especially for large enterprises, scattered worldwide, considering time or
privacy are key factors.
Being informed and informing others is essential. People need to have the latest information,
which also needs to be precise, so they can perform their tasks correctly. Everyone is exposed to
several information flows continuously and keeping an effective and transparent track of them is
not always simple.
One of the toughest challenges perhaps is finding the most effective way of recording and
keeping track of those, so they can instantly draw the required audience’s attention to them and
keep them coming back for eventual updates. Typically, many messages are simply told and kept
in mind for it is simply easier to keep small pieces of information such as instructions in mind
10
and passing over to newcomers than keeping a reasonable track of those. Let us imagine short
statements or directives with a certain validity period and tentative expiration date, it really is
faster to spread those across a group by word and forcing them to handle the information
themselves than writing it down on a piece of paper and pinning on a notice board, for example.
Let us not forget that it might tend to be updated, or completely changed, and finally removed
once. Someone would have to be assigned to be the caretaker unless we would want to avoid
hundreds of paper scraps pinned looking rather reluctantly and confusing. On the top of that,
categorizing them so they could get thematically grouped together to maintain transparency is
yet another thing worth considering.
Nevertheless, there undoubtedly are ways of solving the above problem, their efficiency,
however, in comparison to the effort made is negligible, such as sending e-mails to carry and
store such information. This practice begins to become complicated after a certain number of e-
mails sent, when one attempts to find something in a congested inbox, especially not being
entirely sure what keywords to search for. The e-mail solution’s success strongly depends on the
individuals’ mail management and in fact, demands a distributed sophisticated approach, as
everyone involved needs to work on his own effective mail managing solution in parallel. And
we’ve still not considered newcomers in a group, who won’t have access to those information
scraps unless they are resent to them, which obviously is yet another action required. Obviously,
this is calling for a centralized and effortlessly administrable solution at the same time, with
great visibility and simple access. Of course, this does not mean that e-mail is a not a strong
enough instrument for collaboration, in fact it is. The example above just simply demonstrates
that it is not the most appropriate one for all scenarios.
Apart from the short notes, we also have to cover areas rich on information that need to be
recorded somehow yet smartly, and exposed somewhere, where they are easily and intuitively
attainable. Again we encounter the categorization dilemma. Assigning a virtual category to a set
of information really is indispensable as it has a strong influence on the final intuitive factor of
the system keeping record of those. Thematically related sets need to be stored and exposed
together so the requestors find them and their relatives easily. Once the proper category is
selected, the most suitable storing method has to be kept on mind as well, so the information is
intuitively findable and conveniently useable for subsequent processing. The final
implementation then depends on the concrete, either electronic, or other custom developed
system.
2.1 Common techniques and solutions
Each organization certainly has its own developed methods and practices of coping with
information, but let us try to outline some that are probably the most common, and are generally
applicable. We can categorize the methods into two diverse categories based on the medium
type carrying and storing information:
Analogue: information held and carried outside computers, mostly paper
Digital: information held and carried in computer software and applications
By collaboration and sharing information, we refer to any electronic, non-electronic, verbal and
non-verbal interaction between/among the involved individuals or groups, including interaction
11
between/among colleagues, teams, managers and groups, not forgetting customers and service
providing partners or suppliers either. The last area worth focusing on is sharing information
with oneself and working efficiently with it, i.e. self-management. That means taking a look at
the techniques of recording and processing information by individuals for their personal need
only. That becomes interesting once there are many various and incoherent pieces of
information that need to be followed up and prioritized adequately.
2.1.1 Analogue techniques
Despite of being a part of the modern ‘e-world’ and underlying up to date technologies offering
‘e-solutions’ for all problems and requirements, there is still enough space persisting for the
good old-fashioned information carriers such as paper there. Some information simply is
predestined to be recorded on paper for a reason, as it might require hand written inputs such
as a signature, or, sometimes it is simply more effective and less demanding at the same time
than being covered by an e-solution. Let us also consider the fact that some environments
collaborate with groups or individuals who don’t necessarily have to have network or even
computer access, such as end users or customers in some scenarios.
2.1.1.1 Notice boards
They are one of the most popular devices. Notice boards serve as a nonviolent channel for
communicating information that impacts large audiences and doesn’t carry sensitive data, due to
being exposed to public. They are usually placed in rooms or corridors where many people pass
by so they can read them. An organization can have multiple notice boards wisely hitched over
the place so each of them reaches out to the corresponding audience; a central notice board with
announcements affecting everyone placed in a lobby or at the reception, and departmental
boards at each department’s lobby or a socializing room, for instance.
2.1.1.2 Newsletters
Several organizations run their own internal newsletters. They usually inform the employees
about the current happenings of the company, recent corporate activities, news, changes, etc.
They may also make for the employees possible to express their opinions and thoughts,
improvement suggestions, practically whatever related either to the organization or the people
within. It is a good way of presenting the company within its own structures, or even outside in
cases of newsletters freely distributed, even if it’s commercial flyers mostly.
2.1.1.3 Verbal communication
Probably the most frequent mean of sharing information. Co-workers pass information among
each other, and to customers and service/product providers, too. This is happening on a daily
basis from internal meetings, thru meetings with business partners, phone calls, or just regular
discussions among colleagues solving particular problems. Issues and problems are usually
reported verbally to the direct superiors and eventually escalated further. Important decisions
with either global or strong personal impact are also supposed to be told face to face, rather than
sent over in an e-mail. The undoubted advantage of oral communication is its promptness,
swiftness and space for immediate feedback, for it is interactive, unlike the previous two
channels. It’s weakness, however, is that it strongly depends on the involved individuals’
12
capabilities of memorizing what has been told, or other dedicated techniques they use. The
experience says that what is told and not taken a note of is fated to fade away.
2.1.1.4 Paperwork
Now let us focus on paperwork strictly related to collaboration and abandon any other paper
items such as contracts etc. Paperwork has a couple of practical representatives and mainly
serves as a self-management tool, although we can find some collaborative representatives, such
as user manuals for instance. Employees can administer their personal notebooks1, where they
take notes related to themselves, such as a checklist of tasks to be done, things to keep in mind
and following up on them later, or things that need to be kept in one’s sight permanently. A
notebook or a piece of paper comes very handy in need of taking quick notes of verbal
communications, as described above. One might antagonize that personal notebooks are far
from collaboration, but in fact, they’re tightly coupled as they carry outputs in a temporary
manner, and they actually do participate on collaboration, for they can function as basic data
sources to consequent actions that influence a broader spectrum of people.
Another paper tool often used to help memorize and retain attention is pin papers. People take
short notes on pieces of paper and pin them around their workspace so they don’t forget their
pending activities and have them in their sight. Once the task is done the paper is removed.
2.1.1.5 Calendars
Calendars belong to the typical stationary equipment of an office. Keeping numerous deadlines
and meeting schedules in mind is far less comfortable than making a note for a specific date.
Calendars are rather personal so they represent another self-management item, although wall
calendars placed in offices might serve as the office crew’s team calendar pointing out team cut-
off dates and business oriented or socializing events, too. Personal notebooks are also often
combined with calendars so one can merge a personal to-do list with a schedule.
2.1.2 Digital solutions
We could hardly find a thriving organization today, wherein information technologies would not
be in use. In the world of continuous IT evolution computers and networks play a fundamental
role in everyday business. We could also barely identify a phenomenon, for which there would
not exist some sort of computerized solution. The numerous software companies on the market
offer a various range of products adaptive to cover any possible exigency. The diversity of their
products and services is often even extended by individual solutions tailored according to the
customers’ specific requests. Some of them are very common, such as e-mail, others are business
specific and known within the distinct industry branches only.
2.1.2.1 Electronic mail
E-mail represents the modern correspondence of today. It is one of the most used
communication channels. Its popularity is thriving thanks to its swiftness and ease of use, which
1 In this context, notebook is meant to be a paper notebook.
13
does not restrict to business only, for it has a remarkable share outside the commercial sphere,
too. One of the main advantages of e-mail is that the information within can be conveyed to a
large target audience with the same effort as passing it over to a single receiver.
Apart from the basic behaviour and anticipated features of e-mail, today’s advanced mail
solutions available on the market often offer extra packages of handy features bundled to extend
the limitations of bare e-mail to help people organize and manage messages more effectively.
Those usually are client or server side features and gadgets, so changes executed on the server
are immediately effective at the clients’ end eliminating the need of the individual deployment
approach. Servers are then equipped with address books, calendars, mail templates, etc.
E-mails often carry information impacting more than one target user. In order to handle the
conveyance in an effortless manner and address the message to the appropriate receivers,
instead of collecting potential individuals one by one each time a message is communicated,
distribution lists come handy. A distribution list is a file of addresses collected upon a common
characteristic, such as participation on a specific project, membership in a specialized group,
operational department, seating in a room or hall, etc. Distribution lists can consist of people and
other distribution lists, too. For example, if a company is settled in two or more buildings, and
each building has several storeys, there can be a distribution list per storey enlisting employees
sitting on the particular storey, a distribution list per building consisting of the storeys’ lists and
one overall list consisting of the two buildings’ list. Thus, if an employee gets relocated, and
subsequently his membership within the storey lists is updated, this is automatically reflected in
the parent lists and the employee starts receiving information relevant to his new location and
no longer gets messages related to the old one. This is especially significant, when the relocation
involves changing the building, or even the country. The same scheme is applicable to a
structured hierarchy of any kind. Consequently, there has to be a manager per list responsible
for keeping it up to date. For a clearer picture, see another example in Figure 1: Cut-out of a
fictitious organization’s distribution list structure, which illustrates a hierarchy of distribution
lists per department.
Distribution lists also eliminate potential delays of responses due to absences. As there are
several people at the receiving end, vacations, sick days or business trips of employees will
never have impact on drawing adequate attention to any queries, for someone is always going to
be there to react. Besides, communication lead thru distribution lists secures that everyone on
the list is getting updated each time the query is sent back and forth, and taking a service request
over or backing a sudden absence up is very flexible.
14
Figure 1: Cut-out of a fictitious organization’s distribution list structure per department
2.1.2.2 Shared calendars
The analogue table and wall calendars outlined above have been surpassed by their digital
descendants. Although they are still in use, their potential will hardly satisfy today’s business
needs, especially when considering those related to collaboration. A digital calendar application
can act like a personal assistant and takes care of the user’s time management. Its features allow
the user to focus on work and forget about the scheduled tasks and appointments unless needed,
reminding him of them just in time. For example, inserting a recurring task into a table calendar
might get quite annoying if the number of occurrences is high, while inserting a task and setting
up its recurrence in an e-calendar is a one-off effort.
Shared calendars also empower the user to schedule an appointment with his colleagues or
partners easily, as he is able to see when they are occupied and when they are free, so the
organizes is capable of setting up a meeting selecting a time that would not collide with the
others’ schedules. Furthermore, not only human, but items can have their own calendar on a
server, too. If an item is a shared resource, such as a meeting room, a car or a video projector, its
calendar can turn to be a transparent booking schedule preventing multiple users reserve the
resource at the same time.
2.1.2.3 Intranets
Intranets have also become popular and many organizations run their portals, especially those
larger ones. An internal portal is a good and effective way of sharing information, because it is
exposed to a broad audience and important corporate conveyances are immediately accessible
to each employee. Intranet pages are somehow related to the analogue notice boards and are
probably replacing them, as they happen to be their evolved successors to a certain extent. Just
like notice boards sophistically pinned onto walls to address relevant target audience groups,
intranet can be analogically structured into departmental subsites as well, so everyone accessing
intranet has a direct access to information relevant to him and his group. Depending on the
Company A
Production
Managers Operatives
IT
Technical support
Developement
Analytics Programmers
Sales
Domestic Foreign
15
architecture and the functional features, the information flow can go either one way from the
organization downwards to the employees, or both ways if employees can post their messages
to the company or its employees thru the environment. They are usually developed and
administered in-house, but it depends on their scale and the scale of the company, and more
complex and multifunctional intranets can also be provided by external suppliers. However, an
in-house solution is an advantage, as eventual changes and updates tend to be executed and
published instantly, independently of the availability of an external provider.
2.1.2.4 Corporate information systems
On the contrary to intranets described above, corporate information systems are mostly
provided by external suppliers. They are one of those products that are getting individual
approach of the software providers. Different corporations naturally have diverse operation
requirements which eventuate in a strong need of developing dedicated systems to cover the
particular corporation’s requisites. They represent a complex system with different modules
often integrating the individual features elaborated earlier.
Deploying and operating a corporate information system is naturally somewhat more
demanding than operating particular tools and one-purpose applications. It is a longer process
consisting of analyses and design, deployment and operation. The prospects of such a system are
higher as it is presumed to cover a large spectrum of semi-automated information and data
management saving human effort and time. The expectations need to be identified and defined
in the early stages as implementation of substantial change requests set forth later intends to be
more expensive.
Information systems give great value in return. Their complexity draws the users’ focus to one
centralized product keeping the most fundamental information and data at one place eliminating
disorder and randomization. They undoubtedly play a key role in competitive business, because
they help business grow by taking over human tasks or actions and are capable of processing
large volumes of those in a significantly shorter timeframe. However, their universality within
an organization is just limited, since it is virtually impossible to implement a system, which
would please all needs of each individual, and sometimes groups, too. Yet satisfying additional
requests is still achievable by expanding the system’s capabilities, it will hardly meet a general
satisfaction, taking into account the needs underlie changes and considering the cost of
implementing those.
2.1.2.5 Collaborative software applications
Organizations today, especially those in the commercial sphere, often expand their business
worldwide. Having several subsidiaries distributed to different places implicate higher general
expenses and collaboration becomes even more challenging, when the parties operate in
different time zones. The analogue paper-based methods lose their battle to refined digital
solutions here.
The software market flexibly answers the evolving business model’s calls. There is a wide range
of various products focusing on each particular collaborative phenomenon there, facilitating
remote cooperation and the former barriers brought forth by distance are eradicated up to a
certain extent. Modern technologies enable participants located in different places to
16
communicate in real time broadcasting audio and video, as well. As telephony was invented in
the 19th century, it has been one of the most powerful collaborative elements ever since
connecting the participants and allowing them to communicate interactively in real time.
Because a picture tells more than a thousand words, the exigency of transmitting video has
grown and today’s collaborative systems need to combine audio/video broadcasting. There are
applications taking benefit from that, which for instance allow users to share their computer
screens across the network, so the attendees of the virtual meeting can see one common picture.
This, a meeting organizer can roll out a presentation and talk about business plans and all the
attendees get a clear picture thanks to the visualization. Giving training to remote employees or
providing technical support by sharing a computer screen is also very efficient. The limits of
broadcasting video are even beyond that. If the network bandwidth connecting the participants
is broad enough, real time video conferences are organisable, and colleagues or business
partners around the world can discuss important business decisions or a recurrent status report
eliminating the need of travelling.
Apart from direct vocal and visual interpersonal communication, collaborative software
applications also have their focus on data exchange, too. In a collaborative environment, where
achieving an outlined goal strictly depends on each particular component forming the ensemble,
there is a strong perforce of having an effective and transparent way of data management and
sharing implemented. The components need to be on familiar terms with what their
responsibilities are and how they contribute to form the ensemble. They need to know, where
they find information sources relevant to their area and they also have to be aware of the means
of submitting results to the rest of the components.
It is fair to assume that every organization comes across to work with documents of any kind.
Documents can have a lifecycle declared by the organizational requirements and the lifecycle of
each document needs to be tracked. They also need to be accessible to all users who can take
benefit of them, yet their atomicity must be retained. Dedicated software applications provide
virtual spaces for sharing such documents and come along with sets of appropriate attributes
and features disabling the users depreciate the documents by applying inconsistent changes to
them. Sophisticated document management tools integrate check-in/check-out features so only
one user makes changes to a document at a time, and support versioning, too, so there is always
a way back to a previous state if inappropriate changes are applied. This is, however, not
restricted to documents only, it is applicable to any file type, too. If the document/file is driven
by a workflow, the application also manages the file’s state and executes automations necessary
to handle a file of that kind.
Collaborative software applications might resemble information systems to a certain extent, but
they rather concentrate on solving problems and complications implied by the nature of
collaboration – ensuring relevant information is flowing and being shared among the individuals
or groups participating on accomplishing one common goal.
17
3 THE MICROSOFT SHAREPOINT PLATFORM
3.1 Overview
Microsoft SharePoint is a multipurpose platform responding to numerous challenges of today’s
collaborative character of business. It is a suite of various functions and gadgets building up
together strong solutions for an organization of any kind. It is a web browser-based technology,
so its frontend is interpreted as a set of web sites and pages, so called SharePoint sites. The sites
are easily accessible by the users thru their web browsers, and they do not require dedicated
training access and leverage from the platform, unless the users are familiar with basic usage the
web and its capabilities.
SharePoint offers a solution for all the previously mentioned collaborative challenges and
integrates functionality of easily customizable modules to create an information sharing point
(SharePoint), where the co-working participants meet and exchange information. It can function
as the organization’s internal or external web portal, or can even serve as a corporate
information system. The next couple of paragraphs will briefly outline a couple of essential
characteristics usually welcome by users, for which SharePoint has an answer for.
Platform independence
As the frontend is displayed to the users as a collection of websites, it is independent of the end
user’s local platform. Assuming a potential newcomer to a group collaborating thru SharePoint
has a web browser installed on their machine, their ramp up is straightforward. It also
eliminates the concern of diverse end user experience, if the platform is used as the
organization’s web presentation.
Security
Security is a fundamental expectation from an information system or collaborative toolset.
Different users connecting to a system have different roles and responsibilities; hence it is
important to have a solution securing the users interact with the system only within their
competences and permissions. This is easily achievable by creating security groups and granting
adequate permissions for the corresponding components within the system. Moreover, security
18
in SharePoint is scaled down to the smallest element in the system, such as a record in a list.
That makes it possible for an administrator to design a detailed security structure responding to
the ultimate needs of the organization.
Scalability
One of the major limitations of corporate information systems supplied by an external provider
is its universality. Large corporations employing numerous people can hardly have a system
designed and implemented, that could respond to each individual’s needs. Often, systems used in
organizations structured and distributed worldwide cannot even respond to the needs of certain
groups, departments or locales. SharePoint supports scaling its functionality and potential down
to the ultimate employee of the organization. Each department can administer their own
subsites managing information relevant to themselves only, and if this is not sufficient, the
individual employees can have their personal subsites created, too, benefitting from
SharePoint’s self-management features, all that supported with respective security.
Figure 2: A fictitious organization’s SharePoint site architecture
The figure above (Figure 2: A fictitious organization’s SharePoint site architecture) shows, how
an organization can build up its custom SharePoint based information system. Each element of
the chart represents a SharePoint site with its respective security policy. The corporate
information system is the general information point of the company where everyone has access
to and internally public information is shared. Then, each department has its own site where
only the members of the corresponding department have access to. The Human Resources
department has an additional internally public site, which functions as a communication
interface between the department and the employees. The Production department’s manager
and two other operatives have their own subsite beneath their department’s site, where they
securely keep their personal notes and data and can even share it to a desired extent. The
organization’s web portal is also SharePoint-based and besides the general presentation of the
company, it has two authenticated subsites for its customers and suppliers respectively.
Corporate SharePoint
information system
Human resources site
Human resources site for employess
IT site Production site
Manager's personal site
Operative A's personal site
Operative B's personal site
Partner facing SharePoint portal
Customer site Supplier site
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Search
SharePoint integrates an advanced full-text Search module. This is a very welcome feature once
the organization’s sites grow large and the time to find relevant information increases, too. The
Search module scans over the SharePoint site and returns relevant links to content fulfilling the
search criteria, so users can instantly find what they are looking for. Search is not limited to the
sites only; it also looks into documents themselves stored on the SharePoint sites.
Customizability
In spite of the fact that SharePoint is a versatile platform and responds to a wide range of
collaborative and information sharing business needs, it has a finite number of modules and
functions concluding to certain limitations. Organizations demanding features out of
SharePoint’s box or willing to customize those are able to extend their solutions thanks to
SharePoint’s programmability thru .NET development, which SharePoint is compatible with.
SharePoint is a web based platform and core customization is executable in-house thru web
coding, too, which is an advantage to standard corporate systems, to which application source
codes are not provided by the supplier.
Extensibility
Companies with an insufficient IT background not being able to afford customizing the inbox
features of SharePoint but in need of additional components for their business can get additional
module collections from the numerous third party providers’ products designed for SharePoint,
some even for free.
3.2 Branding and product outline
SharePoint as a branding name in fact represents a larger family of products and is sometimes
confused among users. The two distinct yet related fundamental products are:
Windows SharePoint Services
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server
3.2.1 Windows SharePoint Services (WSS)
WSS is the free distribution and entry point of the SharePoint technology and its deployment is
designed exclusively as a Microsoft Windows Server operating system’s extension, although
third party organizations have created a solution for deploying SharePoint on other systems,
such as Microsoft Windows Vista [1] for example. WSS is the starting kit to the SharePoint world,
and among other, in bundles the following key features, too [2]:
Content management system
Shared calendars and contact lists
Custom lists
Alerts & RSS
Discussion boards
Blogs and Wikis
Document management
Search
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The last released WSS version is Windows SharePoint Services 3.01; version 4.0 is being
developed and is coming forth introducing a new branding name –SharePoint Foundation 2010
[3].
3.2.2 Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS)
MOSS is the commercial upgrade of WSS and extends both the core and end user features [4],
too, and is licensed respectively [5]. MOSS boosts the SharePoint platform to a higher level
thanks to its numerous extensive business-oriented features. The following items are some of
the key extensions; the whole comparison table is available at Microsoft’s websites [6]:
Key performance indicators (KPIs): High level data that provide a quick overview of
business performance.
Business intelligence dashboards: Dashboards can assemble and display data from SQL
servers or other data sources.
“My sites”: A module that generates a personal page for each person in the organization
and automatically aggregates information and data from the entire SharePoint site
related to the person.
Content authoring and publishing, document workflows: Enhanced environment for
authoring and publishing web content, underlying workflows.
Enhanced search: Enterprise-level search enable to crawl for information within a
broader radius, returning consolidated results taking metadata such as search ranking
into account. Search behaviour, result retrieval and indexing are highly customizable.
The main advantage of WSS is that it is distributed as a free platform, though deployable on a
licensed Windows Server only. Nevertheless, WSS alone is powerful enough to serve as a
corporate intranet platform, collaboration and data centre, and even as an information system,
depending on the organization’s demands and processes. It is also a good entry-level product for
organizations interested in the technology providing broad trial possibilities before making a
decision to upgrade or not to the licensed MOSS product.
The last released version of MOSS is Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 20071. MOSS’ next
version is under development, too, and the forthcoming 2010 edition is going to be released with
SharePoint Foundation 2010.
3.2.3 Microsoft Search Server (MSS)
MSS is an advanced search extension application to WSS providing more sophisticated search
possibilities. To a certain extent, MSS can be understood as the extracted search module of
MOSS, being available as a standalone application, as MOSS does integrate all the search
characteristics of MSS [6]. MSS is an affordable alternative for organizations not demanding the
extended MOSS features except for search [7].
1 Statement recent to December 2009
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Apart from WSS, MOSS and MSS, there are a few more products sometimes related to the
SharePoint technology, such as PerformancePoint Server or Forms Server1. The development of
these products has been discontinued and they have been integrated in the MOSS solution [8].
Figure 3: The SharePoint product family and relations
3.3 Introduction to the environment
WSS and MOSS offer a different lineage of in-box features, but the platform principals and user
interface are the same for both. The major difference, from the end user experience view, is that
MOSS has a more extensive package containing more advanced modules and components,
including all those that WSS provides, too. From now onwards, we will exclusively relate to the
WSS platform presentation for the following reasons:
It is the edition available for free, even for commercial purposes
It is the entry level to the whole SharePoint technology
It is a satisfactory alternative for most organizations, and understanding it resolves in
understanding MOSS’ root principals, too
The target company, in which the SharePoint based implementation will be executed,
operates on WSS
SharePoint is a web-based platform consisting of web elements and collections. The
administration and end user interactions are managed thru the users’ web browsers, except for
core administrative settings impacting the architecture, schemes, etc. There are three
elementary components upon which the SharePoint sites and collections are built:
Sites and Workspaces
Features
Web parts
3.3.1 Sites and Workspaces
A SharePoint site or workspace can be perceived as a web portal. In other words, it is a
collection of cross-referenced web pages displaying and managing elements such as text,
pictures, charts, documents, etc. When SharePoint is deployed and made operational, there is a
1 Products for the business intelligence (BI) sector and corporate forms processing, respectively
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server
Windows SharePoint Services
Microsoft Search Server
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SharePoint Site created there based on a built-in template with some predefined data element
types and default web parts, so the users are instantly ready to post content to it and share
information. There are a few Site templates available in categories by default, such as:
Sites for Collaboration
o Team Site
o Blank Site
o Document Workspace
o Wiki Site
o Blog
Workspaces for Meetings
o Basic Meeting Workspace
o Blank Meeting Workspace
o Decision Making Workspace
o Social Meeting Workspace
o Multipage Meeting Workspace
There is virtually no difference among the Sites and among the Workspaces, as each type can be
built from the Blank template. These predefined templates, however, empower the site admin to
quickly set-up a thematic site with related features and layouts.
The scalability of SharePoint reposes in building hierarchical SharePoint sites, either subsites, or
entire site collections. If we create a new site or workspace within our already existing site, we
create its child subsite1. This subsite can inherit its parent’s properties, but can be refrained of
them and have its own properties set, including security and user roles. Thus, an organization
can easily have a site or workspace set up for each department and can delegate their
administration to departmental authorities (see Figure 2: A fictitious organization’s SharePoint
site architecture). The departments can create their subsites and delegate further, if needed, etc.
3.3.2 Features
Creating sites and workspaces is the fundamental step to build up an organization’s portal
structure. However, those are literally empty without any content when they are created, and
they represent the portal’s framework. Once these are set up, the end users can start publishing
content and information, and begin to utilize the platform.
SharePoint has several in-box features that are ready to be used upon creating a site. This pool of
available features is practically the same for any type of site or workspace. Some of the features
are automatically generated within each site and workspace, so they fit the thematic selection.
All feature types can have multiple instances; creating, modifying and deleting those depend on
the users then.
1 Subsites and Subworkspaces can be created only under Sites. A Workspace cannot have its own Subsite or Subworkspace.
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3.3.2.1 Lists
The SharePoint list feature is one of the basal elements of the entire platform. A list is a data
structure resembling a table in a database application. It is a collection of attributes which have a
data type. Just like any other end user interaction, creating a list is a web based routine; hence
the users are able to create their own web based databases without any advanced database
knowledge and independently on an IT database specialist’s support1. The individual attributes,
so called columns, can be set up right upon creating a list, but it is also possible to add, modify or
remove columns throughout the list’s lifecycle. Users can create multiple lists for storing
different areas of related information and they can link the attributes among each other, too.
Apart from basic text based properties, each list item can have a file attachment, too. Lists also
support views, so users can query for a desired set of attributes only and display them in a
predefined shape (sorted, filtered, grouped, etc). Additionally, lists also support versioning, so
changes made to the items can be rolled back to a user defined extent.
Both sites and workspaces allow users to create their own lists, and in addition to that, they
integrate some predefined list templates, such as:
Announcement
Contacts
Project tasks
Issue tracking
Links
These in-box lists have their properties and views set to function as different gadgets, despite
their core structure is a list. For an end user unfamiliar with the SharePoint background, they
might seem like completely distinct features.
3.3.2.2 Advanced list-based gadgets
Apart from the standard lists elaborated and outlined above, there are a few enhanced features
available in SharePoint’s box, too. These features are list-based, which means their
administration and customization has the same interface and functionality as standard lists
have, however, they have enhanced behaviour and displaying options.
Calendar
If a team has a shared list of events or schedules, then those can be recorded in a team’s shared
calendar. All members have then instant access to important dates and milestones, and see
changes immediately. By creating custom views, they can ensure that only information relevant
to them is displayed in a desired shape. A calendar, apart from the basic lists’ text views, can be
viewed as a standard daily, weekly, monthly calendar, or a Gantt chart, too.
Discussion board
SharePoint has an in-box implementation of a discussion board, too. The discussion board
automatically manages threads and their related replies.
1 The data is actually stored in a standard database, see 3.6 Technical deployment
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Survey
A survey is a practical gadget for gathering feedback from the site members. It has an intuitive
interface for setting up the survey questions quickly. They can also serve as a decision making
tool taking into account the targeted audience’s opinion. The Survey integrates a graphical view
displaying the results in a graph for a more pleasant analyse and evaluation. Thanks to the
security policies, surveys can be anonymous to the extent that users can only see their own
responses.
Blog
Blogs are also supported in SharePoint; however, unlike the rest of the list items, a blog needs to
be created as a separate workspace. Blog offers the same functionality as common web blogs,
such as publishing blog articles, categorizing them, and posting comments to articles.
3.3.2.3 Libraries
Libraries are special folders for managing files such as documents, pictures, spreadsheets, forms,
etc. Apart from storing the physical file itself, they allow the users to create and assign attributes
to the files, too. They have a similar character to lists, for they both are capable of storing related
files and metadata. The difference is that the libraries’ primary role is to manage documents and
their auxiliary metadata, while lists manage (meta)data and their auxiliary documents. They also
have a different user interface, both having their one adapted to their nature.
Libraries also support additional functions applicable on the files stored. They provide the users
the check-in/check-out functionality, preventing the users from undesired overwriting, and also
support document versioning to an extent defined by the user. Similarly to sites, workspaces and
lists, libraries can also be saved and shared as templates. Some of the Library types are as
follows:
Document library, for managing documents
Picture library, for managing pictures
Form library, for managing XML-based business forms
Wiki page library, for managing Wiki pages
Wiki page library
The Wiki library, as its name suggests, is SharePoint’s in-box implementation of Wiki, an engine
for creating quick interlinked web pages using a simple mark-up language [9]. Probably the most
famous Internet Wiki portal is Wikipedia, and SharePoint’s Wiki library leverages its
functionality. It is a straightforward feature ideal for creating process documentations,
knowledge bases, frequently asked question responses, etc. Along with the search functionality
integrated in SharePoint, it is a powerful tool for users looking for information.
3.3.2.4 Web pages
A web page in SharePoint is a single blank page. As SharePoint’s front-end architecture mostly
consists of the platform’s predefined components and architectural elements, a blank web page
is the only component for publishing content to the site in a common way, though, limited to a
rich text editor.
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3.3.3 Web parts and Web part pages
While sites and workspaces function as the structural and hierarchical element of SharePoint,
and the features represent the data carriers and data management centres, web parts take the
promoter’s role in the system.
When a Site is created and some content is already stored within, such as lists, calendars,
documents, etc., they are all stored and accessible in their corresponding libraries. In order to
draw users’ attention to the most important cut-outs of those, so called web parts are used.
Upon creating a site, aside from the libraries and lists generated, there is a front web part page
created, too, which is the default page the users see when they access the site. This page
exclusively consists of SharePoint web parts. A web part can be understood as a component
type, which can be used and placed on the page.
Each of the created data structures can serve as a data source for web parts. The user is able to
select the View that will be used to display the data and can also select the web part’s placement
within the page. Additionally, the user can adjust settings such as web part height, width,
chrome, option to minimize, close, etc. A data structure can be placed on one web part page
multiple times. This is particularly appropriate, when the structure has more views created. For
example, if there is a list of vehicles owned by the organization, one web part can be a view
displaying the currently available vehicles, and the other one a view displaying vehicles due to
be serviced within the next 14 days. Both information sources are relevant to different target
audiences, but can coexist on one common web part page.
Web part elements are not restricted to the data structures created only. There are some other
web parts, too, such as a content editor web part, where users can create content using standard
HTML, image web part, which displays an image from any URL, or even a web capture web part,
that integrates and displays any internal or external web page’s content from anywhere on the
Internet.
Users can also create additional web part pages where they place web parts responding to their
personal requirements. They can create a page hierarchy within one site and display
thematically related information on each separate web part page, or each employer within a
department can run their own web part page as a self management toolkit.
3.4 Advanced usability options
3.4.1 Permissions and security
3.4.1.1 Permission levels
Permissions and security in SharePoint are managed via user roles. By default, there are 4 basic
user roles with the following permission levels defined:
Full control: Administrator security level, unlimited access to all resources and actions
within a site
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Design: Designers can create and manage features, design the site and web part layout,
they cannot manage security and permissions settings or create sites and workspaces,
like administrators
Contribute: Contributors can add new items into the already created features, create
their own views, etc.
Read: Readers can only read all content on the site.
An administrator can create a custom security level and grant permission to each particular
interaction with the SharePoint site. The default permission levels can be modified, too.
3.4.1.2 Security groups
The most effective way of managing permissions is creating security groups. Each group is
granted a permission level and users are subsequently added to the corresponding one. That
facilitates user management and access control.
3.4.2 Templates and content reusability
As we already know, SharePoint integrates a few predefined feature templates enabling the
users to create data structures or sites quickly. Sometimes a data structure or a custom created
and developed site might become reusable for other departments within the organization, too.
If, for example, an organization is willing to create a dedicated site for each business partner and
the data and layout requirements are the same (or at least similar) for all, instead of creating the
same site with the same features and layouts for each partner repeatedly, the customized site is
saved as a template, and consequently the remaining site instances are created from that
template. Site templates can be shared across the entire organization; hence same departments
from the particular subsidiaries located worldwide can cooperate and save each other’s time and
effort by sharing their templates.
Eventually, any created and customized SharePoint feature can be saved as a template.
Especially large organizations can benefit from internal groups leveraging data from each other
(see Figure 4: Subsidiaries worldwide sharing their customized site, list, library, and other
templates).
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Figure 4: Subsidiaries worldwide sharing their customized site, list, library, and other templates
3.4.3 Microsoft Office integration
The SharePoint platform can be deemed as a broader family member of Microsoft Office (Office),
Microsoft’s application collection designed primarily for office work. Utilizing the Office
applications’ integration in SharePoint makes document and information management even
more streamlined. The symbiosis of the products turns SharePoint to a yet more powerful
toolset.
The particular applications of the Office suite cooperate with SharePoint individually, each
covering its purpose. The common sign of all is that they support publishing the documents
created in them directly to a SharePoint library, and, if an Office document is opened from a
SharePoint library and changes are made to it, they can be directly saved to the Library.
3.4.3.1 Microsoft Outlook
Outlook is the e-mail and time management tool helping people manage their incoming and
outgoing e-mail messages, plan and organize time in its integrated calendar, follow up on
pending tasks in its to-do list, and is also capable of retrieving RSS feeds.
Shared calendars
As stated above, SharePoint has an advanced calendar list type built in that can be used as a
team calendar for managing various events and important dates. Such a shared calendar can be
connected to any user’s personal Outlook as the user’s secondary calendar. The Calendar is
synchronizing with the SharePoint server so changes made on the server are replicated to the
user’s calendar, too. As Outlook has a feature of displaying an alert upon calendar events, the
user is always alerted about important events on time. If the calendar is used an organization’s
vacation planning tool, managers are able to monitor and track their subordinates’ vacations,
and they get informed about their absence in time.
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Alerts
Each feature on a SharePoint site can have alerts defined. An alert is an automated email
message sent to users upon an action summarizing the event that pulled the action in a
predefined mail message. The alert can be triggered upon creating, modifying or deleting an
item within any component of the site. An item can have multiple alerts defined for multiple
targets. If, for example, there is a team calendar tracking vacations, upon submitting a vacation
event, the manager gets an automated e-mail alert, that a vacation has been submitted. The
manager is instantly made aware and can approve or decline it. Alerts are practical especially if
users wait for some event; they don’t have to check the SharePoint site periodically, they get
alerted once the action is executed.
Alert can be set up to be sent either immediately, or in daily or weekly summaries, too.
Administrators and Designers can create forced alerts sent to anyone making sure relevant
information is getting adequate and early attention. The remaining user roles can create alerts
sent to themselves only.
Synchronized libraries
Another difference between libraries and lists is that libraries can be connected to Outlook,
similarly to calendars. Once a library is connected to the user’s Outlook, it keeps synchronizing
its content with the user by creating ‘offline’ copies in his Outlook folder. The synchronization
runs downstream only; changes made in the user’s folder are not replicated backwards. If, for
example, the organization’s IT department keeps rolling out script files for process automation,
the users have get an offline copy instantly not needing to monitor the library and download a
copy.
RSS
Similarly to alerts described above, each item SharePoint feature can also be broadcasted to the
user in an RSS feed. RSS stands for “Really Simply Syndication” and it is a web feed format used
to publish content that is getting updated frequently [10], so readers are instantly informed.
SharePoint automatically aggregates the data within a data structure and creates feeds for the
subscribed users. The difference between an alert and RSS is that alerts can be defined per any
and only that specified change made, while RSS feeds the user with all changes in a standard RSS
way.
3.4.3.2 Microsoft Excel
Excel is Microsoft’s spreadsheet processing application. It has advanced calculation and data
processing features.
Import/export
SharePoint is able to export to and bulk import data from an Excel spreadsheet. Import and
export can function as a streamlined data exchange manner with business partners. The content
of a list is exported into a spreadsheet and handed over to the partner, and eventual
modifications are quickly uploaded back to the list by submitting the spreadsheet once it is
handed back by the partner. A custom list can also be created and filled with data instantly by
uploading a spreadsheet, making the top rows be the list column names. SharePoint is also
capable of exporting the libraries’ content providing a complete list of files stored therein way
down the subfolder structure within.
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Exporting content to an Excel spreadsheet is a quick way of converting SharePoint data to inputs
to any other system or person not interconnected with SharePoint.
Excel Web Parts
Excel can be interpreted on a SharePoint site as a web part, too. An Excel workbook’s sheet can
be grabbed and displayed in an Excel web part as a pivot table, pivot chart, or, simply the sheet
with raw data can be displayed, too. If an organization stores monetary or other numeric data in
spreadsheets, pivot charts and tables can provide a high level overview of the data.
3.4.3.3 Microsoft InfoPath
InfoPath is an application designed to create and manage business forms, such as status reports,
purchase orders or business trip forms. It is an XML based form editor, so it cooperates with
SharePoint’s form library. With Microsoft InfoPath, users can create, manage and publish forms
in order to share them within the organization. Forms created in InfoPath can also be viewed in
browsers, so an organization can create hiring application forms and publish them to their
public SharePoint subsite allowing applicants to submit their applications not needing to have
InfoPath installed.
3.4.3.4 Microsoft Access
Access is Microsoft’s database application for managing simple databases. Its cooperative
functionality with SharePoint has similar a ground to Excel. Once a list grows large enough so it
is no longer convenient to be processed in SharePoint’s user interface, users can switch to open
it in and manage in Access, a tool designed to work with databases. The list can be either
exported as a snapshot copy processed independently, or, it is simply interpreted in Access and
changes made are saved back to the SharePoint list.
3.4.3.5 Microsoft Visio
Visio is an application designed for creating diagrams and graphs, and SharePoint is capable of
interpreting those as interactive components to a certain extent. A Visio diagram can be saved as
an XML file, and SharePoint’s XML web part displays it as it was a diagram or graph in Visio, with
a limited toolbar with a few tools. Thus, the organization can create a business process diagram
or hierarchy chart and publish it straight to a SharePoint web part page as a graphic element.
3.4.3.6 Microsoft SharePoint Designer
SharePoint Designer is a WYSIWIG1 application from the broader Office family designed for
creating custom websites, and tweaking and managing SharePoint sites, too. SharePoint
Designer extends SharePoint’s possibilities and overrides limitations given by the browser-
based site management. With SharePoint Designer, a site owner can extend the platform’s
capabilities and features by adding standard web components, such as web forms, buttons,
checkboxes, etc., which can be programmed to trigger actions. The application also enables an
administrator to design and manage a site on a code level accessing configuration resources that
1 WYSIWIG – What you see is what you get
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are inaccessible thru the browser’s environment because of security and safety precautions
usually. While administering SharePoint thru the native browser environment requires little
platform and programming knowledge, SharePoint Designer is a tool designed for advanced and
experienced site administrators understanding web coding and implications of configuration
changes made. Unskilful interference of some resources can cause damage to the entire
SharePoint site collection. SharePoint Designer is available for free and can be downloaded from
Microsoft’s sites [11].
3.4.4 Workflows
A workflow is a logical sequence of actions in a process producing an outcome [12]. SharePoint
integrates workflows as an instrument for streamlining and automating certain actions expected
from a component or item. For example, if publishing conveyances in an organization goes thru a
sequence of steps and statuses, such as revisions, approvals or sign-offs, a workflow is
applicable. As an instance, workflows can determine that documents that are not signed off by
certain authorities are not displayed on the SharePoint site unless they get signed off. A similar
workflow can be applied to authoring documentation in an organization’s Wiki library.
Workflows combine automated notifications with property changes. They are built up on
conditions that have to be met to trigger actions. If, for example, a workflow is applied to a
shared resource tracking list, after submitting a reservation request, the request gets a Waiting
for approval status and notification is sent to the approving authority. Once the authority
approves the request, the status changes to Approved and further notification is sent to the
shared resources manager, who prepares the resource for operation. Once it is prepared, the
shared resources manager confirms the task. The requestor is notified about the availability of
the requested resource and the status of the request is changed to Ready for loan, and the
resource is withdrawn from loaning for the defined period. Once the loan is over and the
resource is given back, the requestor changes the status to Loan over, and the resource manager
closes the file upon obtaining the resource physically. Workflows can combine actions and steps
inside and outside the system.
SharePoint has a predefined built-in three-state workflow designed foremost for issue tracking,
but is applicable to any list in fact1. Apart from that, SharePoint Designer enables users to create
custom workflows adjusted to fit their business needs appropriately, allowing them to define
multiple conditions and multiple actions per any item, too. A workflow can automatically run
changes on various items within a site, if they influence each other. Thus a manual change made
to one item can trigger changing properties in other components driven by a customized
workflow.
3.4.5 Site usage reports
SharePoint automatically records interactions within its sites. Administrators are then able to
monitor site usage and derive consequences from the statistics. Site hits tracked, for example,
may relate to the popularity or importance of each particular site. If a page has a small number
of hits, it is either unattractive to the users or is hard to find. Analyzing the statistics may lead to
1 The list must contain a Choice column property with three or more values predefined [12]
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enhancing the user experience by modifying site accessibility or removing unwanted content.
The administrators can query for monthly or daily summaries and are able to retrieve the
following reports:
Page hits: How many times has each site been hit
User hits: How many hits has each user made in total
Operating system: Which operating systems are the users accessing the site from
Browser: Which web browser do the users use to access the site
3.5 User interface
3.5.1 Site layout elements
At first sight, a SharePoint site looks like a common web site. The user interface layout is divided
into three basic elements:
Top bar
Left navigation
Content area
Top bar
The top bar together with the left navigation panel represent the site’s navigating elements. It is
up to the site designer to decide which element will represent the top level navigation and which
the sublevel one. The more intuitive alternative is to select the top bar as the main navigation
element enabling the users to switch between the subsites created within a site. For example, if
an organization has a team site, a supplier site and a customer site, links to those should be
displayed in the top bar. The left navigations subsequently represent the local navigation within
the single site.
The top bar with the links can be inherited from the parent site but inheritance can also be
suppressed. This is particularly appropriate if the organization does not want the partners to see
the internal structure of the SharePoint site collection and corresponding sites. Organizations
building up a SharePoint site per supplier would appreciate the suppliers not seeing links to
each other’s site, even though they are authenticated and would not have permissions to access
them anyway. Then, the organization’s collaboration site (the parent site) may be set up to
display links to all subsites on its top bar, while the individual subsites (the partners, supplier,
etc.) only display a “home” link leading to the subsite itself. The subsites can also have individual
top bars with important links, or can point to further subsites eventually. The search form for
inserting queries is also located on the top bar. Additional elements can be added to the top bar
using SharePoint Designer. The top bar is illustrated in Figure 5: SharePoint default site layout ,
and is labelled with number “1”.
Left navigation
The left navigation is the same for all pages within a site and is configurable. Except for a plain
navigation consisting of headings and links, which are customizable, it can also integrate web
parts. Utilizing SharePoint Designer, additional elements can be placed there, too. The top
element on the left navigation is a built-in link to “All site content”, which is handy for the
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administrators and designers, for they can manage all the features and content existing within
the site by accessing the link. The left navigation is illustrated in Figure 5: SharePoint default site
layout, and is labelled with number “2”.
Content area
The content area is the primary area for placing content and data. The data is displayed either by
placing web parts (if it is a web part page) or any web content writing HTML code. SharePoint
Designer extends the possibilities and designers can add any web elements and functions to the
site, too. The content are is illustrated in Figure 5: SharePoint default site layout, and is labelled
with number “3”.
Tabs
Meeting workspaces don’t have a left navigation pane; they have a tabbed interface instead,
which substitutes the secondary navigational element on the site. The tabbed layout of the
workspaces creates a more comfortable interface for recording and storing meeting related data,
such as attendees, agendas, list of objectives, their status, etc.
Figure 5: SharePoint default site layout
3.5.2 Visual accessories
Visual themes
Apart from customizing a SharePoint site by placing web parts and content on it, a SharePoint
site can dispose of a few graphical customization elements, too. There are several embedded
visual themes in SharePoint, which are applicable independently per site. The different graphical
possibilities can breathe life into a team site especially once the graphical pattern matches the
organization’s representative colours. Some of theme colour combinations are more contrastive
providing a good user experience particularly for visually impaired audiences. Additional visual
themes can be downloaded from Microsoft’s sites and from third party providers, too. The
themes can also be modified in SharePoint Designer.
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Thematic icons
The top bar, except for its functionality explained above, also hosts the thematic icon of the site.
Similarly to the visual themes, each SharePoint site can have its own thematic icon set and
displayed on the leftmost part of the top bar. By setting up visual themes and thematic icons,
organizations can create pleasantly looking thematic sites for their partners and themselves, too.
3.6 Technical deployment
Although the end user’s platform independence is one of the highlights outlined in the Overview,
the SharePoint server deployment and operation is strictly limited to a machine running on a
Microsoft Windows Server operating system, as it uses Windows Server’s Internet Information
System for serving content [2]. Hence SharePoint’s fundamental installation prerequisite is to
have at least one operational server with either of the Microsoft Windows Server 2003 or 2008
editions installed.
3.6.1 Server architecture
There are two SharePoint server deployment approaches depending on the scale requirements
and resource availability [13]:
Standalone deployment
Server farm deployment
3.6.1.1 Standalone deployment
A standalone deployment means installing the whole SharePoint platform to a single server. This
approach is suitable for organizations willing to minimize the implementation and operation
cost, provided that they opt for the free WSS distribution. In case of MOSS, a standalone
deployment is recommended for demonstration purposes only [14], for IT professionals to
discover the force function of the product, and evaluate the potential return of investment of an
eventual subsequent corporate implementation. It is also suitable in case of the organization is
willing to deploy just a small number of websites, but then it is worth considering the free WSS
alternative instead of the retailed MOSS.
Database
When installing WSS, Windows Internal Database (WID) is automatically installed, too, to serve
as default storage of the data managed on SharePoint [13]. WID is the embedded database
alternative to the retail Microsoft SQL Server database product. It is suitable for organizations
not having SQL server purchased and willing to save cost [15]. If an organization uses a
Microsoft SQL Server, it can be used as the enhanced database solution for WSS. MOSS has
Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express Edition embedded and installs it as the SharePoint database
by default.
The database resources significantly influence SharePoint’s in terms of growth. Principally, a
steep growing curve can be expected once users get acquainted with the platform and the
database set-up has to be large and swift enough to serve the users’ needs. When designing a
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deployment, the administrators have to take into account the potential growth causers, such as
versioning, etc.
3.6.1.2 Server farm deployment
A server farm deployment results in distributing SharePoint’s individual server roles onto
separate servers. The obvious motivation is to provide better performance and user experience
by load balancing the services on separate dedicated machines, especially in large organizational
environments. WSS defines the following two server roles [13]:
Web Front-end server
Database server
MOSS defines the following server roles [16]:
Web Front-end server
Database server
Application servers1
Topologies
The SharePoint server farm topology depends on the organization’s requirements. Before
implementing a farm server, it is important to analyze the expectations from the platform and
take load balancing and eventual geographical distribution into account. The minimal count of
servers for a farm deployment is two.
3.7 Similar products and technologies
Collaborative tools and applications are no novelty and have been demanded and developed
before SharePoint arrived to the market. Apart from customer tailored solutions delivered by
software companies specializing in this area, there are many box solutions of various sizes
available on the market, too. Some of those remarkable for their complexity and retailed
worldwide are elaborated as follows.
3.7.1 IBM Lotus Connections
IBM’s Lotus products have been available on the market in the last decades to help people
cooperate and manage resources. Lotus Connections is an advanced suit of modules designed for
collaboration resembling those present in SharePoint, too, such as content management and
sharing, wikis, blogs, task management, custom profiles etc [17]. Lotus Connections can be
perceived as a very complex and competitive, yet licensed alternative to SharePoint, which
makes it slightly disadvantageous for smaller organizations, particularly for those operating on
Windows Server systems available to deploy SharePoint as a free add-on.
1 The Application servers host MOSS’ extended services, such as search indexing, Microsoft Excel Calculation Services, etc.
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3.7.2 Oracle Beehive
Oracle Beehive is another enterprise communication and collaboration platform with a similar
feature scope to SharePoint and Lotus Connections. The platform is categorized into three main
collaborative areas: enterprise messaging (calendar, e-mail, and tasks), team collaboration (file
sharing, wikis, contextual search and discussions), and synchronous collaboration (conferencing,
chat and voice chat) [18]. Similarly to SharePoint, Beehive is built up on cross-referenced pages
displaying ‘web parts’ and multimedia content. Beehive also supports integration of Oracle
products, so companies operating and utilizing Oracle’s software would probably benefit from
Beehive rather than SharePoint, although Beehive is a licensed platform.
3.7.3 HyperOffice Total Collaboration
Total Collaboration is again a very similar platform to the previous ones, and SharePoint, too.
The suite provides features such as content management, task management, e-mail
communication, calendars, project management, wikis, intranet/extranets sites, and customer
portals, too. Similarly to SharePoint, it is a web-based platform providing end user platform
independence [19]. The Total Collaboration suite is again a licensed product. However,
HyperOffice provides professional training and ramp-ups, end user (customer) support and
automatic upgrades. The costs of the organizations operating SharePoint are then analysable
and comparable to costs of purchasing Total Collaboration, depending on the organization’s
demands and structure.
3.7.4 Google Apps
Google Apps is the collaborative suite developed by Google. It encapsulates e-mail, calendars,
document management and sharing, sites for intranet [20], etc., a collection of collaborative
modules to empower cooperation within teams and organizations. Contrary to SharePoint or
Lotus Connections, Google Apps’ are run on the platform provider’s (Google’s) server side. That
makes it instantly possible for teams work together from any place in the world. The services
provided are licensed for business purposes, but as those all are hosted and maintained by
Google, organizations are disengaged from operating their own dedicated hardware
infrastructure and maintenance services concluding to cost savings. Particularly smaller
organizations with a few employees which need an effective collaborative environment might
benefit from these services having their basic IT requirements (mail, calendars, etc.) virtually
outsourced. Though, larger organizations looking also for integrating business intelligence and
shared workspaces with dedicated IT departments might leverage from SharePoint’s
customizability and scalability.
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4 INTRODUCING THE COMPANY
The targeted company in which a SharePoint-based solution is going to be implemented is called
Moravia IT. The company is also being referred to by its brand name - Moravia Worldwide.
Moravia Worldwide is a leading provider of translation, localization and testing services. Their
globalization solutions enable companies to enter global markets with high quality localized
products and services that meet the language and functionality requirements of local customers
in any locale. Moravia Worldwide has large regional production centers in Brno (Czech
Republic), Nanjing (China) and Rosario (Argentina). These are supported by local offices and
production centers in North America, Japan, China, Ireland, and throughout Europe [21].
Despite localization is not a new industrial sector and is spread worldwide, it is hardly
recognized among public not having been engaged in localization services or information
technologies. Therefore, an explicit definition will make sure it is not confused with localization
in terms of finding locales or whereabouts of something.
Localization is the process of adapting internationalized software for a specific region or
language by adding locale-specific components and translating text [22]. The non-linguistic part
of the process is often referred as engineering.
Figure 6: A simplified diagram of the localization process and its sub-processes
Localization
Translation Engineering
Pre-processing
Post-processing
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The company has more than 500 employees worldwide [21] and its internal structure consists
of departments such as sales, finances, human resources, operations, and business partner
department. The operations department represents the major portion of the company and its
further structure is outlined in Figure 7: High-level diagram of the Operations department
structure in the company:
Figure 7: High-level diagram of the Operations department structure in the company
Operations represent the company’s production division. It consists of three production centres
hierarchically distinguished by the country they reside in. Each production centre consists of
several engineering groups, and engineering groups consist of several project teams, usually
thematically related to each other (same customer, similar processes, similar products, etc.).
4.1 Targeting focus
The individual project teams and sometimes the engineering groups or even production centers
do need to cooperate and share information among each other just like team members of a
specific team need to within the team itself. The larger structure divisions (production centers &
engineering groups) rather tend to a looser cooperation and information sharing in comparison
with the project teams, therefore focusing on a single project team and building up a solution for
them makes more sense than implementing one for a wider audience. Besides, information
relevant to a large audience is published by default on the company’s intranet site (built on the
SharePoint platform) and usually pleases the looser cooperation’s demands.
A project team can consist of two up to fifteen members depending on the size and balance of
the project. Teams can have core members and temporary resources to respond to peaks. In
order to be able to maximally utilize the power of services and possibilities provided by the
SharePoint platform, the target team for which the solution would be implemented ought to be a
larger one. The larger the team is, the higher the general expenses are and the more effective
means of sharing and distributing relevant information are required. Also, the final result of the
solution in comparison with the current status is more measureable in terms of improvement.
Operations
Production Centres
Engineering Groups
Project Teams
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4.2 Getting acquainted with the focus team
Our focus project team (FPT) consists of circa 12 core members1, but is scalable and can be
extended according to the project’s eventual demand hiring temporal manpower. The team is
dedicated to one specific client and cooperates with them on a single long term ongoing project,
which also involves linguistic services. Translation and language quality services are outsourced
to different translation service providers (TSP). Due to the large dimension of the team and its
permanent and stable focus on a continuous business project, it forms a detached localization
group within the company’s hierarchy itself, as explained above. The team consists of the
following two sections:
Project management: Project managers are responsible for managing the project, i.e.
negotiating schedules and finances, supervising and coaching the execution, ensuring in-
time deliveries, communicating with the customer, etc.
Engineering: Engineers are responsible for executing the non-linguistic part of product
localization, measuring and ensuring quality, preparing files for translation and
assembling the translated files into the final product
Despite the team works on one single continuous project, it underlies evolution and changes to a
certain extent. This project has a relatively stable (recurring) character in terms of handing the
product over to the team from the customer, engineering, assuring quality (testing and
regression) and handing back to the customer. However, the team also needs to be flexible to
respond to challenges of the changing business such as subprojects or special orders requested
by the customer irregularly, often with specific engineering requirements and overlaying tight
timeliness. In such cases, so called virtual teams (v-teams) are assigned to take end-to-end
responsibility of the task. A v-team can be perceived as a lineup of engineer(s) and project
manager(s) from the core team to practically form a temporal team enduring throughout the
subproject’s lifecycle. Each member of the team can belong to several v-teams at a time but they
remain to be members of the core teams working on the main project simultaneously. V-teams
can also be formed to fit the team’s various internal requirements always responding to the
most current business needs. Some v-teams have long-term lifecycles evolved and demanded by
the project’s nature, such as:
Vendor team
Team responsible for distributing the linguistic parts of the product to the translation
service providing partners, negotiating deadlines, and collecting the translations upon
completion. The secondary role is providing support to the partners.
Multimedia team
Team of specialists responsible for engineering and producing multimedia content as a
part of the product requested by the client.
Dev team
Team responsible for monitoring processes and tools, providing support and developing
tools and gadgets to streamline the process (process improvement).
1 Eventual fluctuation is not taken into account.
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Each team is conducted by a Project Manager (PM) who is responsible for the team’s goals as a
whole. A PM can lead more teams, particularly those smaller ones.
4.2.1 Project workflow
The following drawing illustrates the (simplified) workflow of the team from a high-level point
of view. There are two basal terms that will need to be explained first.
Order An order is a (recurring) part of the process when a (part of the) project is
physically sent (transferred) from the client to the service providing partner. Orders also
represent stages or parts of the project and numbering those helps identify a concrete
stage.
Delivery A delivery is the opposite procedure to an order – transferring the processed
(part of the) project to the client. However, one order can be returned to the client in
several deliveries depending on priorities etc. of the order. Regular multiple deliveries of
an order also enable a more scalable timeline of the project with numerous milestones
(milestone per delivery) instead of one final (complete delivery in the end) and eventual
failures with a possible negative impact on the entire project can be detected at an early
stage.
Figure 8: A simplified workflow of the FPT’s localization process
An order in the FPT’s project consists of a set of (usually XML) files and images, so called
sources. Each order is numbered and comes with order instructions specific for that order only.
The instructions clarify which files and images need to be localized for which languages. Prior to
sending the order to the translation partners, the files are pre-processed according to the order
instructions and set to a translatable state. That is called “order preparation”. Subsequently, the
order is distributed by the vendor v-team to the TSPs accordingly. As soon as the portions
defined in the order agreement between the FPT and the TSP are translated (usually per
business priorities), they are delivered back by the TSP to the FPT, who execute their post-
processing and compile the files to the final product, which is finally delivered to the customer.
Customer
FPT
•Pre-processing
Translation partner
•Translation
FPT
•Post-processing
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4.2.2 Selecting the delegate
The general goal is to design and implement a SharePoint site tailored to cover team
communication and information sharing as a whole. It is also expected that the deployment of
the site will introduce immediate improvement and general expense savings. Besides the
general goal, concrete expectations have to be clearly outlined.
At the very beginning, it is fundamental to select a key member of the team and assign him the
role of the team’s delegate, who would represent the team and would be able to cover and
interpret their needs, at least at the initial phase of the site development. The later phases will
certainly need the engagement of the rest of the members, too. The delegate should completely
understand the processes and interconnections inside and outside the team, identify the most
concerning areas, and thus outline the particular objectives and expectations. The delegate will
also overtake the role of the SharePoint site’s designer (owner) in the final stages to be able to
extend or modify the site based on the needs of the project, the team and his. A SharePoint based
platform usually does not have a finite lifecycle defined. Once it is deployed it is expected to be
maintained and refreshed continuously so it can respond to the organization’s changing
requirements and demands.
A Project Manager appears to be a predisposed candidate who is supposed to be familiar with
the project’s managing scope and with the production itself as well, as both these are expected to
be involved in the solution provided by the SharePoint site. Identifying all the areas that could be
transformed to the SharePoint site at the early stage will sound like an impossible plan. At first, a
framework will have to be designed on which the further development will be built on.
The identification of the team members’ needs and requests is supposed to happen by
interviewing them one by one (or in smaller groups, v-teams for example) and taking notes of
the suggestions. Those will then be analyzed and evaluated. A subsequent design and eventual
implementation will follow. The delegate will keep being recurrently interviewed in weekly
meetings, in which the progress of the site development will also be confronted. The meetings
will also provide space to presenting new ideas revealed in the meanwhile.
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5 IMPLEMENTING THE SOLUTION
5.1 Initializing the early stage
5.1.1 Breathing with the team
Despite a delegate has been chosen to represent the team, acquiring a team member’s eye of
beholder will facilitate to understand the team’s day-by-day life. It will ensure a higher chance of
understanding the requirements consistently and eliminate gaps and misunderstandings, which
are often the main issues when building an information system by external consultants.
Particularly once the requestor himself is unable to identify and formulate the requests
precisely. Being with the team on-site should enable understanding of the later requirements
from an inside point of view, thus creating solutions perfectly tailored to the specifications. Such
an opportunity is rarely applicable in practice but if there is one it is worth to be used.
Breathing with the team then means being involved in the team’s regular activities, such as
ordinary daily work, reporting or team meetings. The main aim is to dive deep into the workflow
and understand the processes from a low level. It also comprises observing the communication
and sharing information between the particular sub teams (v-teams), towards the customer and
translation partners as well. Many improvement opportunities might get overlooked by the team
members due to the long-term routine (and by the delegate as well), but the analyst should be
able to point those out. Recognizing those will be one of the toughest challenges.
5.1.2 Exploring the scene
The team is being exposed to many sources and kinds of information on a daily basis. Some of
the information have a one-off character and need not to be tracked, but they definitely need to
be shared. Other information can be long lasting, and either static, or dynamic. Static would
stand for information that is not being changed during its lifetime (and if, then rarely). An
example of static information is a list of translation partners including their contacts, e-mail
addresses etc. Dynamic types of information are subjected to changes on an ongoing base, and
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need to be revisited and eventually modified by the team members regularly. From the analyst’s
point of view it is important to recognize and distinguish which information is worth to be noted
(for a later analyze and implementation), and which not. Some of the current means of keeping
and sharing information might be more effective to be kept the way they are and transforming
them to the SharePoint site might become rather counterproductive.
The team utilizes various means of storing and sharing information in a very simple manner.
Mostly it is stored in documents, spreadsheets, or sophisticated e-mail clients with calendar
integration. The handiest tool used is Microsoft Excel for data that is likely to consist of
attributes. Excel can substitute a database client-server model to a certain extent thanks to its
rows and columns character. An Excel sheet can represent a simple database table and users can
simulate querying by filtering columns. It also supports sharing workbooks so multiple users
have simultaneous access to the same data and can not only read it, but write as well. It is a
quicker and simpler solution for tracking various data unless database-specific features are
required, especially when such tracking sheets are being created as a daily routine. Setting up a
dedicated database each time would be time consuming for such purposes.
Another mean of storing (and eventually sharing) data used within the team is Microsoft Word
documents. Those usually represent information not likely to change and its purpose is rather
read-only, such as cookbooks or specifications, unless revisions are made to them.
The third most popular mean is regular e-mails, where there is an e-mail for instance sent from
the initiator to the target group containing relevant information usually to a specific task
execution. This email carries the word “Action!” in its subject and the automatic email filter rules
in the team members’ e-mailing application put such a mail into an “action” folder which is being
monitored as a list of pending items then.
And at last, tracking personal data which is not needed to be shared is done by the team
members individually. In most cases the action pending action items and quick-off tasks are put
on a sheet of paper (notebook) and checked upon completion. Microsoft OneNote is a handy
software equivalent to that, too. Personal data also means URL links to important pages, both the
customer’s websites and support portals, or internal links. These are usually saved individually
in the team members’ browsers’ favorites folder, and are shared to newcomers upon arrival.
All those examples mentioned above are subjects to ad-hoc creation in terms of storing them
physically. Usually when a new document or spreadsheet is created, the creator stores it in his
personal network folder and shares the path with the rest of the team via e-mail. The various
Excel spreadsheets and Word documents are then randomized overall the team’s shared
network drives instead of one central storing place. Additionally, as there has no naming
convention been declared, it is hard to collect all the tracking sheets and group them to enhance
transparency. Tracking sheets usually have a definite lifetime which expires upon completing
the task tracked within, and as such expired trackers are not deleted or moved to a structured
archive by the owners, transparency and traceability is continuously reduced.
5.1.3 Defining the general goal and outlining frame objectives
The general goal of implementing the SharePoint based solution in the team is to create a
centralized and transparent centre of general interest. Besides storing all the relevant
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documents, trackers and information at one place, the SharePoint site should become an
essential tool for everyone in everyday’s work routine providing an efficient and multifunctional
gadget in comparison with the current randomized solutions. The site might also dedicate some
space to non-project related activities, such as teambuilding sessions, or quick links to the daily
menus of the adjacent restaurants in the neighborhood.
The very first meeting with the delegate concludes to listing a couple of initial requirements to
be implemented as a starting point. Those will represent the framework and will give a draft
overview to the delegate of how the SharePoint site will look like, and will also give an
opportunity to see the initial potential and strength of the platform. The following initial
objectives are then requested to form the framework:
Create a front page – dashboard
Introduce an improved solution replacing “action mails”
Design an announcement board
Initiate building a knowledge base by documenting the processes within the group
involving the team members, thus satisfying the need of a fast ramp-up of eventual
newcomers and providing rich source of know-how
Research important URLs used and design a centralized and handy depository of those
Gather the requests from the individual teams, analyze and design solutions for them
An additional side objective, not requested by the delegate, will be a component used for
submitting and tracking the particular requests. This will also bring more transparency for
anyone involved in terms of what has already been requested (avoiding duplicate requests), and
what the status of a request is. Besides, the submission interface will be a perfect opportunity for
the rest of the team to get the first touch with the SharePoint environment as soon as they start
getting involved.
5.2 Building up the framework
As explained earlier, the Windows SharePoint Services (WSS 3.0) platform is being used in the
company as the official intranet site that represents a depository of information targeting the
global audience of the company and is rather focusing on internal matters. Knowing that enables
us to ramp-up the SharePoint site instantly, once the project’s dedicated subsite is created by the
corporate administrator on demand and the necessary permissions to administrate it are
granted.
The e-mail communication is driven by a Microsoft Exchange server and clients operate on
Microsoft Outlook, of which we already know they talk with SharePoint platforms. The team also
uses the whole Microsoft Office application lineup for office work.
At this point, we are familiar with the platform and are fully aware what it can provide, and we
are also given the initial requests. Based on that knowledge, we’ll need to match the particular
requests with appropriate SharePoint components, which provide adequate data structures to
cover the requirements.
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5.2.1 Replacing “Action mails” with “Action items”
Action mails represent an internally developed process for managing and completing
extraordinary tasks, which emerge randomly and have an irregular and rather one-off character.
The nature of such tasks is inconsistent, and they don’t tend to relate to each other, which is the
main reason why it is inconvenient tracking those in another way. Usually they request some
outstanding work performed that is outside the standard engineering process, hence they
require special attention, and are tied to deadlines.
Action mails are triggered by an engineer upon finding an anomaly. The step-by-step procedure
of what needs to be executed is described and put in a mail sent to the engineering team keeping
the project manager on the copy of the mail. The subject is then labeled as “Action! Action item
name”. As mentioned above, the mail is automatically put in the engineers’ Action mail folders to
follow up. They then individually carry out their share of responsibility on the task. The pain
point of this approach is the manager’s unavailability of supervising progress and completion,
for he either has to literally poll by mail (or personally) the engineers asking for an update or
wait for their individual confirmation mails upon completion. Engineers sending mails
(regularly) with status updates leads to mail overhead and is rather inconvenient and doesn’t
provide a complete overview at a glance. In some cases the manager can check the progress
himself but this is desired to be avoided.
The appropriate coverage for the action mails eliminating the pain points and gaps experienced
rests in creating a SharePoint “Action list”. Such a list will ensure a centralized solution and a
virtual progress bar opposed to the current distributed character of the actions. Introducing the
list will certainly require designing an appropriate data structure and tweaking the current
action workflow.
Action items list structure
Based on analyzing of a sample set of action items, the following attributes are selected to be
used within the list (the list, of course, is going to be a subject to changes on demand):
Title; single line of text
Description; multiple lines of text
Project; list of applicable projects
Applies to; list of applicable languages
Owner (Initiator); Name
Due date; Date
Status; List of choices [New, In progress, Completed]
Customer’s Issue tracking database name; list of choices [customer’s databases]
Issue ID; number
In order to keep the team (automatically) updated about important events, automated alerts are
set up to do the job. Automated alerts are defined to be sent by SharePoint upon submitting a
new action item into the Action list. Subsequent actioning, monitoring and completion of the
task enrolled depends on the assignees themselves; the most comfortable option is to subscribe
to the Action item list’s RSS feeds in their default RSS readers. The readers will draw the
particular assignees’ attention to the list anytime the item gets changed so they are kept up-to-
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date instantly without any deliberate need of following progress themselves. Anyone can set up
their own automated alerts based on what they need to be informed about.
Defining the workflow
The initiator of the Action item, i.e. an engineer who encounters something outstanding, creates
a new record in the Action item list very similarly to what he/she had been used to before in a
mail, however, instead of compiling that mail, the key information is inserted into the Action
item’s fields. The team is alerted upon submitting the item by SharePoint’s automated mails
which carry the basic information. Each engineer completes his part of the task keeping the due
date on mind and unchecks the language the task has been done on already. Unchecking the last
language means completing the task, hence the status is set to Completed by the automated
workflow defined in SharePoint Designer, which triggers the Status property update upon the
Applies to checklist being emptied.
Creating views
The Action item list contains only a few properties and they all could be easily displayed.
However, from the manager’s point of view they are irrelevant and it is only the due date of the
incomplete tasks and the outstanding languages that attract their attention. Hence such a short
view is created besides the default one, which displays all properties. The view also filters and
displays items not yet complete only.
5.2.2 Designing a public notice board
Notice boards usually carry information impacting larger audiences and have a one-way
direction – information conveyed from the author towards the audience not awaiting responses.
In contrary to Action items, notifications (announcements) usually have an informative
character not requiring immediate or scheduled action from the impacted public. They also often
have a character of a conveyance with a validity period.
Currently, such announcements are announced (usually by the Project Managers) in meetings or
are sent over mail. Information of this type is rather rare and the recent communication
basically channel satisfies its needs. The minor gap is when someone is on vacation or has a sick
day, for the conveyance is hardly forwarded to them, especially those announced in meetings
and not tracked. Although the gravity of these announcements is fractional and their nescience
could barely jeopardize the project, keeping track of conveyances increases the team’s
collaborative spirit.
A notice board can be easily and deployed created from the SharePoint’s List-based
Announcement feature. This predefined list consists of attributes and views instantly deployable
to serve as a notice board. It consists of a Title, Body and Expiration date, which, if set,
automatically removes the item from the default view once the information no is no longer valid.
For quick access, it can be pinned to the site’s home page. Automated alerts can be set and
defined to be triggered upon submitting a new item, but this is not forced and left up to the team
members because of the notice board’s high visibility, avoiding spam.
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5.2.3 Creating a knowledge base
The engineering work on the project consists of several localization procedures, which
subsequently consist of numerous steps. The particular procedures are subjected to a kind of
evolution throughout the years in use thanks to process improvement mainly, either driven by
automation tools or eliminating gaps by the routine gained. The core team has been surviving
ever since the project has started and fluctuation never vigorously influenced the project itself.
This has had a positive impact on developing a tuned set of procedures by the high qualified
engineers during their day by day work as a side product. On the other hand, the negative side of
that appeared to be the fact that the procedures have never been appropriately documented.
Information handovers were driven on an ad-hoc base; usually newcomers were trained on the
fly, and support requests were pleased by the elder co-members.
Documenting processes, however, is essential, and is one of the most important parts of risk
mitigation, the risk of fluctuation at least. It is a common truth that know-how often vanishes
from a company hand in hand with a key employee’s departure. The more processes and
internal knowledge is documented, the less likely it is to lose substantial know-how and the risk
of an eventual internal collapse is minimized. Such a knowledge based would also introduce a
formal standardization of the processes and would guide the engineers to stick to unified
procedures. An eventual expansion of the team to remote subsidiaries (internal outsourcing)
could rely on a smoother ramp-up thanks to a sophisticated depot of information, too.
5.2.3.1 The library component
No doubt that the SharePoint’s Wiki library implementation is a perfectly tailored component
for creating whatsoever knowledge bases thanks to its hyperlinked nature and full text search.
Creating the library component itself is a matter of a few clicks; the real challenge however
embodies in building up the library by adding content into it; not forgetting a subsequent
maintenance and up-to-date state. As there are many procedures that deserve to be covered,
building up such a library might seem at the beginning as a full-time job for a dedicated
intendant. Obviously, this is not affordable; hence a different approach will be needed to be
taken. Apart from that, new processes can arise and process improvement has to be taken into
account, too (implementing modifications). Being aware of all the factors mentioned above,
keeping the library alive and fresh concludes to considering this as a virtual ‘never-ending’
project with a plan and defined goals and schedules. An outdated and abandoned heap of
documents would lose its purpose soon.
Like any other standard project from the real world, the Wiki project also has to have a ‘project
manager’, someone being responsible for maintaining a healthy state. As the engineers are the
most competent candidates for it is their expertise that is meant to be documented, one of them
will have to be virtually promoted to take charge and ownership of the project. Thanks to the
character of this project, and in order to declare a fair share, the owner might be elected for a
defined period of time only; ownership will then be handed over from one to another upon a
certain period of time based on a schedule set up beforehand (e.g. on a monthly basis). Managing
the Wiki project, naturally, does not require project management skills, but some rules and
responsibilities for all participants involved have to be set and their progress and completion
slightly supervised.
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5.2.3.2 The Wiki workflow concept
At the very beginning, a meeting with the team is held, where the goals of the project are
unveiled followed by a quick brainstorming session aiming to spot potential topics to be
documented as the starting point. As procedures usually consist of subprocedures, it is
sometimes hard to define what is supposed to be covered as an individual topic and what can be
split into more topics re-joined in a thematic category. The brainstormers’ suggestions are
analyzed and discussed, and based on those, thematic categories are designed which will group
related topics. Categorizing topics should make the information in the knowledge base more
easily and intuitively accessed. Once the initial topics are declared, each of them is assigned to an
owner (engineer), who will be taking responsibility for the recency of the topic, implementing
eventual changes to the process covered within during the processes’ lifetime.
Documenting the processes outlined is rather a side goal of the team members besides doing the
standard work; however, as the knowledge base creation is driven as a project, there have to be
some deadlines and milestones set, too. Nevertheless, deadlines should also prevent the owners
from neglecting their duties in this space. Apart from the ownership, each particular topic will
have a completion due date. Based on the set of due dates per article, the schedule will be built
up automatically. Monitoring the meeting of deadlines will be one of the responsibilities of the
actual driver of the project. He will have to keep an eye on fulfilling the schedule and sending a
weekly newsletter to the team about the current status and progress highlighting eventual
latecomers, finishers, assignees, or any other important news or flags. The owner will also have
to keep an eye on the freshness of the documents, as they will have a dedicated property called
Valid until. This property will force the owners to come back to the topics within a specified time
of validity to make sure they are still active and unchanged. The validity will be extended upon a
formal certification of the correctness and recentness of the process. If a process is no longer in
use, the owner is obliged to retire the corresponding topic by setting its status to Retired. For
cases when processes are revitalized some time later, the article remains within the knowledge
base with the rest of its properties untouched and even categorized in the navigation. In fact, the
only reason for having topics retired is being able to create demand specific views based on the
status property.
After generating the SharePoint Wiki Library, the Wiki page data structure consists of the default
attributes, such as title, body, creator etc. To be able to apply the character of a project described
above, the following attributes are added to the Wiki articles:
Category; single line of text
Due date; date
Owner; name
Valid until; date
Status; list of choices [Planned; In Progress; Final; Expired; Retired]
Source file; hyperlink
The new properties will be mandatory and will automatically pop-up with every article created
in the library, thus guaranteeing a smooth management of the entire library. Custom views
created based on the properties will help supervise the project’s state.
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5.2.3.3 Designing the knowledge base UI & creating views
Although the knowledge base is a fundamental thing, we have to remember that it a virtual
project and there is no special dedicated manpower assigned to keep it up. Hence the layout and
UI have to be set easily with minimal effort and not requiring too much time for a subsequent
maintenance. It also has to be easy and intuitive so it doesn’t look repulsive either. Its purpose is
to keep people coming back for information and make them like it and build it up.
Luckily, there is not that much information useful in this space, so keeping the library well
arranged won’t be a challenge. The following layout will serve all needs:
A two-level navigation
o Level one enlisting topic categories
o Level too consisting of articles thematically grouped in the categories
A short “Help and how-to” for authors
A visitor-tailored managing dashboard with most valuable information
o Managing oneself and managing others in a position of the knowledge base’s
current virtual manager; driven by custom views
A SharePoint generated Wiki Library unfortunately does not incorporate an automatic TOC
builder or navigation feature implemented, so creating some sort of hierarchy and transparent
structure lies upon the administrator’s shoulders. By default, there is an initial kind of one-
dimensional (one-level) left navigation created, however, it is very simple and consists of two
types of elements; headings or links. On the top of it, these have to be created and maintained
manually; thus empowering the owner to personalize the navigation according to his notions,
but requiring uncomfortable manual work, and designer permissions, too. This implies that any
intervention to the navigation will always involve the SharePoint site designer, unless all the
contributors were given such permission, which is a kind of security issue and is not
recommended in general. The easiest way to deal with it is that the authors of their articles will
have to notify the administrator about the creation of a new article, and he will add them to the
navigation based on the article’s (mandatory) Category property. Now back to categories again,
the default left navigation generated is not very user friendly and thanks to its plane layout it
grows linearly with each heading or article submitted. Luckily, there is a way of transforming the
plane structure into a two-level navigation, so called fly-out menu. One would expect this was a
matter of a SharePoint control being switched; however, it is not that straightforward. The
transformation requires intervention to the Wiki Library’s master page via a SharePoint-
compatible editing application such as Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer. In Code view, the
ContentPlaceHolder container control, whose ID is PlaceHolderLeftNavBar has to be located.
Within the PlaceHolderLeftNavBar control, the AspMenu control, whose ID is QuickLaunchMenu
has to be targeted. Both the StaticDisplayLevels and MaximumDynamicDisplayLevels values of the
Menu control have to be changed from 0 to 1, as follows:
<SharePoint:AspMenu id="QuickLaunchMenu" DataSourceId="QuickLaunchSiteMap" runat="server" Orientation="Vertical" StaticDisplayLevels="1" ItemWrap="true" MaximumDynamicDisplayLevels="1"
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StaticSubMenuIndent="0" SkipLinkText="">
Now that the Wiki menu is structured it is only a question of creating headings and links to fill it
in.
In order to keep the articles somehow consistent, the authoring will be done in Microsoft Word.
Despite the Wiki Library contains an integrated editor supporting editing font styles and
hyperlinks, authoring in Word will be much more comfortable thanks to the application’s
features. Besides, using a Microsoft Word predefined template can guarantee a consistent layout
and formatting throughout the library, which is quite substantial in terms of transparency and
simplicity. The authored articles will be simply copy-pasted into the Wiki editor upon
completion in Word. The Word documents will also be uploaded to SharePoint, to a dedicated
folder within the default Document Library created along with team’s the Site collection’s birth.
Thus eventual maintenance (updates) will be driven in the same manner as authoring from
scratch, and the Source file property created earlier will be pointing to the Word document of
each corresponding article. The physical location of the template file will be put on the Wiki
main page dashboard as a hyperlinked document with a couple of instruction steps so the
creation process is in front of the authors’ eyes whenever authoring new content. All this will be
placed in a Content Editor Web Part up front.
Yet the last challenge remains to be tackled; creating a wise and handy and not demanding
toolset at the same time to manage the build-up project and provide a quick overview what the
project looks like. The additional properties of the articles above might not have made sense at
first glance; however, thanks to them, implementing customized views rendering the most
relevant information per request will be an easy game.
From an author’s perspective, the most relevant articles are those owned by the author, no
matter what their status is. Therefore, the first view created is a view called Pages owned by me
and based on the criteria set in the view; SharePoint will render within this view only the
articles which are owned by the person logged into the system. The owner will have a complete
overview of his articles and will quickly be able to see how much authoring or eventual revisions
are ahead and when those have to be completed, as the view will provide the Due date and the
Valid until properties, too.
Besides having a quick overview of the owned content, the authors, sharing the role of the
library manager will need an overview of currently “hot” articles; either those pending
completion, or those expiring soon. Consequently, two additional views are created; one
rendering incomplete articles (incomplete articles are those having their status not set to Final
and Retired) with their corresponding due dates, the other one rendering completed articles
expiring in the coming 30 days (including those that could have already expired). This smart
way of reporting will give a brief overview to the current author, who will be sending out a
summary mail to the whole team each Friday outlining what needs to be focused on.
All three views outlined above will share the same resource – the Wiki Library. That means there
will be three instances of the Wiki Library component on the Wiki Web Part page apart from the
help paragraph; each with the particularly selected view. Although there is no content created
yet, the web parts can be added to the Wiki dashboard already. They will automatically start
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rendering lists of articles, once some are created in the library, and can remain empty but ready
at the same time for now.
5.2.4 Researching important URLs
Several sources of information essential for the project are being stored and managed on
different servers, either inside the company (global company information; intranet pages), or
outside, usually on the customer’s portals or other third party servers. There is no list of those
put together and the links are distributed among the team members in their web browsers’
favorites, usually gained and stored upon a an event requiring the link in the past; thus building
up a distributed list of URLs. In other words, everyone knows a couple of addresses, but only
those they ever came in touch with. When someone then needs to follow up on something, they
tend to ask somebody else who can potentially know the corresponding address and when the
seeker is lucky, he’s sent the address in a mail. This is a relatively efficient way of keeping this
kind of information as it has survived over the past years, and might not even be worth thinking
of an alternate solution for that, but why not, if it can be transcended by a quick and simple
solution? On the top of that, let’s not forget about unexpected system collapses or system
reinstallations burying the collection forever.
Instead of the continuous and irregular chases after URLs possibly stored by someone, there
could be a centralized list of useful links put on the SharePoint portal, where everyone would
turn to seek. A centralized solution would also ensure that everyone could contribute to one
common place by adding relevant links, thus keeping the entire team updated constantly and
minimizing effort.
There is a SharePoint predefined list called Links so creating the desired centralized repository
of URLs is a question of few clicks. In addition to the default properties generated, we create one
more called Category, which would represent the area the link falls into. Based on that, users will
be able to customize rendering of relevant links to their own needs (by creating custom views).
5.2.5 Getting ready for the upcoming requests
There is one last item pending to be actioned before the page is revealed to public and released
to initial use; the feature request tracking component. Now that the outlined framework is ready
and the broader team gets acquainted with SharePoint soon, the members need to have an
interface to express their requirements and those will need to be tracked. Obviously, we will
need yet another list to manage that, and we will also need a couple of custom views depending
on what information we would to expose to whom.
This simple tracking list will consist of the following properties:
Title; single line of text
Description; multiple lines of text
Area; single line of text
Status; list of choices [New; Approved; Declined; In Progress; Implemented]
Link; Hyperlink
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The contributors will be obliged to cross-check the list before submitting new requests in order
to avoid submitting duplicates. The automated alert set will make sure a mail is sent to the board
of designers (the project manager and the SharePoint architect) to discuss and approve the
submissions, and also chalk out the implementation plan of the request. Once a request is
approved, the link attribute is filled in by the architect to point to the feature’s implementation
tracking record, and later on, upon completion, to the feature component itself.
5.2.6 Designing the front page
The front page is the initial page displayed upon accessing the SharePoint site. It can also be
referenced as the default page or the home page and is automatically generated upon the site
creation. It remains empty unless some created content is attached to it using Web Parts, that’s
why we focus on it at last after concentrating on the components above.
The page is expected to be a crossroads-nature dashboard, where the most important
announcements and hot news are published to, so that everyone can see them promptly. The
dashboard will also easily navigate the users to the most important sources of information, such
as quick links to various important sites, important milestones and cut-off dates. In a nutshell,
the dashboard ought to display the most requested information abridged and relevant for the
given moment of time. The users will be able to see a general summary of the happenings in the
team and will be able to access all features instantly.
From the architectural point of view the dashboard is built on a Web Part page. At the early days
of design and implementation there is no essential need for too much effort thinking about the
layout and placement of the components. The placement of those will play an important role
later once the amount of the information gathered becomes larger and a reorganization of the
dashboard will follow in order to keep the page user friendly and transparent.
All we have to this specific moment of time is the couple of components created and outlined
above. Once they get appropriately placed onto the dashboard, the site can be unveiled to the
team to demonstrate the aim of the SharePoint-based information centre, and it can be put into
operation instantly. The team will now be able to start creating knowledge base articles,
submitting additional feature requests, planning holidays, extending the list of relevant URLs,
and putting in place the Action item process instantly. A very quick tour of the Site and
explaining basic behaviors of SharePoint will do it in terms of training the team, as it is very
intuitional and anyone with Microsoft product experiences will easily adapt, which fortunately is
the case of our team in focus.
5.2.7 Site presentation and launch
There has been a recurring weekly team meeting (the “weekly”) held regularly, where the team
rally to evaluate the previous happenings, and identify the forthcoming challenges and goals.
That is the regular moment, when the whole team sit together to discuss the project’s status,
come up with improvement suggestions, and have the opportunity to participate even on
influencing the character of the project, and also the right place to present the team’s new day-
by-day companion, the SharePoint site.
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It is crucial to convince the team that SharePoint has a great potential in centralizing and
organizing the team’s needs and their individual needs, too, but it won’t be effective unless
everyone participates and has the will to be open to this change. People tend to stick to their
individual work modes and completely changing their self-developed routines will be a big
challenge. The whole team needs to understand and foresee the good payoff of the system and
they need to comprehend that their regular individual contributions will be the basal elements
to maintain the site’s efficiency, purpose and attraction. They need to identify with the vision
that the site will facilitate their daily work consisting of the supporting tasks, such as tracking,
checking and ‘staying up-to-date’ at least.
Having the framework already built up with those few components present is very beneficial, for
it is more efficient to demonstrate the platform’s functionality and capabilities on tangible
examples. On the top of that, the little content yet present will hardly allow the team to get lost
therein, thus losing their sympathies and confidence in the system, but will provide enough
material to ramp-up and learn.
In the meeting, the team is familiarized with the portal and its contemporary features, and the
output of the meeting is the instant application of those in practice: action mails are no longer
supported; important declarations are published and kept up-to-date on the dashboard;
common useful links are added to the quick links section; additional feature requests are
submitted for approval following the submission process. Developing the knowledge base,
however, will be a more demanding challenge. The team is demonstrated what the expectations
of the future knowledge base are, but the project of building it up is not yet launched. The initial
output for each member is to consider their daily routine or tasks they execute, and identify key
topics and corresponding categories for the knowledge base project. This will yet remain a
discussion item for the following meetings.
When speaking about meetings, until then, the output of these meetings (so called ‘meeting
minutes’) had usually been compiled in a summary mail by the meeting owner and sent across
to the participants. The nature of such minutes is either passive (recaps, comments,
announcements, etc.), or active (action items, individual or group tasks, etc.), and keeping track
of the subsequent fulfillment of those active then remains to be a task for the manager to cope
with. The input for the meetings – the meeting agenda, had been prepared by the manager on his
own (taking notes into his notebook or similarly). Now, being aware of SharePoint’s power and
foreseeing the potential of the meetings to be ‘transferred’ to the portal, the weeklies, such as
any other meetings evoke to start thinking about a tailored solution for these, too.
5.3 Partner sites deployment
One of SharePoint’s advantages is its end user independence thanks for the browser-based
access to its resources. Combining that with the availability of making a SharePoint site facing
public audiences outside the corporate network, organizations can benefit from an improved
communication and collaboration model with their customers and suppliers using a shared
SharePoint site (see Figure 2: A fictitious organization’s SharePoint site architecture on page 18).
From the team’s workflow detailed earlier (see Figure 8: A simplified workflow of the FPT’s
localization process) we already know the team’s linguistic part of the localization process it
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outsourced to external partners. Yet the simplified diagram conceals another workflow
participant in the products’ lifecycle. The files’ post-processing stage, apart from aggregating and
compiling the files into the final product, also comprises of before-delivery quality assurance -
testing. This service is a result of the evolving nature of the product and has been planted lately.
It is going to be executed by a testing team within the company. Building up a dedicated partner
site for the customer is redundant, because the customer himself has his own SharePoint-based
collaboration workspace operating and dedicated to FPT.
5.3.1 Translation partner support site
FPT localize the customer’s products into several languages and there is a translation partner
(vendor) dedicated for each language there. The vendor v-team represents the gate between the
team and the linguistic partners and the communication is driven exclusively via e-mail. E-mail
is a suitable channel for interactive communication based on questions and answers for
language-specific problems, for example. However, in most cases project and product related
information, such as order instructions, general announcements or important links, is applicable
to all languages. Distributing overall applicable conveyances is much more effortful via sending
individual e-mails (despite those can be pre-programmed and automated) than sharing them on
a SharePoint site.
SharePoint’s scalability and security policies enable creating a subsite under the FPT site
dedicated for translation partner support. The vendor v-team is granted administrative
permissions and responsibilities building up and maintaining the site. The translation partners
are also given adequate permissions to be able to access the site and leverage information from
there. The parent site’s permission inheritance is violated, because the aim is to keep internal
project information irrelevant for externals hidden.
The important decision to be made before starting building the partner site is determining the
necessity, return, and effort of having a subsite built per partner with a mutual starting page, or
one mutual subsite only for all partners. Considering the character of information and
SharePoint’s item-level security policy, one mutual subsite with features containing partner-
sensitive information particularly secured will be sufficient and will save later maintenance
effort, too. Should the information resources increase at a later stage requiring dedicated
workspaces per partner, the site can be saved as a template and quickly cloned.
5.3.1.1 Identifying and clustering information sources
The communication model between the vendor team and the corresponding vendors usually
stands on a one-on-one interaction, where both FPT and the partners have a liaison officer at
their ends, who exchange information via e-mail messages. FPT’s controllership over spreading
and sharing information among the vendors ends upon sending an e-mail carrying that
information to the liaison officer. From that point, sharing that with the corresponding audience
is the officer’s competence. Considering the risk of sick leaves and vacations, important
information exchanged between the twosomes not shared appropriately might get lost or
concealed. On the top of that, keeping track of general announcements and their actual status in
e-mails is effortful and becomes blind within a certain timeframe. Especially for new partners or
individual translators, a workspace aggregating all the information ensures a quicker ramp-up
and reduces training effort. However, some sort of information exchange, especially that
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interactive kind requiring responses, such as (deadline, milestone, etc.) confirmation still
remains to be conveyed thru e-mail.
General announcements
The general announcements have an identical character to announcements conveyed thru the
team’s notice board. These announcements are the same for all partners and carry general
project related information, or they are aimed to draw the partners’ attention to novelties,
changes, etc. It is a good channel for keeping the partners informed about forthcoming office
closures due to bank holidays for example. Project related general instructions or technical
changes applicable can be delivered to the partners, too. Placing announcements on the board
replaces the former one-to-many e-mail driven information forwarding. The partners are free to
decide setting up automated alerts or subscribing to the announcements’ RSS feed.
Discussion board
The partner support site’s interactive and broad audience communication channel is integrated
in the SharePoint’s list-bases discussion board feature. Partners can input queries and get
ambiguities clarified here. The discussion board practically replaces the partner queries
submitted via e-mail and the main advantages are recycling information and a central storage.
Previously, if ambiguities or additional questions arouse, the v-team often had to provide the
same explanation to one mutual question posted by multiple vendors independently, or,
sometimes, additional information was needed to be resent to all partners after discovering
numerous information gaps. A discussion board stores information (responses to queries) on a
central and publicly accessible location, so the partners are able to find answers to their
eventual queries researching if those had already been submitted and answered to another
partner saving the v-team’s time and eliminating response time delays in case of working in a
different time zone to FPT or office closures.
Schedules and forecasts
Schedules and forecasts carry important project information, such as delivery timeframes,
deadlines, translation volumes, etc. The translation partners need to be informed about the
latest plans of the project to be able to book resources and schedule workload. The volumes,
plans and deadlines are partner specific; hence SharePoint’s item-level security policy is suitable
and applicable here.
The schedules and being kept in a schedule workbook, one per each vendor. In order to store the
particular workbooks and any other partner specific and sensitive documents securely, a
dedicated Document Library with folders per partner is created. Security policies are applied
separately to each folder, so the partners can access their schedules only. The administrators
(vendor v-team) naturally have access to them all. As schedules and forecasts strongly influence
the project and changes made can conclude to negative impact, automated alerts sent to the
partners are forced and set up by the vendor v-team. Each time a schedule is modified, an
automated alert is sent to the partner impacted by the change only, so the vendor v-team is freed
of sending update information manually.
Tools
Translating the project does not consist of simple plain text translations. In the localization
industry, there are some specialized software applications designed for effective translations.
Despite, each localization process has its specific features and additional requirements, such as
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automation tools for example. FPT’s virtual dev v-team also develops gadgets and automation
scripts designed to streamline the translation partners’ activities, such as sophisticated file
management or delivery check batch files etc. The distribution of the applications was
previously performed via e-mails. SharePoint’s Document Library allows sharing the latest
versions and additions in one location and updates can be broadcasted to the partners via
announcements.
Links
Similarly to the FPT, there is a set of useful links for translation partners to help them execute
translation, too. The links lead to different sources of knowledge, such as specific terminology
servers or translation advisories. Keeping the full list of relevant links and assuring their
recentness in one common place always provides the translation partners a reliable location for
help look-up.
Help and how-to
The discussion group initiated will surely be a good source of recyclable information and
instructions created on demand. However, after analyzing the support queries resolved in the
past, the conclusion is to build up a project starting kit summarizing the basic project
information and guidance. Most of the queries coming are related to tool, process and
application support. Besides, automation scripts and tools developed to streamline the
translation partners’ work do need a user manual, too. Leveraging from the team Wiki
documentation’s success, significant return in terms of reduced effort on providing support is
expected from building up a translation partner Wiki documentation. The standardized
documentation will also help new translators and partners on the scene ramp-up and
understand the project in shorter timelines eliminating basic support from the vendor v-team.
5.3.1.2 Overall expectations and return
The goal of the portal is to broaden the communication channel between the team and the
translation partners. The previously operated distributed communication had many gaps and
involved significant human effort on communicating information towards the partners. The
SharePoint site aggregates different information clusters and presents them in a user friendly
and transparent way, so the partners can find answers to their queries quickly and the
information never gets lost, they are always able to get back look it up. Unleashing process
changes or updates should also become smoother and their application should become faster.
Centralizing and accumulating all translation related items also enhances their maintenance for
the vendor v-team.
5.3.2 Testing portal
The quality assurance (testing) before handing the project back is a reborn task and it is the
implication of the project’s evolution. The processes and service level agreements are being built
up and defined. The advantage is that the SharePoint based collaboration and communication
centre is going to be built up from scratch neglecting any data and information transitions (for
no such yet exist), and the involved parties will be getting used to the environment from the
beginning bypassing process change implementation.
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From the experiences the team already has had with SharePoint based cooperation, leveraging
and identifying fundamental elements to start building up a shared workspace is simple. The Site
framework will have the following features already used in the previous portals for a similar
reason plus a testing specific one:
General announcements
Important links
Discussions
Share Documents
Shared calendar
Wiki library
Known issues
Known issues
The purpose of quality assurance is identifying bugs and problems by testing (validating) the
localized product. In order to prevent reporting numerous bugs concluding to bug management
and turnaround overlabor, there is going to be a list of Known issues published on the
SharePoint site. Known issues are bug types that the team is aware of and the product contains
those for a reason. Reporting those then is irrelevant. The testing team should stay synchronized
with the most recent list of known issues on the project achieving that either by setting up
automated alerts or subscribing to the Known issues RSS feed.
5.4 Further maintenance and development plan
The FPT’s team site framework has been built up and released to operation. The most popular
collaboration and information sources have been analyzed and transferred to the site and
transparency over them has increased. The team will have the opportunity to start drawing their
attention to the tools present on the site abandoning the old out-of-date procedures.
In the meanwhile, the site designer v-team will have the chance to monitor the internal
processes and collaborative elements and thanks to the experiences gained by projecting the
site’s framework, they will be lurking to spot eventual gaps and improvement opportunities so
the collaboration performance curve will become steeper.
The team members are also encouraged to start reconsidering their daily routines and
submitting improvement suggestions thru the designed feature request list. The designer v-team
will need to receive feedback so they can analyze the requests concluding to designing
SharePoint features centralizing the workflow to one common place step by step. The site usage
reports will also be monitored in order to identify popular content and sites or features not
heavily visited. The results of the analysis should conclude to eventual feature redesign or
proper feature promotion.
Additional site quality improvement will also be achievable by polling individuals to express
their opinion on the site in general. SharePoint’s list based survey feature will certainly come
handy and the team members will have space to participate on the site’s design evolution.
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5.4.1 Forthcoming challenges
Apart from the continuous process monitoring and gap lurking happening in the background of
the team’s life, some outstanding challenges are already waiting for analyze and implementation.
5.4.1.1 Establishing a complex meeting workspace
Except for the weekly team meeting mentioned above, there are more meetings recurring
throughout a week or month, either regularly or casually. The particular v-teams have their own
meetings; twosomes of v-teams have meetings (any v-team with the dev v-team to discuss tool
development for example), too, and the team members also have meetings with their superiors.
The individual meetings have different participants requiring certain restrictions. For example,
agendas, goals, and outcomes of the subordinate-superior meetings shall be accessible to the
corresponding couple only.
SharePoint does dispose of a predefined feature for managing meetings within its meeting
workspace. However, prior to creating the workspace, the individual meeting types have to be
identified, and each meeting type’s requirements have to be reconsidered. In some cases,
dedicating space to a meeting within a meeting workspace might be counterproductive, for some
meetings might have a recurring same agenda or are quite casual. In such cases, maintaining the
meeting workspace is rather time consuming and the agenda items are faster paper tracked.
Before the meeting workspace is created and put in operation, a detailed analyze must be
coming forth.
5.4.1.2 Tracking tool development
The dev v-team are responsible for helping automate the team’s processes and manually
effortful tasks. The current process is that tool suggestions and requests are discussed during
the weekly meetings or casually. The dev team get feature requests in e-mail and it is up to them
to cope with the information and to handle it. The development itself, its status and schedule is a
black box for the team. Milestones are achieved by publicizing releases. Considering SharePoint’s
features, a tool development tracking item might shed more light on the individual tools’ status
and duplicated feature requests will also be prevented. The dev team will be able to manage
better their active tasks and the entire team will have a clearer overview of what release can be
expected when.
5.4.1.3 Status reporting
SharePoint along with InfoPath generate a strong couple for managing various forms, such as
status reports. Status reports are parts of business in general and sometimes it is hard to find a
well designed template that can be easily filled in to display clear overview of a project’s status.
In the forthcoming period, the v-team will have to analyze the potential of the status reports and
their return if transferred to SharePoint. Before this is executed it is important to weigh the pros
and cons of creating a reporting workspace. The essential thing to look at is the gain of having
status reports compared to the time and effort put in creating them on a regular basis.
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5.4.2 Eventual future extensions
SharePoint’s scalability has been mentioned several times already. At the current stage of the
project, the FPT have already utilized this characteristic by creating a subsite for the TSPs and
quality assurance provider (testing) each.
The scalability might become even more popular later, once the amount of the content on the
sites will grow over a certain bearable limit. For instance, at this point, the dev v-team will only
have one dedicated feature on the site in a short timeframe; the tool development tracker. That,
of course, doesn’t mean that the team will end up with that one only SharePoint component to
enhance development conditions. Further on, if the dev v-team comes up with feature requests
and their number will outgrow the team site, the dev v-team might be given a dedicate dev site.
The same naturally applies to any v-team within the FPT.
Similarly, once the individual team members gain sufficient knowledge and understanding of
SharePoint, they might tend to ask for a dedicated subsite/page for themselves only. Apart from
the collaborative philosophy of the platform, it is also a helpful environment for keeping track of
personally related items helping improve self management. A dedicated site per member
automatically aggregating information and data relevant to that person only, as mentioned
earlier, is already bundled in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. Consequently, if the
requirements grow over a certain limit, and the sites become overloaded with content and data,
then upgrading to the licensed yet enriched SharePoint product is worth considering.
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6 CONCLUSION
Implementing an information system in an organization always faces big challenges for both the
system provider, and the end customer, too. The provider has to be able to understand the
customer’s requirements and see them with his eyes, too. Sometimes the customers themselves
are unable to identify key elements or struggle to express and disambiguate their demands. The
provider needs to foresee eventual outcomes and they must leverage from past experiences to
spot potential gaps or problems. The sooner those are recognized and processed, the lesser their
additional cost and effort is.
Supplied information systems often depend on the providers’ support, and change or update
management underlies delays and potential system outages. Solutions, features and user-
friendship rarely meet the criteria level stipulated by each department or individual, especially
in larger organizations where a corporate system has to be universal to respond to all queries
and expectations. Naturally, listening to each single end user, and analyzing and implementing
their sometimes controversial eyes of beholder are impossible in practice. Many systems then
fail on the users’ aversion and reluctance.
Microsoft SharePoint, from a certain aspect, is a complex and universal information system
platform, too. It can respond to various claims to the very last end user and does not violate the
overall corporate system behavior. SharePoint’s secret embodies in its flexible scalability and
distributed administration. The ‘out-of-the-box’ deployment sets up the system environment
chrome with some predefined elements only and the final design and functionality depends on
the particular user groups who have a dedicated site created.
An information or collaborative system based on SharePoint, however, is not challenge-free
either. A reasonable declaration of user roles and smart responsibility delegation prevents the
site from becoming a repulsive mess of information. Site designers (administrators) need to
cooperate tightly on designing the site, introducing features and creating layouts, in order to
maintain a consistent site. If the designers enrich the site each on their own, then it is likely to
become a heap of blind information. The readers and contributors also have to keep pace with
the site development and changes, in order to be familiar with where and what information they
60
can find and contribute to. They need to be familiar with the site, the structure, features and its
philosophy, so the organization can benefit from the platform’s potential. A SharePoint site
usually has a growing curve in terms of content and information and if the users do not
“breathe” with the site, they get lost and find navigating across hard, even concluding to system
disinclination. Nevertheless, the browser based environment and interface of SharePoint is very
intuitive and user friendly, hence end users are able to ramp-up very easily.
The decentralized administrative competences in SharePoint disburden the IT department’s
effort on system maintenance; on the other hand, that responsibility is attorned to the site
owners. Departments or subsite owning groups have to take into account that the site
administration will take their internal time and effort. The major time investment is expected in
the early build-up stages, the subsequent preservation effort is minor.
Considering the overall pros and cons of SharePoint, the platform is a very suitable solution for
organizations already operating on Windows Server operating systems foremost, at least for its
availability as a free add-on. It can be easily installed and evaluated by the organizations’ IT
professionals enabling them to weigh the effort and return of investment before actually
releasing to end users. The numerous third-party extensions downloadable from the Internet
extend the responding power of the platform even further. SharePoint is suitable from small
organizations, such as family businesses, schools, etc., to large organizations distributed
worldwide and collaborating in different time zones. The platform integrates features adjustable
to suit any business need, such as collaboration, reduced communication effort,
intranet/extranet, partner data exchange portals, etc. SharePoint lists are able to simulate
databases and are easy to build and maintain without deep database knowledge so IT
departments are disburdened from creating and administering various databases on demand.
The database background of the platform remains hidden for the end users while they benefit
from the custom lists, views and workflows providing overviews and automating tasks. On the
top of that, inputs and outputs can be streamlined and managed in database applications, such
as Microsoft Access. Setting up a corporate issue tracker or a merchandizing portal recording
orders is achievable in a few clicks and adding workflows to drive certain actions is intuitive.
This collection of multiple services in one common user friendly environment offers the
organizations a cheap solution giving great value in return.
The SharePoint site built for the focus project team instantly started repaying its value in return,
especially the vendor portal, which became a valuable aggregated and structured information
repository for the translation partners. The information documented on the site provides the
partners a 24-hour level one support for their most common problems and queries eliminating
resolution delays particularly for partners in different time zones and holiday calendars. The
centralized and interlinked Wiki documentation also immediately solves specific issues, which
were previously solved per personal process knowledge and experience, but failed upon a key
member’s absence. The major effort resting in building up the framework and launching the site
has been completed and the continuous maintenance and operation should not have an impact
on production, as mainly routines previously executed different tools and applications will be
managed and recorded in the centralized workspace. The adoption to the team’s daily routines
was smooth and lacked reluctance. The site became a central repository of shared files, tips and
knowledge.
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