SharePoint 2007 Capabilities Breakdown (Part 2) - Collaboration
In Part 1 of the Capabilities series of SharePoint 2007 we discussed the overview of the platform. In Part 2 we will dive more deeply into the functionality that represents the Collaboration slice of the pie chart.
Collaboration is defined slightly differently by people due to the type of environment they collaborate in, or the demands of their work that require collaboration. All this means is that different features of a collaborative environment have varying degrees of effectiveness in certain situations.
Although I can't speak to and cover each of the many scenarios, I can discuss the features of MOSS designed to create and build collaborative environments in your organization. I'm optimistic that some will apply to each of our readers.
Documents
Let's start with one of the most common items in collaboration: The Document. Document libraries represent the cornerstone of collaboration. The ability to create an unlimited type of documents, requiring specific metadata, with check-out, check-in, approval, and multi-user workflow around individual document and document types is extremely powerful. You can also define default document templates for each type of document you define. The day of the network file share should be over.
If that isn't enough, you can create document workspaces, which are sites specifically built around a single document. These workspaces represent a more in-depth and secure area where tasks, discussions, calendars, meetings, notes, etc. can be built around a single document. This may be useful for people collaborating on a book, chapters, or a large sales proposal.
Calendars
Calendaring in SharePoint has become very good. Whether you use MS Exchange or not, you can still take advantage of many features in shared calendars. You can choose to have a public calendar that you share for dates, meetings, deadlines, etc. for a given context (project, document, logical workspace or team site). You can also sync multiple calendars to outlook to overlay and manage your schedule as it relates to the schedules of all the calendars you must contend with.
Blogs, WIkis, and Discussion Forums
These lists represent a more modern web experience, and depending on your intended usage, they can be very effective. Blogs can be used for external sites or internal users to create personalization and information dissemination in a familiar format. Discussion Forums can be used in team areas or document workspaces to keep context and focus around your work and your information while providing an ongoing dialog. Wikis are very flexible and give you the opportunity to build documentation, help files, notes, glossaries, indexes, etc. in any environment.
Tasks
Task lists allow you to assign and track work or duties to specific users in your organization. Metadata can be added to expand the use of these lists allowing for Calendar and Gantt views as means to manage and report on task data.
One Note Shared Libraries
If you use One Note as I do extensively, you can create One Note shared libraries in SharePoint. This is one of the best features for collaborating with off-line users and content. One Note will sync your library, sections, and pages back to SharePoint for all users. This is very effective at automatically keeping notes, pages, etc, available off-line and synced automatically.
Collaboration Sites
Although we already mentioned Document Workspaces, SharePoint also delivers other pre-defined Site Templates for similar purposes. Team Sites and the various options for Meeting Sites and Workspaces are also available. Microsoft has also released 40 additional site definitions and templates you can download for free. These pre-defined templates create a default set of lists, pages, and workflow to help create a foundation for a type of work activity or group.
Project Management
Between standard site templates, standard and custom lists, the Gantt chart view on task lists, and some innovation with SharePoint and security, you can create very effective Project Management Workspaces within your SharePoint environment. If one of the pre-defined templates will not work, you can define your own requirements and build your personalized project site and save it as a template for reuse.
Alerts, Views, Roll-ups
SharePoint lets you assign alerts to lists so you can get email updates with the types of changes you want to see in areas of concern. This is very useful for staying updated on changing content. You can also create some very sophisticated and targeted views on lists such that a single underlying list can offer significantly different and useful slices of the data depending on the user and the context. Think of it like a light version of reporting services in your ability to get very specific views of your document and list data. This makes metadata and its accuracy very useful and important. You can roll-up task lists into views at various levels so you can see all your tasks across the entire portal or specific site and sub--sites. This is a great way to keep your data where it belongs, but still have access to all of it when you need to see the big picture. Through the use of some of the more sophisticated web parts you can learn to roll up any lists, list types, or content types in your site collection.
Outlook and Email Integration
If you use MS Outlook as your email client, you can sync SharePoint lists, calendars, tasks, etc. to your local Outlook folders, tasks, and Calendars so you can take this data off-line with you, and get updates when you are connected. This is a great way to keep sets of tasks or documents locally on your laptop while ensuring they stay current with their underlying server-based location.
SharePoint also allows individual lists to accept email. This allows you to send email directly to SharePoint as a means to capture carbon copies, or quickly send/forward required content to a specified list. This helps to back up or make available certain data contained in email through the SharePoint platform.
Workflow
Last, but certainly not least, is the availability of Windows Workflow Foundation as a built-in component of SharePoint 2007 / WSS 3.0. SharePoint provides some basic workflow options out of the box, but with SharePoint Designer or Visual Studio.NET and a willingness to write a little code, you can extend it much further. Workflow integrates with collaboration because of the ability to create and assign tasks automatically as part of a collaborative process. This can help efficiency through automating certain required tasks as part of a project, deliverable, or set of functional goals within a given context. This frees you up to worry less about making sure all items are getting proper attention, and spend more time on actual productivity.
Conclusion
This covers the basics of the functionality built into SharePoint that promotes collaboration. Some people choose to use a certain subset of these features, some use all. Most find innovative ways to make these features even more useful by working within the flexible SharePoint environment and working with some combination of all the items I mentioned.
Please stay tuned for Part 3 of this series where I will discuss People and Personalization.
Part 1 - Overview
I hope this helps,
-Ryan