Part 3 of 5: The Expansion

Internal Constraints
As user hits were reaching the 5,000 a month mark I began to investigate what SharePoint could do as a workflow tool as apposed to just a library of training and procedures.

The initial searches and information all pointed to SharePoint Designer. There were two key problems using this application. One, it was early September and late fall bailouts were looming as the bank was feeling the body blows of the times, so asking for anything related to money was out of the question. My manager supported the idea but knew the timing was not right.

The second reason has its roots in the reason Phase 1 site development was made easy. Introducing out of the box workflows would have taken far too much training and support to implement. Too many odd clicks and checking of things.

Another larger constraint that would plague full blown SharePoint roll out is the discrepancy in MS Office versions throughout the bank. May still have MS 2000 in order to run the DOS applications needed. Those who had moved to MS 2003 were too few to really be significant and my line of business is scheduled for MS 2007 roll out in late 2009.

So after running into those two walls I had to accept the fact that Dashboards, KPIs and anything that had to do with the Excel Services Business Intelligence was going to have to wait. I’d keep an eye on the development of these via blogs, but I wouldn’t be able to get my hands on them anytime this year.

Semi Automated Forms
Around this time trouble had been brewing with a series of functions that were off shored. In short, the off shore team was receiving long email conversations that dealt with account contact changes. The staff offshore had difficulty deciphering the cryptic jargon and abbreviations that all non native North Americans take for granted.

I was asked to refresh the procedures and develop a template that staff could complete to then cut and paste into their emails. Less email traffic was a clear business goal. But without the right tools how does one do something right? Luckily I followed the Document Management Center (DMC) lectures. I soon configured the various forms and libraries. User would still have to rely on emailing the doc but the efficiency of the cleaner version cut down on the amount of emails going to and fro and was much easier for our off shore team to read.