Part 4 of 5: The Site Requests

Hybrid sub sites: Project/Training Migration
If any momentum had been lost in our off shoring effort the launch of the DMC seemed to offer possibilities to improved communications. Soon the request to send further functions arrived and in turn mangers now came to SharePoint for solutions. This was of course rewarding on two fronts. One, the learning and familiarity curve had begun its slalom down and the second, my solution prowess was on the rise.

New training and materials were developed as previously described, but I wanted this new site to have a tighter feel and reduce the amount of page navigation. Earlier I mentioned that I needed to give up on advanced dash boarding due to the lack of tools but this did not need to hamper the model.

The scope of the knowledge the sites were publishing was far smaller compared to the department wide training site so I decided to have everything based on the home page.

A simple library web part held the soft copy documents. I decided to use a Content Web Page to post the flash tutorial hyperlinks. Being this site also needed to serve the Project Management team I added a calendar, Issue tracker and a survey (for SME questions) as web parts.

The result was a team could get in and out of the site without too much navigation, time and traffic.

Manager Reference site
One of the initial project ideas I had scribbled down when first I arrived was the lack of centralized manager material. Given the tasks I had at the time this took a definite back seat. Compiling documentation and creating content types was now a built in best practice. The real win on the site was gained by creating columns and turning spreadsheets into published lists.

Permissions had to be heavier since managers could not access other manager MIS so once the first list was created I saved it as a template. I would then lock down each list to its perspective manager.

In order to cut down on email and file sending traffic a series of trackers were built and customized. Point being managers could fill in item as they worked on them. After launching this service one manager mentioned how “unsticky” the workflow was. Being familiar to web terminology I took this a negative, when in fact they meant it as a positive.

Working in Excel and inputting info into cells causes you to be “stuck” a bit more to the page and the cell, whether by formatting or selecting, the cursor just does not move quickly. The trackers allowed managers to get in and out with far less clicks as apposed to being spread out through all those tables, rows and columns.