Introduction
This post is the first of a 10 piece story about how SharePoint can be used as an IT management tool. It will focus on how SharePoint can help managers and staff to work together better. A lot of literature can be found about SharePoint for project management, document management, collaboration,etc. but these posts will try to combine all of those aspects to lay out a picture of how SharePoint can combine all those things into one solution for an entire IT department.
What is the goal of these posts
Let me start by explaining what the goal of this story isn’t. It is not intended to be a complete and detailed guide of how you should use SharePoint in managing teams, projects, etc. It is also by no means a story on all of SharePoint’s features itself.
So what is the goal of this story? Well, the real goal is to get you thinking about what you want as a manager and how SharePoint can help you achieve those goals. SharePoint will never be able to cover all the bases, at least not without a huge amount of custom development. There are too many specialized tools on the market to help with specific tasks of managing an IT department or any other department for that matter. What SharePoint can provide, and what we try to explain in this document, is a base platform that everybody in the organization can use for communicating and collaborating. Why this is of vital importance and how to accomplish this, will be explained in detail in this document.
Who is this for?
Contrary to what you might think when reading the title, this is not intended for managers only. Because everybody will have to work with the tools suggested, it is very important that everybody understands the tools and why they were chosen. So besides managers, this can be interesting for anybody who is affected by it. This means everybody working in the IT department, all the project teams, the support staff, the architects, etc. The idea is to get you thinking and the more people that start thinking about collaboration and communication, the better.
Although the story focuses on IT department, the basic principles can apply to any line of business, to any department. So even if you are not in IT the concepts might provide you with some new ideas regarding the use of SharePoint in your organization.
White paper
The end result, after all ten chapters have been published,is to combine these posts into one white paper. That white paper will be available for download on the Euricom site. It will not only combine the ten chapters of the story, but will also be completed with an example.
By Ronny Gabriels, Functional Analyst and ex-.net Solution Architect
Next chapter: Part 2 - The "Why?"