Smart Information Asset Management for Project Managers on SharePoint – Part 2 External/Internal Project Staff

External and internal staff for temporary projects is often made up of third party consultants or specialists from other offices within the organization. Professional services organizations are similar. Users are brought together for a limited amount of time at a premium cost to get the job done quickly and properly. It is common that there is a high degree of fluctuation of this type of staff. Considerable savings can be achieved by ensuring these users are brought up to speed on the tools and information assets they will need to conduct their work as fast as possible.

SharePoint content managers (including power users, department heads, and project managers) are the most aware of the content types that their staff will be utilizing, and therefore best qualified to manage who can access what content. Giving these managers a simple way to deploy SharePoint site collections, sub sites or lists & libraries to their staff can reduce training time and ensure project staff is presented with the precise content they need from the start.

Having an easy way to make that happen is invaluable. As when providing access for mobile workforces, setting up and closing projects that involve potentially large numbers of users strongly benefits from centralized administration to provide consistency for end users and to simplify management for IT administrators.

For example, delivering relevant content right within Outlook is an excellent way to kick start a project – made available to them as soon as they log on. SharePoint content can be provisioned to the user’s Outlook folder tree for easy access. Project staff can then ensure emails and attachments relevant to the project are filed alongside other project related data. The standardization of SharePoint content pushed to project staff and a consolidation of email communication can greatly improve transparency and ease the hand over process.

In addition to SharePoint, project staff must also work with different line of business applications, such as Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce, Jira or Pivotal Tracker, to document and log their progress. While these web-based applications are usually accessed through a browser, they can also be made available to users through the Outlook ribbon for simple, one-click access within Outlook. Launchpad, a component of Colligo Email Manager, provides access to web-based applications and websites within Outlook, which can increase productivity by eliminating context-switching.

Colligo Networks were already signed up as Silver Exhibitors for the European SharePoint Conference 2013.

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