Project Management with WSS 3.0
Recently the company I work for began a rather large project that I am now the project manager for. As we have begun working on this project over the last couple weeks, there as an administrative decision made (not by me) to use Sharepoint 3.0 to manage the documents, project timeline, and tasks. Now, I should admit that at first, I was apprehensive to use Sharepoint for such a large part of our project, especially since it meant training my end-users on VPN connections, document versioning, proper folder structures, standard filenames, and using their outlook for more than just email and calendaring. Now into our third week of the project, I’m realizing that using Sharepoint was probably a blessing in disguise, albeit with a few hiccups here and there.
As with any company, my end-users are varied with their knowledge and experience with computers, but I am well experienced with technical training and documentation so getting everyone on the same page, while a bit time consuming, has been a fairly easy task. I have found that versioning can be a very confusing topic to some people, but I think the knowledge of that just comes with regular use. One thing I am slightly annoyed about is the inability to setup reminders on tasks from our project timeline. I have found a couple third party applications that can provide this feature, but I guess the PM in me assumed that would be a feature out of the box since it would be so useful. One feature that my team has found very useful is the alerts. They no longer have to regularly check back to the Sharepoint site for the project just to check if anything has changed – instead they immediately get alerted via email when changes are made to document libraries or specific documents that they have selected to receive alerts on. Also, the ability to link a task directly to an issue in the issue log is a handy feature for me.
Judging from the experience with Sharepoint with the project so far, we will probably continue to use Sharepoint for future projects, although I am hoping that either we will be able to search the Sharepoint site (a limitation with upgrading to WSS 3.0 on SBS 2003) or that we will have migrated to SBS 2008 before another substantial project comes along as I’m assuming they will have fully integrated WSS 3.0 with SBS 2008 just like they did with WSS 2.0 and SBS 2003.