EXTENDING SHAREPOINT TECHNOLOGIES TOWARDS PROJECT MANAGEMENT CAPABILITIES. Wido Wirsam 1

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1 EXTENDING SHAREPOINT TECHNOLOGIES TOWARDS PROJECT MANAGEMENT CAPABILITIES Wido Wirsam 1 Modern groupware systems serve as universal information sharing platforms by providing manifold capabilities for customization and extension of their core functionalities. In this paper we introduce a set of extension modules that were developed in the context of the Distribution networks Relationship Management (DRM) project 2 to support distribution networks of industrial small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in terms of project management and advanced group awareness mechanisms. These interoperable modules tackle the specific requirements of SMEs particularly with regard to ease of use and flexibility. Our software development bases upon the collaboration platform product Windows Sharepoint Services by Microsoft [5]. Thereby we also exemplarily demonstrate the general flexibility of enhancing this particular groupware system by custom functionality. 1 Introduction: Project management needs for distribution networks of SME Industrial SMEs that act in a global market often have a highly dispersed network of people, who act as distributors for the respective company. Those distributors can have a variety of different types of affiliations with the company. They may be employed in the company, they may be external partners that work exclusively for one company, they may represent different enterprises or they may be completely independent freelancers. This diversity of distribution networks is typical for industrial SMEs in contrary to large enterprises. The main challenges that we face in this environment are: That the dispersed network of distributors is neither locally nor organisationally directly connected to the company s headquarters. 1 Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology FIT, Schloss Birlinghoven, Sankt Augustin, Germany wido.wirsam(at)fit.fraunhofer.de 2 This project is carried out from Feb until Aug It is partly founded by the European Commission through IST no. SME

2 The high communication and collaboration needs of the outlined target group. The fine grained user access restrictions necessary due to the nature of the heterogeneous kind of the distribution networks. Taking into account these requirements of industrial SMEs, we identified the following factors of major importance, when effectively supporting these companies with customised groupware solutions: The generally low budget available for acquisition, implementation and training activities of users in the companies. Integration with existent software products (i.e. CRM and Office software). Easy and flexible ways to adapt the groupware system according to the respective needs of the companies to guarantee an ease of use and thereby a good acceptance of the system. The way of establishing a groupware system that suits the requirements of the outlined target group differs fundamentally from the approach that would be suitable for big enterprises. One of the specific requirements is the heterogeneous kind of user groups in terms of affiliation with the companies headquarter, level of technological literacy and loyalty. Another aspect is the companies lower impact on distributed salespeople, suppliers and partners to change their communication behaviours and technological infrastructure used. Those challenges are closely related to the problems targeted by the research field of concurrent enterprises (CE) as defined by the CE-NET consortium. The CE-NET consortium has examined the state of the art of KM for CE and identified the most important fields of research for the future in this application area. In CE-Roadmap Nr 3 they state that The focus in Knowledge Management has slightly shifted from the emphasis of making knowledge explicit towards facilitating individual and organisational relationships and supporting knowledge flows between individuals and organisations. They identified the lack of connectivity in actual software systems and propose to close the gaps of missing standardised interfaces [1].

3 2 Description of the Project Management Suite a set of universal collaborative software modules With the term Project Management Suite we designate a set of adoptable and reusable software modules so called Web Parts that may be integrated in any cooperation solution product based on MS Sharepoint Technology. In this chapter we introduce these specialised add-ons and demonstrate their functionality by showing the adaptation and practical use in an example implementation done in the context of the DRM project. Details about the DRM project, achieved results as well as about the current state can be accessed online [2]. 2.1 Windows Sharepoint Services as underlying cooperation platform The DRM consortium agreed on implementing the DRM solutions based on the same publicly available collaboration platform. Such a platform has the advantage to cover a variety of features needed. The most important ones are: Web based client server architecture which allows remote access with only a web browser and no additional software installed. Integrated mechanisms for security, access control, data encryption and personalisation. Well defined interface specifications for the connection to external information sources. The reasons for choosing Microsoft Sharepoint technology are: Penetration of the market due to the wide distribution of Microsoft Servers that support Sharepoint Technology. Seamless integration in Microsoft Office Products that are widely spread in the target group. 2.2 Basic structure of the DRM knowledge management problem This paper concentrates on the motivation and realisation of a set of enhancements for project management capabilities supporting distribution networks of industrial SMEs. This is just one aspect targeted by the DRM project. A deeper explanation of all applications related to the support of distribution networks that is done by the DRM consortium would go beyond the scope of this paper. You can find more information about generally supporting distribution networks of SMEs with knowledge management tools in [6].

4 The information that is managed by the Project Management Suite is structured based on projects. Each project is represented by a Sharepoint site. User access mechanisms are defined on a per site level. This means that all members associated with a project can access the specific site. Depending on the role the user incorporates, there may be different access restrictions like read only access or the ability to contribute to the site content. Projects overview site Site template New project List of projects Project sites Project sites Project sites Figure 1: structure of DRM project management One root site represents the entry point of all users to their projects. This site enumerates all accessible projects for the current user and allows him or her to navigate to one specific project or instantiate a new one, if the user has the appropriate rights. Newly created project sites are based upon a site template. This guarantees that all sites of a kind have certain common properties. This is important to enable a meaningful processing of the contained information like searching for projects fulfilling certain criteria or sorting and filtering based on project related contents. As a result we have a very simple jet universal hierarchical structure that the project management functionality of the Project Management Suite relies on. Figure 1 shows this structure. Figure 2 shows an example of a project site derived from a site template and populated with some project details.

5 Figure 2: Screenshot of an example project site 2.3 Project management extensions added to the core Sharepoint functionality Even though Sharepoint Services support this kind of sites hierarchies, functionalities for a comfortable and user friendly navigation and creation of this kind of structures are missing. The DRM development team created interoperable software pieces that close this gap. Those components that can be deployed to any Sharepoint based solution are called Web Parts. Those Web Parts are predefined functional units that have their own user interface and may be placed on any Sharepoint based web site. In the following sections we describe the design and functionality of the Web Parts facilitating project management that were developed as a part of the DRM project.

6 2.3.1 Displaying and navigating project sites The main purpose of the Data Extractor Web Part is to provide the user with a comprehensive view of all projects he or she can access. Because this view can become cumbersome when the number of entries grows, the Web Part is capable of sorting and filtering the enclosed entries. Furthermore it delivers several shortcut links to certain configurable views of the project site of interest. Figure 3 shows a list of projects accessible to a specific user. This list is filtered to show only projects with the status field set to In Progress Figure 3: Web Part to browse, sort and filter accessible project sites Creating new project sites The process of creating a new project site by using the standard mechanisms as provided by the Sharepoint platform is perceived as too cumbersome by the majority of the target user group s members. The way to create a new site based on an existing template, as it is designated by the Sharepoint system, provides some pitfalls for the disregardful user and additionally requires some basic web technology knowledge. To overcome this, the Subsite Creator Web Part was designed to enable the user to automatically create a site based on a template, fill the parameters needed and assign access rights to the authorised user groups. Figure 4 shows a screenshot of this Web Part. In the first step the user specifies the users and/or groups of users that shall have access to the newly created project workspace. In the second step the user specifies the template, that defines the basic kind of the new site as well as the title before he or she finally creates the new project site.

7 Figure 4: Web Part providing project sites creation capabilities Contextualised uploading of documents into the projects workspaces The document uploader Web Part enables the user to upload documents to the right place and to specify the required parameters directly from the projects overview site, without having to navigate to the respective document library on the respective project site Advanced group awareness functionality for activities performed on documents All previous Sharepoint enhancements which the Project Management Suite consists of have the common purpose to support the user in creating, accessing and filtering project related information. Although the following extension can be utilised very well in this context, its field of application is more general. It lends itself to be integrated in every collaboration scenario based on Sharepoint technologies where a big number of documents are handled and many document libraries are distributed over several workspaces. In this very common scenario it quickly becomes hard for the information worker to overview the current state of changes, versions and occurrence of new documents of his or her interest immediately. Therefore we created a Sharepoint Web Part to

8 facilitate this very task. The user is provided with the possibility to specify, which document libraries are of actual interest in the current context and then can quickly browse the latest activities performed by all users on the selected information sources. The so called Document Libraries Awareness Web Part provides three views: the first lets the user choose which document libraries are of interest to him or her. The second provides the user with a textual tabular representation of the recent events on the documents in the libraries and the third view displays the images of the people who have caused the recent events on the documents. As an additional visual representation of the age of the corresponding event, the user s images fade out over time according to the age of the user s last event. The visualisation of this third view follows a concept introduced by Gross et al. [4] in the context of the CYCLADES [3] project. Figure 5 shows s screenshot of two views of the described Web Part. Figure 5: Document libraries Awareness Web Part in Configuration and Peoples images mode 3 Conclusion and outlook In this paper we presented reusable software components that can be integrated in any Sharepoint server installation to facilitate the project management related activities of groups of co-workers. These so called Web Parts are installed as a showcase implementation in one company participating in the DRM project and will be evaluated in the upcoming project phase. After the evaluation phase this set modules delivering extended groupware functionality will be made commercially available to the public by the associated exploitation partners within the DRM consortium.

9 References [1] CE-NET Consortium. (2004). CE Roadmap Nr.3, Project CE-NET Concurrent Enterprising Network of Excellence IST , Deliverable D09, 2004 [2] DRM Home Page. Fraunhofer FIT. (2005). (accessed ) [3] Gross, T. Tan, D, Wirsam, W. (2004). Empirical Evaluation of CYCLADES: A Cooperative Knowledge Management Environment. In: Proceedings of the Eleventh International Information Management Talks - IDIMT 2004, Sept th, Budweis, Czech Republic. [4] Gross, T. Wirsam, W. Gräther, W. (2003). AwarenessMaps: visualizing awareness in shared workspaces. In: CHI Extended Abstracts 2003: p [5] Sharepoint Home Page. (2005). (accessed ) [6] Wirsam, W. Prinz, W. (2005). Supporting Distribution Networks of Industrial Small and Medium Sized Enterprises. To appear in: Proceedings of 11 th International Conference of Concurrent Enterprising, June nd 2005, Munich, Germany.