Team, Meet SharePoint

IN THIS CHAPTER, YOU WILL

• Gain a snapshot overview of how the different parts of the SharePoint team site will be used.

• Set up alerts to pull you back into the SharePoint site.

• Enter your context and contact details into SharePoint.

• Find the overlap in everyone’s working day.

• Establish and document a virtual teamworking protocol.

• Start using the team blog.

• Learn how to work with SharePoint when offline.

ROGER WAS PLEASED with himself after he finished setting up the three SharePoint sites. The structure that he had created would give each of the main groups of people involved in the project a place to work and a place to see what was going on. For the moment, the main part of his work was completed, and it was time to get the team members involved in their new work place.

Roger pulled out his trusted piece of paper again, and found his favorite pen. “Now before we get started on Project Delta,” he mused to himself, “there are some things that I, for one, want to know.” And then putting pen to paper, he quickly wrote down:

• Who are these people?

• How are we going to work together?

• How will we each know when other people want us to do something?

His writing was interrupted by the phone ringing, and when Gareth Chan’s name flashed on the little screen, he quickly reached over and picked up the phone. With a great big smile in his voice he said, “Just the man I need to speak with!”

Welcome to Your New Team Home

The Seamless Teamwork approach is to embrace the capabilities of SharePoint to support both the doing of the team’s work and the cultivation of the health and well-being of the team. The doing of the team’s work is expressed through several SharePoint tools: a wiki page library, a document library, a discussion list, a calendar, a task list, and an announcements list. The health and well-being of the team is also cultivated through SharePoint tools, with the two key ones being the wiki page library and the team blog.

At the top-level, there are three parts that describe how the Seamless Teamwork approach works (see Figure 4-1):

• Doing the Work. The work of the team is done by using shared artifacts (in the wiki page library and the document library), with the team calendar used for coordinating in-person meetings.

• Coordinating the Work. The work of the team is coordinated by using the process part of the Team Wiki for describing a common working approach, the announcements list for team-level coordination, and the task list for individual-level coordination.

• Sharing the Context. The context of the team and its members is shared by using the team blog.

  

  Figure 4-1. Seamless Teamwork embraces SharePoint for doing the work, coordinating the work, and sharing the context of the work.