In this digital age of mobile devices blurring the lines of computing and connectivity, collaborating on projects between team members in various locations should be a perfectly viable option. However in actually implementing this kind of collaborative approach, you’re likely to find that without the right IT services in place there remain numerous challenges to address for it to be effective.
As a freelance writer for a huge variety of clients for several years now, I know all too well that different organisations have different approaches to this whole idea of capitalising on the Web for collaborative purposes. In the end, however, most of these have come down to the seemingly age-old internet communications email Round Robin, where the draft product is bounced through each successive link in the chain of command, emailed back for edits, and then bounced on higher up the chain until at last the final approval phase is hit. That is, if it doesn’t get bounced back down the chain to start all over again… This process alone can easily eat up twice the time of actually writing the piece to begin with.
Clearly, this method is not the most efficient way. Ideally, your team should have access to the same documents, edit them live and have these changes shared instantly throughout the group. But architecting such a solution based on the cloud services available, such as Google Docs, is quite a challenge. Can team members edit the contents of these document repositories while other team members working on the same documents get real-time updates of the changes being made so that efforts aren’t duplicated? And how do you ensure that these collaborative projects are accessible from anywhere, but without compromising security in place to protect your valuable IP?
Microsoft SharePoint has evolved into an ideal solution to these challenges. What is SharePoint exactly? This enterprise-class environment has numerous applications, but establishing and maintaining an online, collaborative environment is a core strength of the product and one which keeps getting slicker with each new version released. SharePoint, coupled to a Web browser, are literally all you need to build the foundations of successful collaborative projects within your SME.
Our own Space Age Technologies marketing department is a great example of just how your organisation might be able to benefit from a SharePoint environment. Our Marketing Director reports each and every working day to the office in Stellenbosch, our Marketing Technical Expert sits remotely, as does our content producer who stays all the way out on the West Coast. Apart from the bi-monthly update meetings, achieving any level of collaboration between us without sacrificing all efficiency required a slick and sophisticated online collaborative tool.
Beneath the hood, SharePoint is an enormously complex system complete with a wide array of integration options and incorporating numerous technologies into its core. However the environment has been designed to be administered and the contents manipulated by users at all levels of technical knowledge. Once SharePoint has been set up, either a locally-hosted version or as part of your Office 365 cloud productivity environment, building sites and solutions for the challenges of your business is Web-based with an interface familiar to any Office user.
Building Libraries.
Adding components to your Team Site in SharePoint can be done in a variety of ways. The fastest and easiest way of setting up a site with a basic framework of what you will need is to select a custom layout in the setup stage, but it’s also easy to build an environment which precisely suits your needs using what are known as Web-parts.
One of the most commonly used web-parts is the Document Library, and is the key component to our document collaboration at Space Age. There are four types of document library. The standard Web-part Document Library is for standard files, such as Word or Excel. There’s a Web-part for storing Wiki pages, and a repository just for your forms. If you need to share images as well, there is also a Picture Library.
We use the standard Document Library and Image Library extensively for our tasks to create compelling content. At Space Age we don’t just sell technology, we rely on it heavily to enhance and improve the way we work. In this scenario, SharePoint was pivotal in enabling this working model, and certainly is key to saving us time and stress every day by eliminating that lengthy to-and-fro period which often frustrates the flow of content creation.
These web-parts are what make it so easy for any user even those without specific technical skills to set up SharePoint exactly how they need it to work for their specific collaborative projects. Building a custom site is as easy as adding these web-parts as and where needed, providing the necessary permissions to collaborators, and sharing the link.
Compared to the alternatives, this customisation is exceptionally powerful. Not all collaborative projects are the same, so providing the user with the freedom to build their own custom environment can make a lot of different to the productivity of the collaboration effort, keeping all the relevant documents and images in the same, organised location available to all members of the team. Need a team email view thrown into the mix as well? No problem, there’s a web-part which connects to Exchange just for that.
Populating your library.
Again, SharePoint provides a variety of methods for populating your Document Library. These give you the flexibility to work and interact within SharePoint in whatever way you’re most comfortable. You can manually create new documents, upload multiple documents at a time simply and easily using drag-and-drop from the file explorer, or synchronise your SharePoint folder with an offline-readable copy by using SkyDrive Pro.
Collaborative editing.
When accessing the online document library, users with the right permissions are given two options for editing the contents of these documents – edit in the browser using the relevant Office 365 Web App, or utilise a dedicated productivity suite. Both options allow editing the documents online, complete with real-time update tracking and dissemination and live edit-awareness which alerts you when another user is editing the same document you are.
Collaboration awareness alerts the user when another authorised user is editing the document, and locks the content being edited until complete.
As we work a lot in Word documents with multiple edits flying back and forth to nail just the right tone or message for a specific campaign, this edit-awareness is very helpful. When editing the same document at the same time, any paragraphs being edited by another team member are temporarily locked to me until that contributor has hit save. Once I’ve also saved, the updates then show up in the copy of the document I am working on and the workflow can continue without any emails or IMs prompting me of the completion of a task I may have been waiting for to proceed.
Once both collaborators have hit “Save”, the document refreshed including the latest changes.
All members of the team site will automatically have access to the files uploaded to the Document Library, but to share specific files with others outside of the team or to highlight the location of a file in need of attention, there is also the Share button. Best of all, despite this easy sharing enterprise-grade security is still applied to all your collaborative documents.
Using these methods, our agile marketing team can be working on the same documents, within the same document repository, but from any location around the country or world without any danger of changes being lost due to simultaneous editing, or of team members working on the wrong file versions within a project.
The Power of Versioning
Although the purpose of this environment is to enable remote collaboration and not backup data, by enabling Versioning in your SharePoint site you can also ensure that a number of previous versions of the documents being worked on are stored invisibly to the user just in case a major faux pas results in the loss of data in the live version. You set your own number of versions under Site Settings, Versioning Settings although by default unlimited versioning is enabled.
Exploring the versions of any file will reveal that each time the document is saved, the old unedited version is automatically retained as a new version number, and the newer version becomes the live one. Users can choose to rollback to any previous version at any time. What’s even more convenient, is that you can rollback the file without losing the current version! The older version simply becomes the latest version, and the document being replaced remains stored in the versioning queue in case you need to revert once more.
This enterprise-grade data security represents an immeasurable advantage over competitive solutions.
As many applications as requirements.
With Web-parts, adding new functionality is as easy as selecting the relevant app and configuring it.
This is but one small example of how SharePoint enables a new way of building and maintaining an effective collaborative team, one to which geographic location is largely irrelevant and the focus can remain entirely on getting the project done efficiently, on-time, and to very high standards.
In fact, SharePoint is a lot more powerful than this example highlights, however the ease with which it enables collaborative online document editing and creation, and the functionality it delivers to such teams even without dedicated technical assistance, will change the way you think about the Web as a mechanism of collaboration. SharePoint effectively bridges all the major challenges of this model today, allowing your enterprise to explore new and more efficient ways of viewing team projects with the aim of boosting productivity and expanding the office to any Internet-connected location for your remote or mobile workforce.
Project collaboration through this model is not a chore for the participants – it becomes intuitive and easy to manage for all involved. This is Web-based collaboration perfected in one environment, and SharePoint has come of age enabling seamless collaboration in a modern, functional model.
