Empowered by SharePoint

I know, I know, it has been more than three weeks since my last blog posting. Anyway, no excuses on my end, kindly forgive my brief hiatus. Rest assured, I’m back with regular SharePoint and Project Management blog postings.
I know, I know, it has been more than three weeks since my last blog posting. Anyway, no excuses on my end, kindly forgive my brief hiatus. Rest assured, I’m back with regular SharePoint and Project Management blog postings.

In a power seminar I presented today entitled “Empowering Organizations with SharePoint”, I got the chance to meet and talk to a lot of the 130 people in the audience. It was exciting to see how organizations are eager to learn how to harness the power of SharePoint.

A key point I stressed throughout the seminar is the ability of SharePoint to empower individuals in any organization to take charge in creating collaborative platforms. An example I shared that most of everybody in the room was able to relate with is collaboration in project environments. Typically, if a project manager wanted a collaborative platform (other than email) to facilitate sharing of project documents, schedule, contacts, and status updates, he or she would need the IT/IS departments’ intervention and assistance to set it up. In addition to this, IT/IS would need to define the appropriate access privileges to limit who has access to these project information. Now, realistically, do you think IT/IS will get it done ASAP?

By using SharePoint, with minimal technical skill requirements (familiarity with Windows, Microsoft Office and web surfing), a project manager can setup a web-based project collaboration platform that can store all project information (documents, templates, reports), enable document management capabilities (versioning, check-in/check-out), define access privileges, and generate automated reports. All this without IT/IS support. Think about the possibilities. In the next few weeks, I will be discuss specific steps in creating a collaborative project environment in SharePoint.

Thanks again for those who joined me today at the seminar. As I have mentioned in the seminar, go to my company’s website and sign up to get a coupon on my upcoming book entitled “SharePoint for Project Management” and also get a chance to win a free web part from Bamboo Solutions.

Speaking of Bamboo Solutions, I was glad to have finally met John Anderson today at the SharePoint seminar. Because of him, I have signed up to be the resident project management expert for their SharePoint community Bamboo Nation.

All the best and stay tuned for more!