I am now going to enter my very own SharePoint “sandbox” (and of course I’ll be using a BrightWork sandbox) to test the project management ideas I’ve been learning over the past few weeks. The SharePoint platform is perfect for the managing work and projects and it easily enables collaboration. It can be enhanced and configured to mimic the varying degrees of structure required for project management. I will be looking at this from the end user perspective using SharePoint for Project Management.

Being in marketing and completely new to SharePoint, I need to get the lay of the land before I can do anything “project management” related. From the perspective of a newbie wanting to manage projects on SharePoint, I want to first learn what is in my SharePoint site and how can it help me with project management. That means I must start with the SharePoint basics, and just exploring my “sandbox” for a minute I can see why SharePoint is the ultimate collaborative project management solution.

Now I’m just learning SharePoint, so I'm just poking around the building blocks of SharePoint to see how they help me? To start we’ve got lists, lots of lists. This could be anything from Project Schedule to Project Goals, Issues and so on. It’s a very handy way to keep project information completely up-to-date with relative ease and allows the project manager to get a great snapshot of the project. Next SharePoint has libraries to house all relevant project related documents. This is a brilliant feature that allows project teams to discuss and comment on documents, while keeping the document in one place, never having to worry about who has the most recent version or anything like that. In terms of project management, the web parts might be the most useful things in the bunch. Web parts can be used to display reports, charts and other types of data. As I progress from rookie status I will learn how to take the most advantage of all these features. Lists, libraries and web parts are all housed in a SharePoint project site, which makes this platform the perfect place for guidance, visibility and collaboration.

I’m looking forward to diving in and discovering project management on SharePoint.