SharePoint Project Sites
 The
kalmstrom.com team has finished a custom SharePoint project
that gave good experience and a very flattering testimonial.
Many more organizations would benefit from this kind of
solution for automated creation and configuration of site
collections.
A company that delivers high performance woodworking machinery
to house manufacturers all over the world runs large and
long projects for their customers. They contacted me to
have assistance with their project management system.
Before they started to use our solution, they created a
SharePoint subsite for each project and configured it manually.
This is of course a time-consuming method that is prone
to errors, so they wanted our help to develop a solution
that automates and improves the current system.
The goal was to automate the creation of SharePoint project
sites. Each site acts as a collaborative platform for often
long and work intensive projects.
After a workshop where we got to know the company's situation
and heard their requests and suggestions, we offered a solution
that worked as intended, but with a few enhancements.
 For
example, it is easier and more user-friendly to enter information
in a SharePoint list than at a script prompt, so we suggested
that a SharePoint list should be used instead of a script.
Then a PoweShell script could get the parameters from that
list.
"The project became both a development project as well
as an education in SharePoint and project management",
said the satisfied customer.
 The
solution we offered, auto-creates a site collection for
every new project entered in the SharePoint list.
Kanban Task Manager for SharePoint is installed
in a subsite to each site collection, so that the staff
can manage the tasks connected to the project in an efficient
manner.
The configuration of these site collections is of course
also automatic and builds entirely on the customer's requests.
When the solution came into place, they changed some of
these requests to make the solution work better.
This is something we are used to in custom projects, because
it is difficult for a customer to take everything into consideration
from the beginning. That is a reason why we often work closely
with someone from the customer organization, who can review
and discuss part deliveries.
Changing systems is never easy, but we included migration
services in the offer: a manual/scripted migration of existing
information from subsites to the new structure. For the
customer this was a smooth operation, and they could quickly
start working with the new system without any disturbances
for their customers.
The site creation application we created is automatic, correct
and easy to use, and we are all happy that the customer
is satisfied with it.
Peter Kalmström
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