This is Part 3 of a journey into setting up ProjectWise with SharePoint and putting it online for a large project. See Part 1 for a description of the project.
Setup and Preparation (cont'd)
The next task is to setup an external SharePoint site that will be the front end of the project website. This website should be user friendly, appealing to the project team and public, and it will serve as the main communication tool for the project team. The logins will be the same for ProjectWise and SharePoint as SharePoint also integrates with Active Directory.
By using a SharePoint site the web interface should be very familiar to everyone. I created an external facing SharePoint site that will be the shell for the project management tool.
Announcements
The SharePoint Announcments web part is a very useful tool to communicate with everyone on the project team. Each project team memeber will be notified by email when an announcement is published.
Calendar
This central based project calendar will contain all project meetings, project submittal deadline dates, or any other scheduled events that everyone on the project team can see. The project team has the option to connect this calendar to his or her Microsoft Outlook Calendar which allows them to view the project calendar offline. There is also an option to "Alert Me" which sends that individual an email when anything changes on the calendar.
Lists
SharePoint Lists are a collection of information that you can share with project team members. The Lists are ideal for RFI's, Tasks, and Project Schedules. Each list item can be assigned to individual project team members or a group. These items automatically notify the individuals when any updates have been made or if the items are close to an overdue status. This will help keep the project moving.
People and Groups
SharePoint has a nice feature for organizing and tracking project team members. The People and Groups function allows you to create a sort or project registry of all the team players. This allows a master list to select from when assigning Tasks, creating RFI's, or just looking for some contact information.
Sites
I will be creating multiple "sites" inside the main SharePoint website that will be the host for the separate contracts. Instead of having one main site that contains all project information I decided to create multiple areas that will allow for better organization. The SharePoint Sites function is great for this.
Installing ProjectWise Web Server on a SharePoint server allows you to deploy ProjectWise Web Parts to your SharePoint Site. The Web Parts allow a project team to access the ProjectWise content directly from the website without having to use ProjectWise Explorer. Below is a listing of ProjectWise Web Parts I deployed and since I have multiple sites that represent different contracts of the project I have the web parts deployed to each site. This allows the project team to search and dislplay specific documents related to each contract.
ProjectWise Navigator
Navigate the ProjectWise folder structures.
ProjectWise Content WebPart
View ProjectWise data in a specific folder.
ProjectWise Properties WebPart
View the specific properties or attributes of ProjectWise documents.
ProjectWise Search WebPart
Allows the project team to search for specific ProjectWise data from SharePoint.
This screen shot depicts what the ProjectWise Web Parts look like in a SharePoint Site.
The ProjectWise Web Link allowed project team members to copy the web location to an email or insert into an RFI, Task, etc. which directed the individual back to the SharePoint site. This web link was copied from the ProjectWise Content WebPart and actually shows the entire file path. This allowed the project team that did not have ProjectWise Explorer or basically anyone on the project to have total access to the data and still maintain one true source for the data. No documents have to be attached to an email and distributed to multiple project team members.
The screen shot below depicts how a project team member can copy the ProjectWise Web Link of a ProjectWise document from a SharePoint site. This web link can then be pasted into an email or into a specific Task, Project Issue that directs any project team member back to the SharePoint site to view the document.
The final screen shot depicts what the web link looks like pasted into a Task on the SharePoint site.
This is Part 3 of Putting ProjectWise Online, see Part 4 - End Result and Summary to see additional content.
Does everyone need to have licenses for both ProjectWise and SharePoint to be able to access the integrated ProjectWise web parts thru SharePoint?