Collaborative Working

Background

Collaborative Working refers to the tools and infrastructure that teams have in order to work together effectively. Teams can range from two people working together in the same office through to huge multifaceted groups dispersed over different geographical locations.

To determine if it is worthwhile for an organisation to invest in any collaboration tools, it can be helpful to consider the following questions:

1. Do teams currently have a single, common repository to store all documents, emails, files, etc., that can be easily accessed by all other members of the team. How hard is it for anyone else within the company to find out about the repository and access it if the information could be beneficial to their work as well?
   
2. Can people easily search across the repository? (i.e. Can they search for specific words within the documents) without having to manually browse a directory structure and open each file individually.
   
3. If anybody changes a document, presentation or project schedule, are the effected people automatically informed?
   
4. Do tools help to automate common processes such as the tracking of documents through the authoring, reviewing and publishing cycles?
   
5. Is project information available to everyone who might need it, or only to those people who are on a certain email distribution list?
   
6. Are the majority of meetings spent making actual decisions or do people mostly use meetings to simply present information?
   
7. Do people discuss issues using electronic forums or via emails? If discussions are always based on emails, how can people in other teams learn from results of the discussions? Or similarly, how do future teams know what was discussed in the past? Does each team have to re-learn or re-discover for themselves, lessons that were realised in a previous project?
   
8. Can you easily capture team member's opinions, votes or preferences regarding a decision without always holding a physical meeting?
   

Our services

We help companies to implement Microsoft SharePoint Server as part of their collaborative working infrastructure. We design and install the SharePoint Portals Servers, develop any custom web-parts that are needed, integrate SharePoint with other systems, and show how employee's can change their work practices to make best use of the new tools.

Companies benefit from having information more readily available, improving employee productivity and being able to support the working practices of dynamic teams.

Contact form

Interested in finding out more information? Contact us now using our online form.