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Leveraging Office 365 for Project Collaboration

Danny Burlage [MVP Office 365]

When dealing with projects in many cases people rely on Excel sheets and email to distribute tasks, information and keep track on activities to be performed. Although Excel is a great tool for planning, there are better ways to plan projects.

Information in emails easily gets missed and project members overlook documents or tasks. Let alone the problem of having to deal with all those different versions which get send around.

Organizations dealing with large projects, many different tasks and complex structures in their projects, should consider a project management application like Microsoft Project and the accompanying Microsoft Project Server. In other cases a solution like SharePoint Online combined with Microsoft Project could fit the job perfectly.

SharePoint Online allows project managers to create online Project Sites. These project sites can contain tasks list, document libraries, contact information for team members, project calendars and all sorts of other information which has to deal with project management.

All project members, even the people outside of the organization, can access this secure Project Site because of the use of SharePoint Online. When a SharePoint "On Premise" environment was to be used of course the same would apply but next to in some cases expensive licensing, the organization would have to worry about getting the SharePoint portal on the internet in a secure manner.

All documents and information stored on SharePoint Online can actually be viewed in the browser. Word documents, Excel spreadsheets actually open up in a browser window, without users needing to download the documents first. Next to this document versioning makes sure team members are able to view older versions of documents quicker.

If project members all get the entire Office 365 suite, one of the services they get is Lync Online. Lync Online shows the availability of all team members or company users which have the Lync client installed on their computer. This actually allows team members to contact each other quickly when viewing information in a project site.

Co-authoring allows team members to work on the same documents at the same time. Especially in projects with tight deadlines this feature allows a closer collaboration between project members. Project Managers don't have to worry about having to combine all sorts of information stored in multiple documents.

A SharePoint Online project calendar can show the entire calendar with all deadlines and other information online. It allows team members to create Alerts for new or changed information. It also allows users to actually connect this shared calendar to their Outlook client. This enables users to view all calendar information combined. Next to synchronizing calendar information Outlook allows you to synchronize Tasks, Contact Information, Lists and Document Libraries.

The creation of custom lists allows Project Managers to set up all sorts of process management lists like a list for change requests. By connection workflows to these custom lists actions on specific items can be followed.

Project Managers dealing with projects that have many different tasks typically use Microsoft Project to organize their work. Although Microsoft project is a great tool, it needs a Project Management Server to share this information with Project Members. If no Project Management Server is available the project planning sheets could be shared by putting them on a file server of a solution like SharePoint Online.

Another option is synchronizing a planning created in Microsoft project with SharePoint Online. This capability shares all the tasks in a planning with an online task lists. This online tasks list can then be viewed by all Project Members. Changes made to the planning, like completed tasks, can be changed online. Whenever the project manager then synchronizes the Microsoft Project Planning Sheet with SharePoint Online the planning sheet is updated automatically.

If people are mobile the best experience is offered with Windows Phone. Windows Phone synchronizes all sorts of documents with SharePoint Online sites. It also allows Project Members to make notes in Microsoft OneNote 2010 and synchronize these notes with their project site.

Watch the video below. It shows all the different functions of Office 365, Microsoft Office 2010 and Microsoft Project 2010 combined together. It's really good!

Microsoft has created a whitepaper which describes all the features discussed above. Download it from their site: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=28750&ocid=aff-n-we-loc--ITPRO40870&WT.mc_id=aff-n-we-loc--ITPRO40870

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