At McGhee Productivity Solutions, we have consultants and employees located around the country. Because we work together on a lot of documents, we need a central location where we can store and edit these documents as well as keep track of our schedules. To work together as efficiently as possible, we use a team website created with Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services. Team sites work great if you have team members working in different locations, or even if your team is all in one office.
In this article, I"m going to give you 7 tips we"ve learned in setting up and using our team website. These tips can help you get up and running productively as quickly as possible with your site.
Note: Windows SharePoint Services is a great, and underused, tool for managing teams and team projects. You can use it to create a team website to track objectives and projects, as well as have a central location for storing and collaborating on documents.
Example of a team website created with Windows SharePoint Services.
Organize site folders by whatever makes the most sense for your team. The key is to be clear and, above all, consistent. For example you could choose to organize:
By department
By objective
Alphabetically
By clients
By project
We also create a new Document Library folder in SharePoint for each project. We can store all of our files related to a project in a Document Library. This not only helps keep our files organized, but makes it easier if a project is reassigned for the new owner to take ownership of all the associated materials. Learn how to add a new Document Library folder.
Decide as a team how you want to name your files. For example, you can insist that a date be attached to each file, or that the person who created the file put their initials in the file name. Also, you can take advantage of the fact that you can use long file names for files and SharePoint folders. Be sure to publish your naming structure so that everyone on the team knows what it is. Above all, be consistent in reinforcing and using this naming convention. This is critical. We’ve found that if you don’t, your team won’t know how find files and therefore won’t use the site effectively.
Develop an archive folder system for keeping previous versions of files for historical or version control needs. We keep only one current version in our “active” folders. This clears up any possible confusion over which version of a document should be used, particularly when your team members download files to their computer to work on while they"re traveling or working out of their office.
If your team members do copy files onto their computers, you need to take extra precautions to ensure you only have the most current versions of their files on the team website. If team members keep versions of files on their computer, they should change the file name. That way, if they upload the file at a later date, they will not overwrite something on the team website that might have been edited in the meantime.
Give each folder a single owner who can add files to it. We find that this ensures the integrity of naming and file structures within each section of the team website. Multiple people may edit documents in various folders, but we make sure no one else uploads new documents or creates new folders inside a folder owned by someone else.
You will probably have a number of files (like sales data) that are accessed and edited by several team members. While SharePoint won’t allow multiple people to save an open file, it is possible for a person to open a file while someone else is editing it. Unless the file is checked out, you run the risk of more than one person working on the same file. One or more people may end up doing work that can"t be properly saved. And if a user doesn’t check the file back in, then others can’t access it. Learn how to:
