Your business is a process, not a platform, and while platforms represent enormous inherent value in the features they offer, those features have to sit lock in step with how your business works. Process first, platform, as valuable as it may be, must be second.
The key is to not stick a square peg in a round hole. Find a solution that allows for the use of best of breed tools as it relates to critical core features and where your content sits and drive process around the management of that content. Whether it be in SharePoint or across other systems as well.
For 15 years my services company, Gig Werks, has worked with the AEC, and we have often been asked “how can we use SharePoint to serve our project needs?” We learned a lot over the years, and first and foremost is to not expect SharePoint itself to achieve full project management in the Enterprise. It’s a platform, a piece of a puzzle in the ever-expanding sea of offerings from cloud platforms to supply content management and storage.
Based on that experience and years of development of SharePoint for our customers, is where ProjectReady was created and is all about. Seamless, process driven, built for users — a solution to manage and control content and activities, across platforms.
ProjectReady: Collaboration Through Connection
Let’s examine how ProjectReady, takes a platform like SharePoint, its upside and downside as it related to use in the AEC and drives its value without sacrificing how you need to work and get things done.
Focusing on Office 365, storage is cheap. External users are easy to register and manage via dynamic AD groups. Site collections scale to 1 TB and back up, recovery and DR is all baked in. Moreover, the majority of our clients already own Office 365 SharePoint to take advantage of Exchange and are otherwise not utilizing a powerful platform that they’ve already bought and paid for.
In our experience, however, every project has benefit of being its own site, its own collaborative center. This makes sense but maintaining those sites, creating, securing controlling content across what might be thousands of sites is just impractical, at least with just SharePoint on its own. That said, there is no better platform to manage Microsoft Office assets such as Word and Excel, and with “out of the box” integration of task lists to Microsoft Project, the attraction of its benefits is too big to ignore.
ProjectReady began based on that understanding and challenge. While ProjectReady has evolved with rapidly expanding features and integration with a variety of other platforms, our roots are in SharePoint.
One of the first features of ProjectReady brought to market a few years back was the removal of all the IT overhead of creating and securing sites. Full, business user driven creation of project sites, their governance and the ability to centrally manage information across thousands of sites was one of the very earliest features ProjectReady brought to our customers and remains core to our value to this day.
From consolidating and managing tasks across 10 or 1,000 sites, to automation of security, reporting and control of content regardless of where it may live, ProjectReady drives SharePoint’s value — through process for your business.