Improving Enterprise Project Management using SharePoint
Sample section of the paper
Various researchers and studies have shown the existence of SharePoint by noting how institutions around the world make use of the concept. Most of these studies show the implementation ranging from providing team sites, supporting team collaboration by the use of SharePoint to offer support to specific functions to its role as a portal of an institution. Share point provides the staff with a single site where they can access important information sources and tools. As Langfeld, Spence & Noel (2004) notes, so far, the main usage of SharePoint is for team collaboration as depicted in UK High Education Institutions (HEIs).This is seen in SharePoint team sites replacing or supplementing network shared devices as a platform through which staff collaborate on documents and information sharing. In 2007, SharePoint was used to support teaching and learning in Virtual Learning Environment (VLEs).
The VLEs are used to provide an area where students can access information resources relevant to their courses such as learning materials, course timetables, and assignment details (Curry & English, 2008). The site also provides a portal for students to maintain their jobs, submit assignments, and have a record of their personal learning journey. There is also the use of Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) market, which primarily is meant to manage learning and teaching. The VLE software market is greater than that of HEI’s which consist of schools and college of further education. Microsoft has been at the forefront in advancing into the VLE market. In the United Kingdom, providers of the VLE such as Blackboard and Moodle dominate the VLE market.
In 2004, JISC launched its Virtual Research Environment program. This program included deploying and building Virtual Research Environments based on the available frameworks and tools. It was also engaged in assessing their benefits and weaknesses in its support for the process of research, to improve and extend them in order to meet the UK research future needs. The program was also seeking to develop or integrate new frameworks and tools where there were no appropriate solutions (Langfeld, Spence & Noel, 2004).
The JISC gives a definition of the VRE purpose as “to help researchers in all disciplines manage the increasingly complex range of tasks involved in carrying out research.’’ In the current program research phase, only a single project among the 12 projects incorporated SharePoint technology. The project is called the Cancer Imaging and is based at the University of Oxford. The project is concerned with developing a link between university and hospital information resources for sharing cancer information. SharePoint in Industry was used to look at a UK-wide collaborative platform for a tender process for defense (Curry & English, 2008).
In 2008, SharePoint 2007 was used for student support and administration. JISC released a publication “Landscape Study of Student Lifecycle Relationship Management” that looked
