SharePoint has received a lot of buzz in legal and litigation-support communities over the past few years and with good reason. SharePoint provides a decent set of collaboration and knowledge management tools that are easy to implement and simple for end-users to learn.
I began using SharePoint around five years ago when an IT consultant who was setting up a server for one of my projects asked if I wanted him to set-up SharePoint, a version of which came free with the Windows Server licenses. I had been reading about SharePoint and was interested in checking it out, so I said "sure, go ahead." As soon as it was up and running I became engrossed in learning how to set up and manage team sites and was soon using it to help manage all of my document-review projects.
The graphical user interface is simple, both for administrators and end-users and requires almost no training. In a way SharePoint is too easy to use. It can quickly grow out of control if you don't have good processes and information-management policies in place. But that is a topic for another post.
To help you understand the power of SharePoint, I thought I would share what I was able to start doing with it within a week of it having it set-up.
- I was able to set-up multiple project-specific calendars and contact lists, which I could link to Outlook and view together side-by-side or, starting with Outlook 2007, overlain. At the time, I was using a Palm Treo (Treo 300 --> Treo 600 --> Treo 680) and was able to synchronize and manage multiple calendars and contact lists on the palms with Chapura's KeySuite.
- Before SharePoint, document review manuals were always printed and bound in three-ring binders, organized by section tabs. Every time there was a change in instructions from the client you had to swap pages like a law librarian updating form books. With SharePoint, for those projects where my team was involved in preparing and distributing the review manuals or where the client was amendable to my converting their MS Word documents, I created on-line review manuals using SharePoint's Wiki-type features. Updates are easier, quicker, and less expensive to make with SharePoint than with paper.
- I created on-line datasheets (basically spreadsheets with on-line-optimized views and limited formulas) to manage a great deal of my project information, including:
- review assignment status and reviewer metrics,
- paper and electronic-data collection and processing status,
- rented equipment and furniture,
- supplies and expenses.
- The data sheets deserve another bullet point. One of the banes of my pre-sharepoint existence was the sending back and forth of spreadsheets between collection teams in the field and the Project Management staff at the review centers. Often this information had to be fed one way or another into MS Access databases. Just ensuring that you had the latest version could be a headache. With SharePoint you can have data entered in a central datasheet, on-line. Everyone works from the same datasheet. Some field-team members would still need to use spreadsheets, since they were often collecting from areas with no Internet access and still needed to track what they were doing, but when they got back to the war room at the client site, or their hotel room, they could just synchronize the spreadsheets with the datasheet. Trying to pull together data from multiple datasheets on SharePoint to work on it in one view or to run reports was done in MS Access, which could easily connect to multiple datasheets.
- I set up checklists with basic workflows built in (e.g., when you click this done, then you get this task and an e-mail is sent to your team leader)
- I created project-specific announcement lists
- I set-up project-specific discussion lists to capture and better promulgate client answers to reviewer questions. Participants could access these discussion lists via a Web-browser or MS Outlook.
- I created on-line polls to elicit review-team feed back and, after the project, client feedback.
- RSS feeds could be enabled for all of the above so that changes could be monitored in MS Outlook or a dedicated RSS feed-aggregation application (e.g., Google Reader).
- E-mail alerts can be set up for nearly any part of a team site, which is popular for mobile managers who are not logged into the team site all day and want to notified of updates on their mobile devices.
- With the click of a checkbox, I could provide mobile-phone-friendly versions (WAP pages) for just about any page. There was no need to code a second version of the page optimized for mobile devices.
- Security in SharePoint is very granular. You can decide who has access to which areas and features. While administering security is pretty easy in SharePoint, Your IT staff or an outside consultant should be involved in ensuring the security of any SharePoint implementation. This is one area where you do need to take time to understand how SharePoint works, including Active Directory, SharePoint user groups, and security inheritance defaults. Also, you'll need to involve your network administrator if you need to limit access so that users can visit only from certain IP addresses.
All of the above-described functionality was created on a single platform. What was revolutionary for me, however, was how quickly I could set all this up. Using templates it became almost trivial to create a team site for a new project. None of the functionality listed above required looking at any code. Even the Wiki-type functionality in SharePoint doesn't require you to learn any special mark-up code. All text editing is done with text-formatting toolbars that are immediately recognizable to anyone familiar with word-processing software.
Initially, SharePoint was only used by me and the team leaders and administrative assistants working with me. Slowly, however, other project managers began to use SharePoint to manage their projects. SharePoint deployments are aided by the fact that you can adopt the bits you want step-by-step. You don't have to find a way to make an on-line version of your spreadsheets and MS Access databases right away. Start with those aspects of the project that most benefits from collaboration and requires little time to set up.
Client's were slower to jump onto the SharePoint bandwagon. I was surprised, actually a bit shocked, that most clients wouldn't use the team sites. While there were some Gen Y associates at a few firms who "got it" and used the team sites heavily to monitor the work of, and collaborate with, the contract attorneys, most preferred reports by e-mail and teleconference and couldn't be bothered to visit the Web site. Now, they're the clients, so they are, of course, right. I'd provide updates by passenger pigeon if the client is willing to pay for the experts, coop set-up. and poop clean up. Still, it did take me some time to get over my evangelism and frustration at the lack of converts.
This taught me a valuable lesson. As useful as a tool is to you, don't make assumptions about your client's needs. In the case of SharePoint, the issue is that most attorneys want the information "pushed" to them and they want that information in as few chunks as possible. For most clients this means content-rich, but easy to read, periodic reports e-mailed to them, which they can view on their smartphones. This is one thing that SharePoint won't give you out of the box.
Generating and delivering context-rich reports highlights why I think SharePoint is not going to put project/case/practice management application developers out of job anytime soon. SharePoint is like a gateway drug for collaboration and knowledge management. After you start using it, you want it to do more. You start craving the harder stuff. Even things that "should" be simple, such as creating a look-up field to pull data from another team site are surprisingly difficult. You can do it, but to make it work requires coding knowledge and a greater time commitment, or the purchase of Web parts or add-on software applications. When you get to this this stage, you should start looking into bringing in an outside consultant.
Recently, I talked to the guys at Legal Science and conducted an interview by e-mail about their Caselawg product. Caselawg is a project-management application for litigation support departments built on the SharePoint platform. I hope to post my questions and their answers later this week. In the meantime, I suggest you check out their Web site to learn more: http://www.caselawg.com/
Of course, over the past five years, the number of on-line SaaS offerings for project management, knowledge management, and team collaboration has increased and SharePoint faces some serious competition. I'll highlight alternatives to SharePoint in my next post.
Paul,
Would love a chance to show you how you can use PBworks Legal Edition as a SharePoint alternative. Do you have any time for a chat?
I'd love to. I've sent you an e-mail with my availability.
I think SharePoint is underrated for these purposes; thanks for bringing out these points.
As a user I prefer big-push to pull in terms of information dissemination; as a project manager, I like having it both ways -- I'll push periodic stuff to the users but I'll also have it where they can look at an up-to-date version at any time. SharePoint does the latter better than the former, as you note; that said, whenever I sent out project information, I usually did some formatting to highlight key messages anyway.
XMLaw makes a really slick tool for aggregating data on SharePoint from multiple data sources. It's a great way to build up a more complete and complex picture of what's going on.
Thanks for pointing out XMLaw. I wasn't familiar with it. Interesting to see that it was acquired by Thompson Reuters. I'm looking forward to seeing where they take it.