Automating the Site Provisioning Process

February 2008

 

Your company has launched SharePoint to great success and fanfare within the organization. It’s popularity has taken off to the point where new sites are being created on a weekly or daily basis. Standards, governance and best practices have been established. Perhaps it’s time to automate the process with a site provisioning tool.

 

Consider the following taxonomies:

• A Research and Development group uses a custom site template for every new product in the development pipeline.
• The Sales department dedicates a site to develop responses to Requests for Proposals and to track their progress.
• Project Managers create project sites to monitor issues, assign tasks, and store project-related documents.
• A home remodeling company uses a site for every new customer to track the entire remodeling process. As each job goes from one stage in the process to the next, the site gets a “handoff” from department to department.
• A real-estate Due Diligence group tracks the status of properties being evaluated for acquisition. Each property has a dedicated site where Due Diligence checklist items are assigned to team members and key documents are collected.
• A national consulting services company creates knowledge management and collaboration sites for each office, account team and project team.

 

Under each of the above scenarios, the power users responsible for site creation likely face the same set of repeatable tasks for every new site. The process may or may not include the following repeatable tasks:

• Create a SharePoint site using the same template
• Add a link to the site into a site directory or other list of links
• Assign Full Control, Contributor, or Reader rights to certain users or groups of users
• Set default metadata values for certain lists and libraries
• Set a default due date for all tasks in a task list based on a projected project end date
• Assign default tasks to different employees, depending on their role within the project
• Create custom alerts on specific lists or document libraries within the site
• Notify the appropriate people that the site has been created

 

When done manually, each bullet identified above is another step in the process. When every step is completed, the process is time consuming. If a step is missed, the end-user experience is bound to suffer. Users may be able to locate a site, but they can’t access it. Project team members may find it more difficult to locate sites for projects to which they have been assigned. Deadlines could be missed when task due dates are not set. Managers and executives will spend too much of their time trying to track down the status of projects or identify projects based on category. If the wrong site template is used, the site will need to be deleted and re-created. If not, certain pieces of key information will not be collected in the site.

 

Abel Solutions has implemented site provisioning tools for multiple customers. While the rules and process vary from client to client, they all have one thing in common – each version of the tool completes the site creation steps automatically. In all cases, subject matter experts can create new sites by simply filling out a form with the relevant information about the site. For some, the form is based on a custom SharePoint list; for others, where more sophisticated business logic is required when completing the form, the form is based on Microsoft InfoPath. After the form is submitted, the site is created with no additional input or time investment from employees. More importantly, the steps of the site provisioning function are all completed automatically ensuring the process is uncompromised.

 

To determine if a site provisioning tool is the right investment for you, consider the following:

• How much time do power users spend creating each new site and completing the supplementary steps to make the site “complete”?
• How often are new sites created using the same, or roughly the same, set of repeatable steps?
• What is the hidden cost to your company when steps in the process are missed or performed inconsistently?

 

If such a tool is the right investment, contact Abel Solutions to start building a site provisioning tool for your organization.