Project Lifecycle Management in SharePoint? It’s possible with WorkPoint

By: Michel Verwijmeren, consultant at Delaware

One central place for all your project-related information sounds obvious, but many project managers are often forced to work in multiple applications. For example, industry-specific project management software is good at managing final documents, but offers less support in creating these documents. Or when you need to advance in digital communication, project planning, collaborating simultaneously in the same file, version management and to give insight into statuses.

Many project organizations, therefore, work together in Microsoft's SharePoint platform. And that's understandable. You can always access SharePoint in the cloud and it has all kinds of tools for information exchange and digital collaboration in a group or organization. 

However, SharePoint cannot do everything. It lacks out-of-the-box professional project management capabilities, such as process phasing, a relational model, extensive automation tools, and project-level metadata management.

The best of both worlds 

The Danish company WorkPoint took on those challenges and brought the best of both worlds together. It developed a layer on SharePoint containing professional capabilities for managing tasks, entities, risks, documents, communication, and project lifecycles. In short: everything you need to manage your projects. Finally, a central place where you can bring all your project information together and from which the entire project team can work.

WorkPoint has managed to keep the good things about SharePoint, such as the seamless integration with the Office 365 platform. And complemented this with tools that improve project-oriented collaboration. For example, in WorkPoint you can keep track of which phase (sub) projects are in, and it offers document and task management options.

You can also optimize processes with tools for automation, data analysis, monitoring, and reporting. Or as they say: it makes SharePoint complete.

Collaborate with all project members inside and outside your organization

Another important reason why I recommend WorkPoint as a project management tool is that you can easily and automatically assign permissions to different users based on their role in the project. That is why you can also collaborate with people from outside your organization on the platform. The advantage of this is that all project information remains within the platform. For example, you no longer have to send a bunch of e-mails, so the chance that information is lost or steps are no longer traceable is reduced. Moreover, the Danes developed WorkPoint in close collaboration with Microsoft, so you are assured of lasting seamless integration with Office 365.

Connecting to your approach and systems

The great thing about WorkPoint is that you can set up almost everything yourself. You don't need in-depth technical knowledge. delaware can help you set up the platform in such a way that it matches your project approach. And with the help of the WorkPoint API in combination with SmartLink, we integrate your environment with third-party systems, such as your ERP platform. This way we streamline the management of projects, cases, documents, communication, and contracts in your organization in a short time. Collaborating has never been so easy.

Do you want to know whether WorkPoint can also add value to your project organization? View our information page or send an e-mail with your question to Michel.Verwijmeren@delaware.pro