OT: Project Organization

[benaiahhenry]

I have written a lot of custom code for our implementation to automate some things and to connect with other non MS systems but for your needs it sounds like SharePoint Online would be best for you.

We use Share point online and also have share-point sever in house. Having SharePoint server in house can be a bit to maintain for a small shop.

From your description I doubt you would want to go with server or any custom coded apps. At least not to start with. I would say get your feet wet with SharePoint online and the standard features first.

Yeah, I've been playing around with our SharePoint online (through Office 365) and I think it will be a good starting point for us. I know for sure we don't want to have a SharePoint server in-house, just taking care of the one fileserver (MS Foundation Server) we already have is enough We do have the expertise in-house to do any custom code we would want to do on it, but getting the time to do that kind of stuff is difficult.

On a related topic, are there any tools that you guys use to have your employees track how much time they spend on a particular job each day? This probably applies mostly to OEM's or Integrators, but possibly others as well. Right now we use a timetracker that we developed in-house, and while it works okay and has lots of potential to be great, we always get back to the problem of never having the time to put into making it great!

Most of us end up using some other tracker ourselves (Clok, Toggl, Grindstone, Notepad...etc) and copying it all into our main timetracker at the end of the month. Does anyone have any experience using any of these (or others) at a whole company?

Thanks to everyone who has chimed in here, there has been a lot of good info and lots to think over!

-Benaiah

 

[kwade]

When I did custom OEM work years ago, we took pictures and videos of the machines in operation and placed them in the folder structure that James M. mentioned earlier.
This can help phone tech support.

 

[dlweber]

Time recording

For the Time management we use an excel file at the employee level, however this excel file links to other database or files to track information. the one column is for inputting department, say if I put d03 in that column the next column will automatically put in the name of that department. If the time I spent is related to a certain project I can put the project number in, then the next three columns will automatically populate with the information relating to that project number. we also have a r&d check box that links to another file to track r&d work.
The way these files are linked one, with appropriate access, can go in query a job, or department and see who has spent how much time doing what.