With 13 offices and over 350 employees contributing to its “one firm” mentality, Walter P Moore shares information among its offices hundreds of times daily. Whether it’s the latest download about a pursuit, a recently issued set of drawings, meeting minutes following a project design review, or electronic redlines to be drafted, SharePoint, a Microsoft technologies product, enables this collaboration.

In 1998, Walter P Moore introduced the first version of its company intranet to employees in five offices. Flash-based, slow, and supported by minimal content, it was quickly replaced by a second site a year later. In 2001, the firm introduced the third version of the intranet, called the MooreNet. This platform was based on Microsoft’s legacy Active Server Page (ASP) technology and met the company’s needs for a couple of years, but the shortcomings of the network became apparent as the company grew. The intranet did not allow easy permissions changes, open sharing and collaboration of knowledge, or easy expansion to grow the firm, among others.

Firm-wide announcements as well as dozens of links to all types of information and internal community sites greet Walter P Moore employees on the firm’s internet home page. Walter P Moore

SharePoint was adopted firm-wide at the beginning of 2009. The technology that Walter P Moore employs is officially known as Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS), and it can host websites, shared workspaces, document libraries, custom lists, wiki libraries, and blogs. Additionally, MOSS 2007 allows for integration with Microsoft Office products such as Outlook, Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. Finally, SharePoint can interact with external customer relationship management (CRM) software or financial databases.

File servers for document storage
The old way — At Walter P Moore, each office has traditional file servers and users’ computers have lettered drives automatically mapped to the local drives. For example, a user in the Houston office may have an R: drive pointing to a Houston server, where an Atlanta user has the same R: drive, but it points to an Atlanta server. As a result, it is second nature for people to find things on their own office’s server via Windows Explorer, but it is complicated navigating to other office servers due to an impossibility of having lettered drives for the company’s 80 or so servers. Because of this challenge, users tend to copy files locally to their own machine or to their office’s server, leading to thousands of duplicated files and confusion about which are the most up-to-date files. This also forces a time premium when working across multiple offices.

Without an easy way of collaborating on files, documents are routinely emailed to multiple recipients, clogging up email servers. Even with ‘tracking changes’ enabled, incorporating comments on documents from multiple users is time consuming. It is also difficult to maintain and change permissions on our servers for folders containing sensitive documents. And if a user wanted to search for a document on a remote file server, it just is not practical. SharePoint has allowed Walter P Moore to change all of that.

The new way — Documents stored on SharePoint can be accessed through URLs (which start with http:// and are used through standard web navigation tools such as Firefox or Internet Explorer) instead of UNC addresses (which start with server name). This allows us to have only one location to store and access files. SharePoint documents can also be tagged with additional custom information, called metadata, that functions similar to keywords. Document libraries then can be filtered using the metadata, allowing the user to quickly zero in on documents of interest. Finally, when a document is uploaded, SharePoint parses it and stores the words inside the document in its database. This enables the robust enterprise search capabilities of SharePoint to look inside Microsoft Office documents, PDFs, DWGs, and DWFs, along with a host of other file types when properly configured.

Virtual workspaces for collaboration
At Walter P Moore, formal committees and task forces have existed since the early days of the firm, but they spread geographically starting in the early ‘90s as the firm grew. More recently, Walter P Moore has embraced and formally recognized several Communities of Practice (CoPs) that organically evolved around the firm’s core values and focus project types such as sustainability, sports projects, healthcare projects, and tall buildings. These committees, CoPs, and task forces, collectively referred to as “communities,” represent individuals spread throughout the firm that need support from technology to enable collaboration and drive innovation, creativity, and best practices to all the offices. As discussed above, the MooreNet and existing file servers did not provide this functionality.

SharePoint sites are now created and customized for the needs of each community. When used in combination with complementary software such as web conferencing and Microsoft OneNote, SharePoint allows users to collaborate easily between multiple offices. Additionally, community sites are being used even within single offices, serving as the backbone for dynamic agendas for weekly meetings and storing comprehensive office calendars.

One of the core “communities” that can exist within Walter P Moore is a project delivery team. For most projects, this team will exist within one geographic location. However, multiple offices routinely work on the firm’s largest projects. Using project-specific SharePoint sites allows project managers to keep their entire team abreast of the latest information while providing a single location for key documents. Walter P Moore has delivered over two dozen projects using SharePoint sites for collaboration, with the sites being used in a variety of the following ways:

• storing formal correspondence, planning documents, and design criteria such as geotechnical reports and wind tunnel studies;
• logging important phone calls and meetings in project wikis or shared OneNote notebooks;
• housing the latest copies of all deliverables;
• tracking and storing drafting redlines completed in Adobe Acrobat or Autodesk Design Review; and
• maintaining RFI and submittal logs.

By using Alerts and Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds from key libraries in the sites, users are automatically notified of the latest project changes. Additionally, through synchronization with Microsoft Outlook, all of the project documents housed on SharePoint can be available offline when a laptop user is out of the office — a key consideration for any project team member.

Rule the system before it rules you
Starting out in SharePoint can at times feel like the Wild West where anything goes. Information is now gathered so easily in blogs, wikis, and custom lists that it can crop up in any place throughout SharePoint and in a variety of formats. This phenomenon of any information in any location in any format can quickly alienate the general user. It can also lead to duplicated or even incorrect information shared in the entire firm. Handcuffing the users in terms of knowledge gathering flies in the face of some of SharePoint’s best attributes.

Therefore, having a governance plan in place is crucial to the success of site creation and ownership, the understanding of the site structure and navigation, the management of information gathering, and the maintenance of the entire system. An appropriate governance plan establishes a vision for the implementation of SharePoint including outlining new roles and responsibilities for specific key individuals, establishing rules of engagement for the appropriate use of sites, document libraries, wikis and lists, and providing a training and support plan.

Not an easy transition for everybody
With all of these benefits plus the support of senior management and a working governance plan in place, it would seem that a transition from an existing intranet to one based on SharePoint would be embraced by users. However, nothing could be further from the truth. For the previous eight years, Walter P Moore’s users had navigated the same system with the same look and feel. Even though the existing system had numerous limitations, many users were oblivious to them and viewed changing to a “new and better” system as unnecessary. Perhaps most importantly, users have to be weaned from using their traditional file servers for document storage where possible. Unfortunately, many users will not switch until they perceive a tangible benefit for their project. Of course they cannot recognize a tangible benefit for their project until they switch, so this leads to a chicken-and-the-egg type of dilemma.

While each of these items seems relatively surmountable, there is some psychology involved with how each individual user experiences this transition (refer to Everett Rogers’ landmark work Diffusion of Innovations). To aid the users in their transition, a firm needs to provide training for the change, highlight the advantages of the new system, reinforce how the change is compatible with the firm’s vision, and provide tangible examples of how the innovation provides results.

Limitations
While we point out a number of the excellent features of SharePoint, the technology is not without its limitations. While powerful, the enterprise search results “out of the box” are not necessarily displayed in a way that users would prefer, so some customization is needed and should be expected. The default wiki does not have all the features a third-party wiki application would, such as page templates, page-specific commentary, or an automatically generated table of contents. And file size limitations can impact the documentation and analysis models used on projects and force a hybrid environment of SharePoint and traditional file servers.

Our future
There are a number of other tools and abilities of SharePoint that we could not delve into in this article, including Content Types, My Sites, Site Columns, Excel Services, Workflows, and Business Data Connections, that serve to enhance its use. While not without limitations, SharePoint offers a host of opportunities to improve capturing and sharing of knowledge within a company, streamlining some of the firm’s core activities. SharePoint has a new version (MOSS 2010) coming out in the near future that addresses some of the concerns about the technology by enhancing and expanding current capabilities, such as an improved wiki and better integration with external databases. As Walter P Moore continues to grow and expand its use of the technology, SharePoint will grow along with it.

Aaron White, P.E., is a senior project manager in the Tampa office of Walter P Moore. He is a member of the firm’s Technology Steering Committee and has served as a curator for the corporate intranet for nearly 10 years. He can be reached at awhite@walterpmoore.com.