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Up until recently, applications have been pretty much self-contained. Typically, each application has a set of features which are exposed through the interface.  Although access to features can be based on a user profile, you still have to open the application in order to access its features. Through the use of APIs and custom development, web-based applications can provide a limited set of additional features based upon what a user needs to do to get his or her job done. In web development circles, this is sometimes referred to as a “mash up.”  But again, in most cases, it requires either custom development or a highly technical degree of configuration.

Even with the proliferation of SharePoint technologies, an application is represented most often by a single site where users go to access information and work with others who are also working with the same information. These “site-bound” applications still tend to be one size fits all, and do not provide enough flexibility to optimize the needs of different people with different roles.

For some time now, CorasWorks has been delivering on the idea of a workplace of interconnected applications.  These applications can communicate with each other, so users don’t have to go to one application after another to get their work done and they don’t have to be trained how to use multiple applications. Our Workplace Suite is designed to make it easy, fast, and cost-effective to build, maintain, and inter-connect these applications as part of your customized virtual workplace running on SharePoint.

Workplace applications are often considered to be complete elements of your workplace. However, with the Workplace Suite, each business application can contain a number of individual features in the form of configured web parts. With the new architecture of the Workplace Suite, once created, these features can be distributed and reused throughout your environment, not just in the application for which they were configured. We call these re-useable and distributable components Workplace Features. 

A Workplace Feature will usually consist of the following:

• A connection to information

• A filtered view of information that can be either unique to a user or based on some other type of criteria

• A specific type of display such as parent/child or data grouping

• One or more actions that allow the user to work with the information in the business context

As an example, consider the hypothetical distributed Internal Help Desk application shown here.  You can click the following images to go hands-on directly with that application:

• IT Director Dashboard

• Internal Help Desk

• Role-Based Persona

In this example, the Internal Help Desk shares information with several other applications. When Help Desk employees work in the application, they push information out to the other applications, either automatically or via the use of actions. They respond to and update help requests and publish knowledge base articles, and the Help Desk manager pushes work assignments out to a consultants’ dashboard.

In addition, several Help Desk Workplace Features are reused and distributed to other sites and applications as shown in the diagram. As a result:

• Employees can go to their My Site and add new Help Desk requests and check on the status of their existing requests, instead of emailing or calling the Help Desk employees with their requests and more requests about the status

• The IT Director can check his dashboard to see the status of all Help Desk requests, in addition to all of the other work he is responsible for managing

• Consultants can get their work assignments via an extranet

• The user community can access Knowledge Base articles via an intranet, answering their own questions and cutting down on the number of support requests

As an additional benefit, the manager of the Help Desk application doesn’t have to train all of these information users on how to use their application, or allow them access to any parts of the application that aren’t necessary to their jobs. All of these different roles, distributed across the workplace, benefit from the information being more accessible and presented in a manner that works best for them. And as information is more accessible, it becomes more valuable because people can make better decisions, more quickly. At the same time, they only have access to the information they need.

With Workplace Features, you can start to see your application design canvas expand to encompass the entire SharePoint environment, rather than just a single site. Your applications and information can reach across multiple sites, and across the Internet, Extranet, and Intranet. As such, you can begin to break down the barriers between the work of different people within your organization.  And, you have the flexibility to design your distributed applications to optimize the productivity of each group of users.