Departmental Workplaces

Designing Departmental Workplaces - IT Department Workplace with Interactive Tour

A CorasWorks collaborative workplace on Microsoft SharePoint consists of a broad range of types of sites. In this showroom, you see many examples. Some are workspaces, some are dashboards, portals, persona, and others are stand-alone applications.

So how do you bring these elements together to create a seamless collaborative workplace? With CorasWorks - very easily. You just connect them up. CorasWorks is designed to make all of the connections a snap.

In this article, we'll look at one design for an IT Department workplace. This is the place where the people that work within an IT Department would work together. This workplace consists of 7 different types of sites. Through CorasWorks these elements of the workplace are interconnected to create a seamless environment.

The first step is to use CorasWorks displays that connect to information in different sites (or site collections or virtual servers). For instance, the IT Director has displays of information coming from the IT Portal, the Project sites, the Help Desk, and the Vacation Approval applet. Then, we use actions to drive activity that flows across this workplace. In some cases they are acting on information wherever they normally work - yet the information comes from remote sources. Or, they are creating new items or modifying items from the interface where they work - without having to go somewhere else. In other cases, they are pushing information from where they are into other locations or sending emails with embedded links.

In sum, this is a structured, customized, individualized, dynamic, active, connected, seamless departmental workplace. And, it was all done with off-the-shelf CorasWorks software. In fact, all of the solutions are included in the CorasWorks Workplace Suite, and, our documentation walks you through how to install and configure it in your environment.

For now, below we have an interactive tour. You will be able to go-hands with each of these elements within our showroom. They are all interconnected as described below.

The Elements of this Workplace

The workplace consists of the following elements that are used as follows:

IT Department Portal - where all users go for their general information
Internal Help Desk applet - this is where the help desk staff work
Vacation Approval - this application is used by all department members to request vacation and get manager approval. Note: that this application could also reside in the HR department
Project Workspaces - this is where teams of people work on various projects. They also feed information up to the Project Dashboard.
Project Dashboard - this dashboard is used by the project managers to get an integrated view of the project work. It is also used by the team members to see information across all of the projects, such as the issues that have been assigned to them
Workplace Inbox - this workplace accessory could stand-alone or be integrated into the portal. People can "publish" items of any type to this Inbox for the rest of the group to view.
IT Director Dashboard - this is a role-based dashboard, what we call a Persona. The IT Director uses it to see the specific information from the other applications of the department workplace. In addition, this is where they do their personal work, such as creating plans, which get published to the rest of the department.

Work in the IT Department Workplace

Click on the elements in the diagram below, to go-hands on with them in our showroom.