Vivek Narasimhan is a product manager for SharePoint.
With SharePoint, you can store, sync and share with others. A SharePoint site acts as a central workspace for your project-here's how.
You've been tasked with creating a new product for your company, so you'll need to build a team, brainstorm on ideas, design a prototype and create a launch timeline. To start, your project needs a home--the "go-to" place for all project resources. You've already been using SkyDrive Pro to store your work documents in the cloud, so you know that SharePoint provides a familiar and secure environment for collaboration. You create a new site for your project, perform some quick out-of-box customizations and share the site with a few people.
As people visit the site they can start discussions in the embedded Yammer app.
While everyone gets acquainted over Yammer, you use the site's document library to collect all project resources into one place. Uploading documents is easy - just drag and drop them on to the library. You don't need to set up any additional security controls. Only team members who have access to the site can access the documents.
Now it's time for your first team meeting. You can use the site notebook to capture ideas and action items. Once you're done, you don't need to send the notes around. Everyone already has access to the notebook and can open it using their OneNote client or web app.
The project is starting to move forward! There are some cool ideas being explored and a rough timeline with deliverables starts to emerge from your initial discussions. You capture these timelines using task lists in the SharePoint site. You assign owners, select due dates and add major milestones to the visual timeline. Even though the tasks were created in SharePoint, teammates can view and act upon them from Outlook. As the project progresses and timelines become more complex, they can also be edited using Microsoft Project.
Team sites come in many varieties--they can be used as document repositories, discussion boards or even BI dashboards. Tell us how your team uses SharePoint sites by using the #newwaytowork tag.
Learn more about how you can organize your teams with SharePoint and sign up for a free preview of Office 365.
--Vivek Narasimhan