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3. Across Site Collections
SharePoint has a structural concept of a Site Collection. This is a collection of sites that are treated as a group. Sites within a site collection have common features, such as shared permissions, galleries for templates, content types, and web parts, and they often share a common navigation. This is useful for administration. Thus, many organizations use them in a rollout of SharePoint to their organization. They will provide a user group with control over its own Site Collection. For instance, each department or business group might have its own site collection, and thus, be responsible. This structure naturally fits the normal siloed structure of organizations.
However, as we know, breaking through these silos is important to achieving cross-organizational productivity. The Site Collection barrier is very strong in SharePoint – perhaps as strong as the political barrier. However, just as easily CorasWorks crosses this barrier, allowing different parts of the organization to work together as one organization. One department can see information from another. An executive can get a broad view. Business processes and information can flow across the work environment.
Breeze is an excellent example of the typical structure. It has 7 Site Collections for each of the departments. Here are a couple of examples of how we break through them.
Visibility of the Executive Dashboard
There is a role-based Executive Dashboard in Breeze. It is designed to give the executives visibility into key information across the organization. It has many different displays of information from across the organizations.
In this example, we show a display of Open Issues. The executives have identified certain key projects that they want to track closely. They watch the open issues as shown here. These projects are coming from the Services group located in a different Site Collection.
Click here to see this example in the Executive Dashboard of Breeze.
Another example in our Executive Dashboard is charts of Sales Data. The sales data comes from the Sales and Marketing Department site collection. The executive sees it in their dashboard in the Executive site collection.
Click here to access the Sales Data in the Executive Dashboard.
Distributed Training Management, Signup and Approval
Breeze has a rather extensive training application. There is a central application for managing training by a Training Administrator. The Administrator creates classes, reviews approvals from the departments, and manages the evaluations. This solution is in the Operations site collection.
There are three separate Training Approvals applications in separate department site collections: Operations, Products and Services, and Sales and Marketing. This is where the individual goes to sign up for classes and fill out evaluations and where managers approve training requests. The design is shown below.
The training classes reside in Training Central. The users work in the Training approval sites and use the training class master list to sign up for classes. However, the actual signup is stored in the local Training Approval site where the departmental work happens. If the Training Administrator adds, changes or removes a class in Training Central the information appearing in all Training Approval sites is immediately different. Thus, this distributed application cuts across 3 site collections.
Click here to access the Training Approval workspace in the Operations department.
Click here to access the Training Central workspace.
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