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Knowledge
This is a very basic design pattern for managing information. It is the area where one may use a search capability. However, this typically lacks the structure and taxonomy that makes it useful to the user. It can be used in any situation where you create an information resource that consists of multiple information stores, such as document libraries, and you need to provide dynamic ways to access and see slices of the information.
Key aspects of this design are that the information is probably in more than one document library or list, probably in separate sites or portal sub-areas (particularly if you want site level security), and it requires a number of ways to access the information and see slices of information. Typically, the information you are working on is data or the metadata vs. content contained in a related document.
This design is becoming increasingly more important as we are beginning to invest more time and energy in what we call “related data”. Increasingly, we are adding context to data, such as tagging, commenting, bookmarking, marking related items of information. Thus, this Knowledge pattern is being extended to include a two step process of a) querying the related data, and then, b) going against the core metadata of items.
Project Portfolio Management
An interesting application of this design within Breeze is the design for Project Portfolio Management within the Services group. It consists of a single dashboard. Through this dashboard, you are able to see and manage information from projects that are distributed throughout the environment – some are within the Intranet and some in the Extranet. The dashboard contains a broad assortment of different slices of information from the projects. It addition, the information displayed dynamically changes based upon the user. For instance, below is a screenshot showing the Issues for projects that the current user manages (our guest user Corasguest). A different user will see different projects.
Note that in the above display that there is an action called Mark Task Completed. Thus, the user can not only see the information, but, they can act on it such as selecting items
and marking them completed. This is done in one step, even though the information is distributed across many sites and lists.
This portfolio approach is managed through a technique called Scope Management. All projects are stored in a master project directory list. Thus, each display first looks at the master project directory list to see which projects are relevant, and then, it goes to the project sites to retrieve the relevant item level information. This is useful because you may only want to see Issues for “Active projects with a cost greater than $200,000 that I manage” – this would define the scope.
Another useful feature for the Knowledge design is the “pinpoint” Search. This is the box of Search on many of the displays as shown below. Thus, after a display checks the project directory list, and then retrieves items such as issues, you may have too many. You can then just type text to pinpoint the items within the display results. Again, this additional tier of functionality helps you work with information.
Click here to access the Project Portfolio Management Dashboard..
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