Unique Capabilities

BrightWork includes many unique capabilities and features that truly take SharePoint to the next level for successful project management.

Templates

The BrightWork templates approach means that you get to decide how much project management to apply in each situation. We think templates are so important that we gave them a section all of their own. <more>

Reporting

Work and Project Management is all about knowing what is going on. Is my project late? What work do I have to do today? One of the advantages of the SharePoint platform is that it so easily stores information in lists and libraries. However it is very difficult to get the information back from the same lists and libraries with the native SharePoint capabilities.

BrightWork includes many different report types (Gantt Charts; Project Status; Resource Tracking; Work Tracking; Issue Tracking; Charts and Graphs).

Reports can be Printed, emailed and exported to a variety of sources: Microsoft Excel (including to a web query); XML; and Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services.

All reports are highly configurable through the BrightWork web part's settings page and can be further reused, edited and extended via the BrightWork Reporter Library and Report Editor.

Smart Project Management

BrightWork also includes a number of SharePoint enhanced features for Smarter Project Management. See below for selection of highlights.

Project Metrics & KPIs

Project metrics are important because they give you and the other project stakeholders an easy, objective and scientific way of measuring the progress of the project, and also the grounds with which to make important decisions as to the direction and scope of the project. The BrightWork Project Metrics list enables you to track and capture metrics (e.g. number of red issues; Project Health; number of overdue items) relating to the project and feed this information to reports, charts and KPI web parts. The Metrics list also enables you to define Target, Warning and Danger ranges for the metric and to associate traffic light indicators (KPIs) with these ranges when the metric is compared to a fixed target value or to a value in another metric.

Status Reports

BrightWork of course includes live up to the minute status reports, but what if you wanted to review the project status from a week ago or a month ago? BrightWork includes a workflow that enables you to capture a snapshot of the current project status. This enables you to maintain a historical record of the progress of the project.

Enhanced Project Plan Syncing

The Microsoft Project Professional 2010 to SharePoint 2010 sync feature brings some much needed project collaboration to Microsoft Project; however, this does not mean that the feature cannot be improved for more streamlined project management. With the BrightWork Project Structured template, the relationship between the project site and the Microsoft Project plan is established automatically. Additional column mapping is provided for reporting on extra Microsoft Project data such as costs, baselines and durations.

Smart Site Copy

BrightWork includes a proprietary site copy feature that does not rely on the Solution Gallery and gives far greater granularity than is offered by vanilla SharePoint. Advantages to the BrightWork Copy Site feature include:

All Solution Gallery Issues are addressed and remedied
Assignee and Owner values are preserved
Ability to specify which list and library content (i.e. list items and documents) is copied
Views in sites that use the List View Web Part (LVWP) - likely if the source was originally upgraded from SharePoint 2007 - will be created using the new XSLT List View Web Part (XLV). See here for more information on the XLV.

Enhanced Lists

BrightWork includes a number of additional list types such as Project Risks, Project Goals, Project Statement that are designed with specific project management functions in mind.

All BrightWork lists included tailored alerts; assignee email notification and reference numbering.

Hierarchy Support

Out of the box SharePoint tends to treat every site like an island. BrightWork believes that this is not appropriate for organizations with more than one current project! BrightWork supports and enhances the SharePoint as a hierarchy concept, for example, every department (e.g. marketing, engineering) may have their own subset of projects. They will need a location where they can see rollup information pertaining to these projects in a single location. All BrightWork reports can report on sites located below them in the hierarchy. The hierarchy web part provides access to the hierarchy.

Gantt Charts: The single list Project Schedule Gantt displays all the items from a single list in a structured hierarchical Gantt. The example here shows the items synced to a SharePoint Project Tasks list from a Microsoft Project Plan in one complete Gantt.

Gantt Charts: Program managers and senior management have a high-level Project Gantt that gives a snapshot of multiple projects.

Project Status: The project-level Weekly Status Report gives you a detailed snapshot of the health of the project.

Project Status: More general, less detailed views of a single project's status are also available.

Project Status: The same type of reporting is also available across projects.

Resource Tracking: Resource Reports help you to identify which team members are over-allocated and which ones have the cycles to carry more of the load.

Work Tracking: The Open Work report displays information about all the open work items in the project.

Work Tracking: Team members have a set of My Work reports that show only the items relevant to them. Project managers can also use the displayed report to view the work of a selected team member.

Work Tracking: The Overdue Work report shown here is showing all the items in multiple projects that have are now overdue.

Issue Tracking: To mark a work item as an issue all a team member had to do is select the Issue Indicator.

Issue Tracking: For issues of a more general nature, team members can use the Project Issues list.

Issue Tracking: All templates include a set of Issues reports that show the issues affecting the projects.

Charts and Graphs: The Chart View web part takes data from any list and renders it in a variety of chart types.

Charts and Graphs: You can also merge data from multiple lists and display in a single chart, such as the Costs and Work charts displayed below

Charts and Graphs: Program managers and senior management will love the high-level multi-project Status and Health charts.

The Reporter Settings page is where you select and configure the on-page report.

The options on the Reporter Settings page mean that one of the supplied reports can turn into hundreds of reports.

The BrightWork Reporter Library is where you store and manage the custom reports you create yourself.

The BrightWork Reporter Library allows you to create a copy of any report. The advantage of this is that it makes creating your own reports a simpler process, as most reports you will want to create will generally be a variation of an existing report..

The Report Editor enables you to make code changes to a report in the BrightWork Reporter Library without having to touch any actual code. You can do things like: add columns to reports, add and/or update lists being reported on and edit site filters etc., all without having to edit a single line of XML.

With the Report Editor you can also create your own filters (site and list) and add multiple custom lists to report on.

The Report Profiler displays information about the sites and lists that the report queries and how long it takes to run the query.

The Report Locator Report enables you to work out where a report is being used. This can be important if you want to edit the report or delete the report for housekeeping reasons.

The Metrics List captures and collates project information. This information can then be fed to a number of project web parts, such as the Project Summary and KPI web parts shown here.