sessions to continuously improve the student's writing.
Tutors leverage document library views that display his-
torical tutoring information.
Example 2. Manufacturing Process
Optimization
The Problem
A manufacturer of solid ink and color toner cartridges is
faced with a challenge to standardize their production
formula sheet and test results when producing a new
type of ink to comply with ISO 9001 standards. With 16
different types of formula sheets, the company seeks
an alternative to the use of file shares to store these
formulas.
Users have various versions of the formula sheets
stored on their local hard drive, e-mails, and on various
department file shares. These various versions lead to a
time consuming and arduous analysis process.
The Solution
To provide a solution for document standardization, we
worked with the company to implement SharePoint
and leverage document templates within content
types. We created a single document library in
SharePoint to house all the ink formula sheets. The
document library contained a content type of each of
the 16 different types of base formulas for users to doc-
ument their production formula.
Now, users can select from a dropdown box the type of
base document (formula) template that they want to
create and save it back to the document library. Once
the document is created, an approval workflow auto-
matically initiates and obtains approval from the pro-
duction manager.
In terms of managing content, the administrator now
only has to update the base formula template in one
location where all users have access. This helped stan-
dardize the documentation of creating new formulas
and prevented the users from storing various local ver-
sions of the template. To comply with ISO standards,
the documents were also versioned and carefully
tracked for modifications.
Taking It to the Next Level
After implementing the content types in a single docu-
ment library, management now can report on how fre-
quently and for what reason each of the ink formulas
change and can implement additional operational
process improvements based on the lessons learned.
Example 3. Policies and Procedures
The Problem
The Human Resources (HR) department in a financial
firm sees a challenge in organizing their policies and
procedures. They store more than 400 policies and pro-
cedures on their SharePoint Portal 2003 platform using
various document libraries. From an end user perspec-
tive, it involves a significant amount of time to search a
policy or procedure across multiple document libraries.
Additionally, the HR department e-mails the users an
updated version of the policies and procedures tem-
plate that the users are required to create on a regular
basis. Due to various copies being available to the
users, the policies and procedures are not consistent
across various departments in the organization.
The Solution
To provide an efficient solution that can help standard-
ize the documents being created and stored, the firm
decided to implement SharePoint 2007 as a collabora-
tion platform. Procedures are supporting documents to
one or more policies. To have consistency across the
organization, there was a pressing need to have the
policies and procedures stored in one location.
Therefore, a single document library was created to
house all policies and procedures.
The document library contained two content types:
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Putting SharePoint to Work for You, an Internet.com Developer eBook. Copyright 2008, Jupitermedia Corp.
Putting SharePoint to Work for You
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Figure 7: Document library.