Description of Template
The IT Team Workspace SharePoint template helps IT teams manage the development, deployment and support of software projects, tracking of bugs and provides functionality to help simplify the management of IT helpdesks. To help manage projects, the application template allows users to update information on projects, tasks, issues and milestones. Bugs are more easily managed by providing the capability for end users to enter bug report information. These reported bugs can then be assigned by the IT team to the correct developer. The template also includes help desk functionality, making it easy for team members to guide service requests from initiation to resolution. Role based dashboards provide relevant information to team members, such as unassigned tasks and performance history.
This application template is a combination of three separately available templates: Budgeting and Tracking Multiple Projects, Bug Database and Help Desk. Each of these three templates is available separately as a download.
Activities Performed in this Application Template
Help Desk Functionality:
- Provide end users self-service capabilities through FAQ and searchable Knowledge Base of relevant articles. Keywords and related articles can also be added to knowledge base articles, enabling simplified searching of solutions.
- Enable end users to create service requests, assign a priority and check back for updated status. End users can create detailed descriptions of the issues that need to be resolved.
- Assignment of service requests to Help Desk personnel. IT Staff can take ownership of a service request, assign it a priority and save updates.
- View a dashboard of the status of service requests, who they are assigned to end user inputted details.
- Service Representative Managers can view a dashboard of the service department’s performance, including overall service request performance, priority and average resolution time in days.
Bug Reporting Functionality:
- Allow all authenticated users with access to the site to log a new bug, listing information such as what it takes to reproduce the bug, comments, severity level and any related bugs reported.
- Enable bug specific discussions via the comments. This field, highlighted below, tracks all comments made on a specific bug including the timestamp and author.
Project Management Functionality:
- Create and Manage Project, task and issues lists with start and end dates, milestone dates, project budgets, project owner and information regarding the health of the project.
- Change dates for tasks by dragging and dropping bars on a Gantt Chart.
- Create threaded discussions where team members can use a built in rich text editor to discuss the project and RSS functionality.
- Notification of changes: Using an RSS reader such as the one provided in Microsoft Office Outlook® 2007, users can be notified of changes made to data within the application template. In some cases, email notification can be used in lieu of RSS feeds.