Organizations are constantly searching for effective tools that allow individual team members to easily share information that they know and to quickly find information that they don't know. Most projects have documents that need to be tracked, discussions that need to be captured, issues that need to be resolved, and information that needs to be disseminated. What tools should be used to accomplish these tasks, though?
Should separate software packages be used for each individual task? The maintenance for each of these disparate systems might get complicated, confusing, and cumbersome.
Should team members just track everything using Excel spreadsheets and email? Everyone might be comfortable using these familiar tools, but they might prove ineffective when searching for a particular piece of information weeks or sometimes even months down the road.
Should project teams just abandon technological advances altogether and keep track of everything on paper? There must be a better way.
The Solution
There is a better way. It's called KnowledgeDispatch.
KnowledgeDispatch provides organizations with the ability to allow virtual teams, project groups, and/or departments to efficiently and effectively collaborate. Members can share documents, participate in forums, receive automatic notifications, comment on items, and receive automated newsletters. Team members can easily post information they know and find information they are searching for on the KnowledgeDispatch website.
KnowledgeDispatch even contains a built-in tool called StatRep that allows online data sheets to be created and populated. Project leaders with little technical knowledge can create a StatRep database for the sole purpose of tracking their project data. A StatRep project database can contain many different types of data fields including special calculated fields. Team members can then modify the data from a KnowledgeDispatch web page or by using an Excel spreadsheet. Project leaders can create customized reports that group, filter, and calculate the data.
Related data items such as documents, photos, events, articles, videos, and bookmarks can be submitted and stored on a KnowledgeDispatch web page. The items are indexed for search once they are submitted to the page. Each of the data items have built-in functionality associated with them allowing team members to comment on and/or participate in online discussions about them.
The Benefits
- KnowledgeDispatch provides the ability to create user login accounts and security groups. Permissions can be configured for these groups giving them varying levels of access to selected sites, sections, and pages.
- Project documents such as Word files and Excel spreadsheets can be shared and edited. The check in/check out feature allows team members to collaboratively work on the creation and modification of a document. KnowledgeDispatch tracks who changed what when and even allows you to revert to previous versions.
- Team members can participate in forums discussing issues pertaining to their project.
- Issues related to a project can be tracked using built-in KnowledgeDispatch functionality.
- Team members can use the full text index search to find relevant information. All items that are submitted to the KnowledgeDispatch site are automatically included in the search index. This includes item titles, descriptions, and the contents of documents.
- Virtual teams can take advantage of online calendars to keep track of important events.
- Team members can subscribe to sites, sections, and/or pages in order to receive automatic notifications when new items are submitted and content is updated.
- Users can choose to have a daily, weekly, or monthly email newsletter delivered that contains information related to their project(s) of interest.
- Virtual teams can utilize KnowledgeDispatch StatRep, an online project data sheet, to track and report on project data.