The Home Page of your project SharePoint site is the initial landing page for collaborators and stakeholders. As such, I like to keep it clean and uncluttered. Here are the elements I like to include:

Heading (Top of Page):

• Project logo (if you have one) and the official name of the project

Left Side of Page:

• SharePoint populates the home page left side with the navigation to lists, Document libraries, calendars, etc. You can customize the order in which things appear and use Security to determine if they appear at all for some users. I recommend listing the most useful or most used items first.

Center of Page:

• The “Welcome!” announcement. This is placed on the page with no expiration date and orients the user as to where they are, how the site is used, and who to contact for questions.
• The “Latest News” announcement. This contains a brief status update and I usually set the expiration to one week.
• “Calendar of Events”. I use this to show key upcoming events such as regularly occurring meetings, key milestones and any other event of interest.
• “Upcoming Time Off Calendar”. This one shows the upcoming planned time off for key project contributors.

Right Side of Page:

• Project Logo (larger than in the heading, if you placed it there.
• External Links. I list quick links to other key sites of interest to the project stakeholders.

That’s it for the home page. You do not want to overwhelm your visitors with information on any one page as that will discourage them from using the site. For some users not used to using SharePoint, you may have to use some formal “Change Management” to get them on board.

If your company uses Microsoft Windows for your computers, chances are you also have the free version of SharePoint available to you (ask your Windows administrators). If you do, SharePoint is a wonderful tool to use to assist in Project Management and to enhance communication and collaboration on a project.

In the upcoming posts I will address the following topics:

• Part 1 – The Home Page
• Part 2 – Announcements
• Part 3 – Key Lists
• Part 4 – Document Libraries
• Part 5 – Calendars
• Part 6 – The Project Status Dashboard
• Part 7 – Security

I am not going to describe the mechanics of working with SharePoint. Microsoft has plenty of online resources and courses to help you with that. I will focus on how you can take advantage of SharePoint features and functions to assist your project management.