The Client
The client (CAG) is a leading provider of architectural-design and construction-management in China. Founded in 1952, over the past 50 years, CAG has completed over 7000 projects in China as well as in over 30 other countries and regions around the world. From 1986 to 2005, the Group has been awarded with 433 design prizes, including 57 national prizes, 308 provincial and ministry level ones and 8 international ones and the Group has been granted 301 scientific research awards, with 14 at national level and 124 at provincial and ministry level.
The client is the largest architectural-design and construction management group in China. Their projects can be found all over the country, they also have over 100 projects at the same time. To manage projects, they have been using the traditional methods and all work is done by hand. For a long time, their managers have been annoyed persistently by some potential problems existing in project processes such as real-time tracking, task control, staff collaboration, cost management, etc.
For these reasons, ePeaksoft was approached as its partner to set out to create an efficient project management solution.
The Requirements
Following is some features the client required:
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- Project and sub project management
- Task Management
- Project Document Management
- Risks and Issues Management
- Time & Cost Management
- Reporting
- Project Member Collaboration
- Project Member Management
The Solution
ePeaksoft was approached to this project from the requirement analysis, structure design, implementation and maintenance. In order to save time and make the system easy for maintenance, we adopted Microsoft Office Solutions based on Sharepoint Services 3.0 and used InfoPath forms and SQL Server 2005 to implement this system.
By taking advantage of Sharepoint Services 3.0 and InfoPath, we created a new project management solution to manage and track the project process. The solution provides process workflows and effective management tools that support project tracking and cost control.
What we do based on Sharepoint Services 3.0:
- Customize Sharepoint Service 3.0 - Form the particular characteristics of construction projectŁ¬the Project Tracking Workspace Template can not meet the demands of the client, so we must customize this template and integrate some other templates with Project Tracking Workspace. We also extend the workflow of SharePoint Services 3.0 by integrating it with the .Net Framework 3.0 based on Windows Workflow Foundation to automate forms processes.
- InfoPath Forms design - To make this system easy to use, the client provide all forms they used before. We change all these forms to InfoPath Forms. We also used the InfoPath data validation, conditional formatting and other features to deploy efficient forms solutions without the need for additional programming development. For automated forms-driven project processes, we rely on templates for project, enabling members of projects to easily create and deploy electronic forms.
- Reporting based on SQL Server 2005
- To-do list web parts - To provide project members a task list as well as tracking tasks on real-time.
The following figure shows high-level structure of the system.
