Non-profit organisation WorkVentures has been selected to receive a brand new SharePoint intranet as part off the inaugural Community Challenge at the 2011 Australian SharePoint Conference, beng held from March 8-9, 2011, Hilton Hotel Sydney.

SharePoint Community Leaders from Australia and New Zealand are contributing both prior to the event and during the conference to deliver the solution. All time and outputs from the challenge will be donated free of charge to the organisation, with the goal of delivering a functioning solution that the organisation can use and benefit from.

Lawrence Luk, Financial Controller, said “WorkVentures is delighted to be the Community Challenge partner for the 2011 Australian SharePoint Conference.”

As a non-profit organisation, WorkVentures works in communities and with partner organisations around the country. Staff are in seven different locations around Sydney and Melbourne, and come from a wide range of backgrounds with around 23 nationalities from a wide range of business and service disciplines.

According to CEO Arsenio Alegre, “It’s vital that our staff and volunteers are kept up to date with news about the organisation and can access all of our policies, procedures and forms quickly and easily. At the moment everything is paper based or emailed and we desperately need to have everything consolidated in one easy to use location.”

WorkVentures works with people at risk of social and economic exclusion who are seeking to improve their lives. Its aim is to improve the employability of the people it works with, by providing them with the necessary skills, attitudes, behaviours and resources. WorkVentures runs several social enterprises including a very successful technology repair business called SIRC, selling refurbished PCs to low income earners, and traineeships for young people. WorkVentures also offers skills training to disadvantaged groups including indigenous youth and residents of public housing estates.

Currently WorkVentures don’t have an Intranet; staff updates are done via email and newsletters. The aim is improve the communication amongst their very diverse workforce, encourage all employees to use the central policies and procedures and work to improve some business processes – one being timesheet completion and time off requests.

All delegates can come and join the Community Challenge at the event to work through the various life cycle phases to build an intranet for Workventures. The Challenge will be progressed over three sessions.

Session One: ‘Define and Design’ is a Business session which will work through the high level requirements that WorkVentures has for an intranet, their aims for what they hope it will achieve, what they want to see included, and will also involve audience participation in helping to sketch out the information requirements and site architecture for the Intranet.
Visio will be used to map out the Business Process for the Timesheet Process and identify the key areas for development of this solution. There will also be a mini interview from a Hardware/Systems perspective, and whiteboard session to look at capacity planning and other operational considerations.

Session Two: ‘Develop’ will be a hands on session where the room will break into four main groups and begin to build the solution. Each group will focus on one of the following deliverables which a community leader guiding the process.
· Home Page and Content
· Custom page layouts for divisional pages
· SharePoint Designer Workflow and InfoPath Form Design for the Timesheet process
· Policies library creation using Managed Metadata and other metadata, content types and relevant views.

Session Three – ‘Deploy’ will cover the operational aspects for deploying the solution into the WorkVentures environment and best practice considerations in all SharePoint Deployments. It will also look at support and maintenance and planning for training and resourcing of the SharePoint Solution.

The final solution will be shown at the Closing Session on day two. Full details will be posted on the Community Challenge Page of the site as they come to hand.

The Australian SharePoint Conference is organised by a group of dedicated SharePoint MVPs and Community Leaders who participate and support the community through organising and sharing their knowledge at user group events. www.sharepointconference.com.au/AU2011