How to support multi-doc development and reviews?

Question

I'd like to use Sharepoint to improve document handling and issue tracking for a software development process. The participants include from 1 to 3 reviewers, 1 to 6 developers, and other interested persons. The team is global.

Starting from a pdf requirement doc, developers produce designs in Word and Excel docs, then implement and test C# using Visual Studio. Testing generates (large) log files that have to be kept with the other stuff. 

There are four main steps in the development process, and there is a formal review at each step.  As a result of each review, the reviewers update a Word doc with summary issues and also enter detail questions and suggestions as comments in the developer Word and Excel files.  Review comments on lines of code are also entered into the review report doc. Discussion of the review issues is usually done via Outlook email.  The Word and Excel files must be produced from templates. 

With the exception of email, all of these files are kept and updated in a version control system, and periodically copied to share for access outside version control. 

All this works pretty well, but only because all the participants know and follow rules. There are a lot of moving parts and no simple way to track issue resolution over all of them.

I'm wondering if Sharepoint could do some or all of the following:

1  House all of the docs that they are easily linked and easy to browse.
2  Have an integrated view of all the docs and comments, instead of having to open each doc in its native app
3  Produce a unified list of comments from all docs and files
4  Track the resulting discussion thread to resolution
5  Enter/update/view attributes for reviewer comments (e.g., priority, status, tracking #)

Thanks in advance ...
Bob

Answer 1

1  House all of the docs that they are easily linked and easy to browse.  - Yes abut with PDF's you'll need to install an adobe Ifilter, it's not hard at all but it allows SharePoint to search inside of the PDF's and return results.... You'll also want to add a the pdf icon so that shows up in the results... Follow this link for the IFilter.
 --- IFilter 9  - http://www.adobe.com/special/acrobat/configuring_pdf_ifilter_for_ms_sharepoint_2007.pdf 
 --- IFilter 8  - http://blogs.msdn.com/ifilter/archive/2007/03/29/indexing-pdf-documents-with-adobe-reader-v-8-and-moss-2007.aspx 

2  Have an integrated view of all the docs and comments, instead of having to open each doc in its native app  - Yes and no, not all office applications support opening in the browser, look for that in SharePoint 2010.  You can publish or "save to web" and get the result your looking for but maybe not the best for what you want. http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointserver/HA101637801033.aspx 

3  Produce a unified list of comments from all docs and files - It sounds like you're talking about tagging?  Tagging would identify an item based on meta information you attached when uploading or creating ... Exampled in my blog posts I tagged a recent article I did on upcoming SharePoint 2010 certifications with the tags SharePoint 2101, 70-667, and Next Gen Certification.... In my results those pull up right away.... Am I way off?

4  Track the resulting discussion thread to resolution  -  Yes this can be done with custom lists in the discussion feature as well as versioning.

5  Enter/update/view attributes for reviewer comments (e.g., priority, status, tracking #) Again yes, you can customize lists, create views and tally whatever is needed. 

It should like you'd be surprised at what SharePoint can do for you, it just takes a bit of imagination to get it there. Look in to the There are also free project management templates (the "Fab 40) http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsserver/sharepoint/bb407286.aspx that can be installed that give you issues, risk and change control but you could also create a view in a discussion.  These are provided free of charge by Microsoft.

Let me know if this helps...!

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Kris Wagner, MCITP, MCTS Twitter @sharepointkris Blog: http://sharepointkris.com