About Project Templates

Project templates provide companies, groups, teams, and organizations
a quick and easy way to ramp up and start new projects with little
overhead. These project templates let organizations reuse information
from one project to another to save time and effort. For example,
in the construction industry when planning and organizing a job,
information on policies, procedures, practices, and performances
from one job will carry over for many – if not all – other jobs.

Challenge

Project templates can be helpful when organizations have multiple
projects that follow a consistent structure and utilize repetitive
information, but creating project templates can be time-consuming.
To create a project template you typically have to spend a great
deal of time compiling information from past projects located in
a variety of different physical and digital locations. Trying to
structure project templates from projects with such dispersed information
is extremely difficult to do under short notice.

Unfortunately, many projects are time-critical. As a result,
in an attempt to save time a team might simply start a project without
properly researching, planning, or gathering useful information from
past projects. This can happen due to the time required to spin-up
the formal project resources as well as to gather the necessary
information. If a user has many weekly, monthly, or yearly projects,
the time to create them can quickly add up.

Novell Solution

Novell Vibe lets you create workspaces that can facilitate
project management by providing a central location for all project
related activities. The workspaces in Novell Vibe enable project
data consolidation while facilitating the re-purposing of information
for other projects. Project leaders and team members can leverage
Novell Vibe workspaces to store, organize and share all information
related to a specific project, including documents, ideas, plans,
research, milestones, tasks, expected outcomes, work in progress,
and more. The centralized workspaces for document storage combined with
its rich document management features make Novell Vibe an ideal
medium to store, share, and manage documents. Its wikis and threaded
discussions enable teams to collect, refine, and aggregate relevant
ideas and knowledge. Blogs let users easily communicate ideas, while surveys
let them tap into others’ opinions and collective wisdom. Novell
Vibe micro-blogs let users post quick updates so their team or
personal followers can keep track of their activities or status.

Additionally, any project workspace you create in Novell Vibe
can be re-purposed or re-used for other projects. It also lets you
create a standard project workspace that can be used as a project
template. These workspace project templates can be leveraged for
future projects, saving you time and providing you the level of
consistency that your projects need.

Novell Vibe provides two methods for re-purposing a created
workspace as a project template. The first method is to use its
“Export/Import” feature. Once you have your workspace set up the
way you want it, you simply export it and Vibe will save it as
.zip file. This exported version of your workspace will preserve
all of its hierarchical structure, its folders (unless specifically
excluded), folder content, landing pages, entry definitions associated
with any folder content, workflows associated with any workspace
content, custom forms associated with any workspace content. Once
exported, this zipped workspace can be easily imported as a template
for future projects within your Novell Vibe system or into other
Vibe systems.

For example, educational institutions can create a standard classroom
workspace template that can be re-purposed each year or semester.
In the training industry, a standard workspace can be pre-populated
as a project template with all of the necessary information, structure,
links, and processes needed for specific courses. However, it should be
noted that currently, only Vibe administrators can use the Export/Import
feature.

The second method for re-purposing a workspace as a project
template in Novell Vibe is to simply use the “Copy Workspace”
feature. While normal users can copy a workspace, making it the
easiest method of re-purposing a workspace, it has some limitations.
For example, it will not preserve permalinks and wiki home pages.

But regardless of whether you choose to use the Export/Import
feature or the Copy Workspace feature, Novell Vibe makes it easy
for you to leverage the consistency and time savings provided by
using Vibe workspaces to create standard project templates.

Results

Novell Vibe lets you create workspaces that can be used as
predefined project templates that contain all the required information
to quickly, easily, and consistently spin up new projects. It lets
you quickly re-purpose commonly used workspaces, eliminating the
overhead associated with gathering, creating, and organizing workspaces
and information. Workspaces can also be reused and moved to perpetuate
knowledge retention in projects. These reusable workspaces can also
be configured as private or public.

Instead of spending hours creating new environments from scratch
and populating them with the necessary information for a new project,
Novell Vibe lets you import or copy a pre-configured Novell Vibe
workspace and have your new project environment ready in minutes.