Our solution will focus on the needs of three user types—all end users, members of individual teams, and content authors, who have the ability to post documents and tasks on the top-level site. (Most end users can only post within their defined team site.) To fully understand the needs of the solution, each user group needs to provide information about the specific tasks its members need to complete within the system. This information will then be used to design and develop the solution.

Employees will access the top-level activity site to compare schedules with sister teams and to create or edit document and task details at the organizational level. They will also be accessing calendar information, adding events, and adding and reviewing content and tasks (and using other web parts and artifacts) at the team level. This will include the following actions:

Content authors are responsible for posting content at the top-level site—content and tasks that require visibility across all teams, not just an individual team site. Specifically, these content authors are responsible for the following tasks:

Users make up one portion of the solution. Another portion relates to the data that is to be captured. Here are a number of the data types that the solution requires:

In your organization, you might require additional data to be captured depending on how much detail and content is centralized. In this scenario, three remote teams seek only to share their schedules (events), but in other scenarios, teams may want to also share documents and tasks across the broader organization.

Now that we have completed the process of looking at the users of the solution and the types of data that will be included, it is time to start building the solution design. Before we do that, however, we should take a few minutes and summarize the process we just completed:

In the next section of the chapter, we will look at how to translate these requirements into a working design.