SharePoint Web Part ideas for your SharePoint Team Site

If you love creating team sites in SharePoint (just like I do), you might be wondering which web parts would be a great addition to your site. Whether you are building a small workspace for your team or a project site for the next large project in your PMO, this post will talk about the web parts that might increase your team engagement, collaboration, and productivity. Having spent a good chunk of my career in project management, I will also do my best to articulate the relevance of the certain web parts to the project management artifacts. So here we go, some SharePoint web part ideas for your project or team sites.

Document Library

I don’t think this needs a lot of explanation. You can’t go without it on any team site as you need a common place to store project or team documents. Just one thing I want to add here is that you might find it beneficial to configure it with metadata, instead of folders. The reason being is that especially on projects, you will find a lot of standardization in terms of types of documents (i.e. Agenda, Meeting Minutes, Budget, etc.). So should you decide to later create a template from your site, you will have one common file organization across multiple project sites.

Calendar

Calendar Web part is a great way to capture important events, meetings, milestones related to the team or project. Just like with the document library, you can configure it with custom metadata. Moreover, you can synchronize it to Outlook. If you have time, you can also roll up your project calendar with other project calendars and even color-code different categories of events.

Tasks

If you have a project – you must have project tasks. Tasks Web part allows you to assign tasks to each other. Not only that, but you can also configure the Tasks web part to send an email every time a task is assigned to someone. The Tasks Web Part in SharePoint 2013/2016 and SharePoint Online has gotten a beautiful timeline feature, which you can use to highlight critical milestones. You can also view your tasks any way you wish, including the GANTT chart view. And of course, if you are a fan of MS Project – you can manage the tasks, resources, costs using the MS Project that has a native integration with the Tasks web part.

 

Contact List

A great way to keep a log of team or vendor/client contacts. An out of the box Contacts Web part might contain more columns/metadata that you might need, but you can always customize it (remove/hide columns).

 

Announcements

Have something important to say to your team? Then you might stick the Announcement Web part on the page. If you want to make sure the team gets the message, you can subscribe them via Alerts functionality. And, you can auto-hide past announcements via the expiration date field!

 

Links

This might or might not be useful on a project, but in case you want to store links (to other sites or websites or documents), you can use the Links web part. By the way, Document Library might also be an alternative as it now allows to store links as well.

Also, if you have time on your hands, you might want to create links using Promoted Links Web part. I documented step-by-step instructions on how to configure that web part here.

Discussion Board

Want to strike a conversation or have a question to the team? Discussion Board Web might be a great web part for you. Essentially it is a SharePoint list that allows you to have forum-like discussions. This web part might loose appeal with time, with the ongoing integration of SharePoint Team Sites with Office 365 Groups and other social features, but you got this option too!

 

Issue Tracking

I am sure as a team you are tracking different issues, actions, decisions. And you are probably using Excel for this. Issues Tracking allows you to do the same, but in SharePoint. And just like with Tasks Web part, you can enable email notifications when you assign issues to someone. By the way, in case you are wondering on the difference between Issues and Tasks web parts, I have written a detailed article on this – check it out here.

 

Custom List

Custom List web part by itself does not constitute a project management artifact. But, it allows you to create your own, custom metadata (columns) to create any list in SharePoint, you would otherwise manage in Excel. Here are the examples of some of the PM artifacts I used SharePoint custom lists for:

• Lessons Learned

• Risk Register

 

OneNote Notebook

This is not necessarily exactly a web part, but rather a feature of SharePoint sites. Any time you create a site from the Team Site or Project Site Template, it automatically adds a OneNote Notebook into the site. It is worthwhile to use it as it allows teams to capture content that does not fit into any of the buckets above. A great way to manage Meeting Minutes, other project info!

 

When all is set and done, you might end up with a site that looks like this. By the way, if you want to learn more about creating a project or team site from scratch, you might want to read this post.