By Erika 　http://www.xune.net/archives/71

I worked on several different assignments this week. I continued working on the migration of online university pages from the old online university site to the new SharePoint site. Mark and I discussed how the pages that let you login to the online university server should be differentially branded versus pages that are specific to the  department. I also received feedback from other members of the team to fix various links, etc. I wrapped up the online university migration this week and will be meeting with others in the department to speak with a representative from online university to discuss the site and whether it meets online university’s standards. Working on this type of project, one where I migrated an old web site to a new location in an existing site was a good learning experience. I had to understand the dynamics of the existing site and develop a plan for integrating into the current department site. The existing online university site contains information specific to department courses and links to a server called “SyncTotal” which handles course registration and the taking of courses. The department course information had to be moved to a new SharePoint site that still references the SyncTotal server. I had to discuss with John the different ways the new site could look and how it should convey the information nestled within SharePoint. I also spoke with Mark all through out the project on the ways that the SharePoint site for the courses should be linking to SyncTotal (something that took a while to understand). Moving online university course information to the department SharePoint site is a great way for the department to brand the courses with their own personal identity. This way, the courses will stand out from other department specific courses and others will know exactly where to look for department courses within J&J.

I also performed work this week for Deena by researching digital networks/connectivity efforts physicians use for communicating with other physicians within various organizations, such as the American Medical Association. This assignment took about 2 days and was extremely fun to complete. I’m finding that I really like doing research for projects. Once I completed the research, I then compiled my work with the consulting agency’s work (since they eventually finished) and found that I had only missed a few networking initiatives. It was a great opportunity to do the same research as someone else and then compare my work to theirs. I searched for the consulting firms information on the Internet that I hadn’t found. This allowed me to better understand where they were looking to find the information and the search terms they were using.

I was in a conference call with Sarah and Jerald, who works with consumer products in the U.S. (J&J). He works mostly with consumer products and knows a lot about professional education initiatives for consumer product companies at J&J. This was another great opportunity to listen in on the types of questions that are asked in business to get the right answers. Asking the right questions are especially crucial to any type of work.

The final project of the week was creating a new SharePoint site for other J&J business methodologies that don’t fit into the standard methodology categories already on the website, such as benchmarking and project management. The new site is a way for J&J team members to share their methodology examples (case studies) and toolkits with others. The site is very straightforward: people can upload their files and supply other information such as source (who to contact with questions), key insights (notes), and description.

This week I have a very intense project to complete for Deena’s team. The questions being asked related to the project objective are much harder to answer than previous research I’ve conducted. I’ll be working with two other team members who regularly work with Deena on projects as consultants. The first task involves each of us researching three topics and then converging our ideas on Thursday, after which we each take one topic to further investigate. By using this process we’ll discover any gaps or holes that could arise from individual search techniques.