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SharePoint and TINA a Winning Combination for Engineers
January 16, 2012
SharePoint is an excellent communication and collaboration tool for engineering firms to use. With it, you have the ability to manage blogs, wikis, content, extranet solutions, intranet solutions, and your customer-facing company website. Out of the box, SharePoint also provides some basic document management features that can be leveraged by those outside your engineering department.
All of this makes SharePoint a great platform for communication and web content management, but when it comes to a robust solution for engineering file management, you’ll need to procure and integrate third-party SharePoint web parts or spend lots of time and money developing your own.
Another option is for engineers to use Tina alongside SharePoint to take care of all the document management and other engineering data that needs to be tightly managed and controlled within their engineering domain.
TINA and SharePoint
Tina is software that starts with document management. It also has a comprehensive menu of engineering and project management features that are not available in SharePoint.
As engineers, we need to manage our documents and electronic files with rigour. We also need to relate these documents to elements in a Work Breakdown Structure, Bill-Of-Materials and other engineering data. In the process of creating documents, CAD files and other information, engineers need to collaborate closely to come up with great designs.
Collaboration is usually a freeflow activity that’s enabled through communication – this is where SharePoint excels. But when it’s time to begin documenting the design using CAD, Word or other software, Tina steps in to manage and control. Engineers can tightly control their design data using Tina’s rigorous document management features. Links to design documents like specifications, reports and drawings can be posted to any site in SharePoint providing teams, departments and customers with the most up to date version.
Once their designs have matured, Tina’s easy to use workflow feature can be leveraged to manage and control the review and release process for drawings, reports and other design data. The release status information can be presented on any SharePoint site providing all stakeholders with a real time understanding of where everything is in the review and release stage.
What If I Just Want to Use SharePoint?
You can! SharePoint is an incredibly flexible and powerful platform – engineering needs can be fully met by purchasing third party Web Parts supplemented by custom developed features. But keep in mind that the complexity of your SharePoint solution (and associated development and support costs) will be much greater. Take it from a software OEM – it’s always quicker and cheaper to buy off the shelf solutions that are designed to work well with SharePoint than to develop your own.
SharePoint and TINA Solve Big Engineering Challenges
Successful outcomes within the engineering field require a unique blend of collaboration and communication coupled with tight management and control. Instead of spending lots of money and time to create a SharePoint solution that does everything, Tina and SharePoint can be used together far more cost effectively to get the work done. Use SharePoint to collaborate and communicate and Tina to manage and control.