The good news about executing a project well is that the last few weeks of a project should be very quiet. The bad news about executing a project well is that the Project Manger, me, is quite bored. I have mitigated all my known risks. I have schedule all the remaining work. I have updated all the project documentation. I’m in the process of putting together the project’s closing documentation. And while I know the closing documentation is important it is very hard to motivate myself to work on it. It’s just not fun!
All in all the project looks like it is going be a huge success. We have succeeded in implanting all the functionality that the customer approved. It’s looking like we will finish on time and ~10% under budget. Finishing under budget, depending on who you ask, may be good or bad. Especially, since the project was T&M. Since this in my blog and I was the PM for the project, I’ll say it’s a good thing. Better under than over!
Here is a quick laundry list of custom MOSS features we created during the course of the project:
- Custom Site Templates
- Custom List Templates
- Custom Document Library Templates
- Custom web part that handles site provisioning – including the addition of dynamic default content, documents & list items
- Custom web part that manipulated word documents based on user specified criteria
- Including decomposition of a single document into sub documents. It also merged the subdocuments together.
- Launch multiple custom and out-of-the-box workflows simultaneously against several documents.
- Custom InfoPath forms for custom workflow
- A custom column type that for a filtered lookup list.
- A custom web part that launched an out-of-the-box workflow based on lists of users.
- Persistence of state information for users between page visits (remembered what items were selected in drop downs)
- Persistence of button states within a custom web part active/non-active
- All custom web parts used user controls to separate presentation layer from logic layer
- Web part communication from our custom web parts to lists to select filters.
- Programmatically changed views of lists in response to events.
- Custom Event handlers to track workflow status
- Custom Event handlers that limit access to editing list items at incorrect times in a the workflow.
- A custom web part that deleted a site and persisted certain information off lists so it could be reused.
- An MSI installer that installed the entire solution including:
o Deleted the solution if previously installed
o Created a custom security policy
o Modified the web.config file with safe control and other entries
o Deployed all required files
o Created the site collection.
