Are you frustrated trying to manage all the related to your projects in SharePoint? You need to track and compartmentalize contacts, tasks, issues, documents for multiple projects, and maintain an easy-to-manage central list of projects and their metadata.

Project management is more than just documents, it’s also maintaining tasks, issues, risks, etc. You also have to be able to easily archive and restore data for one project without losing other project data. You want to make it easy for users to know the context of the project in which they are working. Even better, if you could also make the Microsoft Office client applications automatically filter the data (documents, links, and tasks) they display to just the items for the current project.

A list would be great for the project metadata, but everything else should really go into a site for each project. You could maintain the list and project sites separately, but that's a lot of work and can be error prone.

Now the good news. We wrote the List Item Workspaces tool to allow regular users to create SharePoint workspace sites based on any list item, similar to the way that document and meeting workspaces behave.

With the List Item Workspaces tool, you can create your central project list with the metadata you need to track. When you add a new project, the List Item Workspaces tool will automatically create a team site for the project and maintain the linkage between the list item and the team site. All project documents, tasks, links, contact info, and other items go into the project site. This way users always know which project they are in and do not have to constantly worry about setting filters on the documents, tasks, contact info and other list items that they work with in SharePoint. Best of all, the Office client applications will show users only the content related to the current project. You can even use the content query web part to aggregate data across multiple projects.