Marines flex their muscle with SharePoint

While the Marines have been serving in every conflict since the Revolutionary War, there is one thing they have never had at their disposal – a virtual work environment to keep them connected.

That has changed with the Iraq conflict as the Marines are piloting a virtual office collaboration system built on the back of Microsoft’s SharePoint Server and the CorasWorks Workplace Suite, a set of business intelligence tools for building collaborative and workflow-based applications.

Marines playing a support role behind the front lines in Iraq use an application built for the SharePoint system to request supplies needed in the field. The Marines use a browser to access the secure system to request equipment and touch off an electronic workflow process that can be tracked from beginning to end.

Rolled out just over a month ago, this week the Marine system was tracking 119 requests, called an Urgent Unfunded Needs Statement or UrgentUNS, for equipment that the Marines think can help better solve their issues on the battlefront.

It is the one of the first capabilities that the Marine Corps Enterprise Information Technology Services (MCEITS) SharePoint Deployment, as the system is known, is now providing to aid the war effort.

Creation of the system began in mid-2006 with a design goal of becoming the heart of Marine Corps collaboration, including everything from filing the daily morning roll call to submitting briefings for generals to review.

“The message here is that you build a system that organizations can use to transfer what use to be a physical work environment into a virtual work environment,” says Ron Simmons, director of KM integration for the Marine Corps Combat Development Command (MCCDC) in Quantico, Va. “Using CorasWorks, I basically train users to build their own solutions, which range from tracking conference room usage to calendars of events. They don’t need a development team.”

Simmons says a prime example for the Marine Corps was improving a paper-based process used by eight divisions at MCCDC to build a daily tabulation of each Marine who had reported for duty that morning. Each division filed an Excel spreadsheet with data that had to be manually collated into a single Excel file.

“When we put that into SharePoint and CorasWorks, it no longer required Excel spreadsheets and the system itself now rolls up the information into a single report,” says Simmons. “Just that little administrative action saves three man hours per day.”

It’s the tip of an iceberg, he says.

The system provided similar efficiencies for UrgentUNS, which was based on a Microsoft Word template that was filled out and sent as an e-mail attachment. The approval process was all done in e-mail with no tracking mechanism.

“On any given day no one knew where all the UrgentUNS were,” says Simmons. “Now I can get a graphic showing how many are active and where they are in the process.”

The system lets users create virtual offices and assign users to those offices, which gives them access to the data stored there.