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76 Chapter 2 Collaboration Information Systems

particular person. The process starts with the thin-lined circle because Pearson would not allow its employees to install it).
in the top left and ends with the thick-lined circle near the bot- Figure 2-29 shows a typical hangout. Notice that the three ac-
tom right. The dashed lines represent the flow of data from one tors in this process are sharing a common whiteboard. Each
activity to another. can write or draw on that whiteboard. At the end of the meet-
As shown in Figure 2-28, the authors work closely with the ing, the whiteboards were saved and placed on the team’s
developmental editor, who ensures that the text is complete SharePoint site to be used as minutes of the meeting.
and complies with the market requirements, as specified by Figure 2-30 shows the team’s top-level SharePoint site. The
the acquisitions editor. We need not delve into this process in Quick Launch (left-side vertical menu) has links to important
detail here; just observe that many different versions of chapter content on the site. The center portion has tasks that have a
text and chapter art are created as people playing the various value other than “Completed” for Status.
roles edit and approve and adjust edits. The team set up alerts so that when new tasks were created
Face-to-face meetings are impossible because the people in the Tasks list, SharePoint would send an email to the person
fulfilling the roles in Figure 2-28 live in different geographic lo- who had been assigned that task. As shown in Figure 2-31,
cations. In the past, the developmental process was conducted emails were also sent to a task’s creator when that task status
using the phone, email, and a file server. As you can imag- was changed by others.
ine, considerable confusion can ensue with the hundreds of All documents and figures were stored and managed in
documents, art exhibits, and multiple reviewed copies of each. SharePoint libraries. Figure 2-32 shows the contents of the
Furthermore, task requests that are delivered via email are eas- Draft Documents Chapter 2 library at the time this chapter
ily lost. Dropped tasks and incorrect versions of documents was written. By storing documents in SharePoint, the team
and art are not common, but they do occur. took advantage of library version tracking. Figure 2-33 shows
When we decided to begin publishing a new edition every a portion of the version history of one of the documents in
year, we knew we needed to find some way of increasing our this library.
productivity. Consequently, our development team decided When it is completed, Laura will need to review the final
to eat its own dog food and use Office 365 Professional. During chapter version, so a task should be created asking her to do
this process, the author, the developmental editor Laura Town, so. That new task will spawn an email to her like the email in
and the production editors Denise Vaughn and Judy Leale Figure 2-31. I will create that task just as soon as I finish this
met frequently using Google Hangouts (we couldn’t use Lync sentence! That’s dogfooding!

Figure 2-29
Google Hangout Group
Conversation