Putting your projects at the centre of the organisation

Enterprise Hub is the perfect addition to PROJECT in a box enabling you to provide real time live access to your projects to outlying project team members or across your entire intranet or the Internet direct from a browser.  The solution is installed as part of your PROJECT in a box Server, requires minimal administration and provides users with read only access to the projects (once permissions have been granted in the permissions model) on the server for only £10 each.  What's more its ability to deliver and support news, interest and discussion really helps in developing and promoting a projects culture.

• Projects portal - customise with your own choice of RSS news feeds or use the helpful PRINCE2™ ones we provide.
• Public access to projects - decide which projects you want to publish and let anyone in the organisation in to view live project content and published reports.
• Restricted access to projects - by default all the projects a user has been granted permissions for can be viewed through the hub project viewer by the user when they log on.  Check content when you are away from your desk, get contact details or view new reports all from a normal browser with no local component install required.  If you are a part time project team member use the Enterprise Hub to keep in touch with work on the project.
  
• Technical Center - download a PROJECT in a box Client for process based access.
  
• Education zone - access to free training resources and reference sites, training provider contact details or link direct to your CBT or browser based training provider content.  You can also show our free sample tutorials or consider buying a full set and let your users train them selves.
  
• Administration - very simple to set up and provided with an easy admin screen to manage your RSS feeds. Decide which projects to publish for public access or restrict to project team only using your existing project permissions in Professional Edition.
  
• Branding - developed with CSS, RSS and other web standards the Hub is very easy to put into your house style to enable it to fit very comfortably into your intranet infrastructure, ensuring your team members feel right at home.
  

Enterprise Hub does all this and more making it an invaluable addition to your PROJECT in a box solution.

Users with a Manager or Team licence can also use the Enterprise hub for view only access when they are away from their desk and Licenses can be added to your server in packs of ten for just £100 to enable other users, customers or suppliers to use Enterprise Hub for view only access.

Browser access via the Enterprise Hub is a key part of the PROJECT in a box  approach and the new release 2.4 due out in January 2009 will see extensive additions made to the capability of the Hub giving day to day users a real choice to use a browser based interface instead of the .NET Client on their projects.  Further details are available at the coming soon... page .

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Benefits

• Wide scale engagement - Providing live 'public' access to specific projects across the whole organisation or restricting access to specific projects as befits the needs of each project and the individuals working on it.  This doesn't require any additional administration the Hub simply picks up your existing permissions settings on the project.
  

• Ease of use - Enterprise hub is very easy for end users, the RSS feeds all use the simple point and click format and the layout of the project viewer provides maximum information for minimum navigation.

• Helps develop a projects culture - The portal tools and news feeds make it easy to keep the content fresh and vibrant and users coming back for more. Providing the tools and systems to back up  the projects agenda giving a visible marker of intent.  The enterprise Hub can even be provided with a user forum to promote discussion and help create a self supporting projects environment in your organisation.
  
• Supports any method - Like PROJECT in a box, Enterprise Hub supports PRINCE2™ out of the box but you can publish and share any project or process based activity being run through your PROJECT in a box system. An essential benefit for the multinational who may be running projects to different methods in the same system.
  
• Central and consistent access to upgrades - simplify the process of keeping your client installs up to date by making patches, upgrades and other technical materials available to your users.
  
• Central and consistent access to training - make all the training resources available to your users from one central point including the help files, training contacts and on-line tutorials even combine it with access to your in-house material or CBT methodology training.
  
• Branding and ownership - Incredibly easy to set up and add your own branding and very easy to tailor to your own requirements using industry standard RSS feeds so you can alter the scope of what you cover in the hub as your organisation matures.  Again PROJECT in a box are putting you in control of your project culture.

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Features

The feature set in Enterprise hub is deliberately modest making it very easy for users to pick up and use, a major requirement for an enterprise 'pick it up when you need it' solution.

	RSS Content Feeds Many websites are now providing their latest content, news and articles via RSS feeds for easy reuse in other web sites. We provide Enterprise hub prepopulated with a set of useful RSS feeds bringing through news, training and support information from PROJECT in a box as well as OGC's Successful Delivery Toolkit feed. As the RSS feeds are live this means the Hub content is self refreshing which saves you loads of times and means people will keep coming back to the site  for more info.  Anyone with admin permissions can simply add or relocate RSS news feeds around the Hub to undertake more significant changes. What's more, if you can't find an RSS feed to suit your Enterprise Hub requirements, we can provide you with an RSS editor tool so you can create your own custom feeds from materials you want to show.  This customisation capability means you can easily make internal business information available via the Enterprise Hub making it a very relevant resource for your PMs, project team members and the wider organisation. The RSS Feeds are used to deliver the training content and support materials which means they can automatically pick up the latest materials.
	Project Viewer Project viewer provides simple yet comprehensive access to information on a particular project .  Once the user has logged in they will see a list of projects they have permissions to view, once a project is selected all information is managed from the same screen making it very easy to access what is required. A number of panes provide different types of information and by switching these on and off the user can have essentially a document management system (as shown left) with view only access to permitted files from the project body or one of its stages. Alternatively as shown left and below the user can search for particular references in project material, get team member contact details or view reports. Whereas the PROJECT in a box Client provides full access to the project and its legacy files, the Enterprise Hub provides just view access and only to current versions of project files making it less confusing for the occasional user who is keeping up with progress on the project. The search feature is particularly useful here as it quickly takes you to dates, locations and other references within your project documentation enabling you to track down relevant materials very quickly.  In the case to the left here showing references to the project focus groups. Likewise the Reports feature enables Hub users to view reports produced by the PM or PMO and published for viewing without them having to learn how to produce the reports themselves. This Project viewer is very useful for a regular team member away from their full client interface or for a part time project team member to keep up to date with progress or get latest project documents before a meeting.
	User Forums Enterprise hub has been developed with forum use in mind.  Forums are a powerful way to get people involved in best practice initiatives both in terms of those who contribute with content and also provide a 'no pressure' environment for others to absorb from the experience of others. If your organisation already uses a forum or discussion threads tool perhaps as part of Sharepoint or a different corporate portal you can simply link to that resource from the Enterprise Hub. Alternatively we can provide a Snitz forum packaged for use with the Enterprise Hub which provides all the features you would expect to find including notification emails, moderation etc. If required we can even help you get discussions moving by seeding the threads with some experiences and thought provoking items based on our extensive cross sector experience.

Plug in Content

Flash training material

For the distributed organisation where arranging training courses can be difficult we have produced a set of flash tutorials which you can include via an RSS feed enabling your users to get a quick start on using the Hub and also on Professional Edition itself.  The flash tutorials are animated screen views walking you through key features in the products with a voice over commentary and can be viewed from a normal browser.

If you are interested in adding this valuable content to your Enterprise Hub implementation just  contact us for a quotation.

Snitz Forum

Forum tools are a popular addition to provide a convenient and expansible environment for discussing and promoting best practice.  Many larger organisations already have their own forum or discussion threads capability but if this isn't the case then we can provide you with a modified Snitz forum to install into your Hub.

The Snitz forum itself is provided for free and we make only a modest charge for supporting it's implementation and helping you configure it for use and seed with some appropriate threads.  If you are interested then contact us for a quotation.

Deployment

As you might expect we have made sure that deploying Enterprise Hub is as easy as possible and requires the minimum of technical understanding.  So much so that since version 2.2 the Enterprise Hub has been installed as standard with both the Server and the Personal Version so it is there behind the scenes ready to use.

Before you make available to your users you may want to customise the content by managing the RSS feeds using the admin page provided and rebrand the site to fit your business needs by altering the CSS and logos used.

Users only need an internet Browser to access the content and IE6.0 or Mozilla 1.7 or higher are recommended.

Costs

Enterprise Hub can be added to any existing PROJECT in a box Server and utilised by a Team or Manager user without the need for an additional licence.  If you would like to add extra users who only access via Enterprise Hub then you will need to provide them with an Enterprise Hub Licence these are purchased in packs of ten for £100 per pack making them effectively £10 per user.  When you purchase the pack this will be added to the licence on your server and you can then allocate these licenses as you do your Team and Manager licenses to users on the system, they can be moved around between different users anytime you wish.

Deploying the Enterprise Hub in an organisation may see a proportionately lower usage of Team licenses so the investment in the Hub is best considered as part of a complete solutions package.

All prices exclude VAT and other local taxes which may be appropriate for sales outside the United Kingdom. Discounts are available for bulk purchases and for further details check out our on-line store or contact us direct for special requirements.

Next Steps

If you still want to know more about how Enterprise Hub connects with your existing PROJECT in a box clients to support your broader organisation aspirations, you can sit back watch and listen to one of our solutions tours.

If you would like to try out the Enterprise Hub we can provide you with access to the public example site.  To get a user account to give this a try just drop us an email and we will set one up for you.

If you want more information you can call us on +44(0)1993 810425 or email us at enquiries@projectinabox.org.uk with your questions or to arrange a demonstration or web demo.

If you have already been convinced that this is the best solution for you then you can proceed to buy now to add Enterprise Hub to your existing licence package.