E005 Business Productivity Software is recorded under banner number ITEC 2106 and is worth 3 competency units. It covers the communication, collaboration, organization and presentation software an IT team runs on, and how using it well changes both individual efficiency and team output. Search E005 or ITEC 2106 and you reach the same requirement. The reason it sits in a technology degree is simple: most technical work fails at the handoff, and this course is about the handoff.
The course everyone underestimates
Students see the title, assume they already know it because they have used a spreadsheet, and give the course a fraction of the attention it needs. The gap is between using a tool and choosing one. E005 asks questions like whether a decision belongs in a chat thread, a document comment or a meeting, whether a data set should live in a shared workbook or a database, and what version control means when the artifact is a document rather than code. Those are judgment questions and they are what the aspects tend to score.
The collaboration material has a technical spine that is easy to miss. Shared editing, permissions, link sharing scopes, revision history and retention are all access control questions wearing friendly interfaces. A student who has met permissions in an operating systems or security context should transfer that thinking directly here, because a document shared with anyone who has the link is exactly the same class of decision as a world-readable file.
Presentation work carries its own discipline. The scored aspect is almost never about visual polish; it is about whether a technical message survives contact with a non-technical audience. That means one idea per slide, evidence attached to claims, and a structure that a reader could follow without you narrating it.
Assessment is Competent or Not Competent, as everywhere at WGU, with no letter grades and no ordinary grade point average. The 3 competency units size the course inside a six month term, and since the term price is flat, a course like this closed in three weeks is genuinely free capacity for something harder.
Building a section plan from the scored aspects
If your version of E005 uses a performance assessment, the deliverable often includes artifacts as well as prose, and both attract aspects. WGU requires a score of 2 in every aspect for a task to pass and scores each aspect independently, so producing a polished artifact while leaving the justification aspects thin is the classic way to earn a return in this course.
Work the arithmetic first. Suppose there are six scored aspects and the written portion targets about 1,500 words alongside the artifacts you produce. Set aside 120 words for context that names the team, the task and the tools available, and 80 for a close. That leaves 1,300 across six aspects, or roughly 216 each. Weight it by what has to be argued: two aspects asking you to justify a tool choice deserve 300 apiece, since each needs alternatives and criteria, while four aspects describing an artifact or a workflow need 175 each. Two at 300 plus four at 175 is 1,300 exactly.
The pattern to internalise here is that describing what you produced is cheap and justifying why you produced it that way is expensive. Budget accordingly, because the justification aspects are the ones students discover too late.
Shape for a tooling and workflow recommendation
The usual E005 deliverable is a workflow proposal for a team, with sample artifacts attached. The proportions below fit that document.
| Section | Content | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Team and task | Who the team is, what they produce, and the specific coordination problem being solved. | 9 percent |
| Current friction | Where work is being lost now: duplicated files, missed decisions, unclear ownership, meeting overload. | 13 percent |
| Selection criteria | What a good tool must do here, stated before you name any product, so the choice looks reasoned rather than preferred. | 14 percent |
| Tool choices | Each category with the option chosen, the alternative considered, and the criterion that decided it. | 21 percent |
| Workflow design | The sequence of work through the tools, naming who does what and where each artifact lives. | 18 percent |
| Access and retention | Sharing scopes, permission levels, version history and how long things are kept. | 15 percent |
| Close | Expected effect, how you would know it worked, and the first step to adopt it. | 10 percent |
What counts as evidence about software
The sourcing trap in this course is the product comparison article. They are abundant, they read authoritatively, and they are usually commercial. Feature and capability claims belong to the vendor's own documentation, which is specific and dated. Limits, quotas and administrative behaviour belong to the same place. Where you claim an effect on team performance rather than a product feature, the authority changes entirely: that belongs to published research or to industry survey data, not to a vendor page, and mixing the two is the most visible sourcing error a student can make here.
The strongest evidence available to you is often your own measurement. If your task involves producing artifacts or running a small process, record what happened: how many revisions a document went through, how long a task took before and after, how many people had edit access. Numbers you collected yourself, labelled as such, beat a general claim from any source, and they demonstrate the analytical habit the course is trying to build.
There is also a currency problem specific to software writing. Collaboration products change interfaces, pricing tiers and sharing defaults several times a year, so a claim sourced from documentation two years old may be simply untrue today. Give the date you consulted the source and describe behaviour in terms that survive a redesign: say that a link can be scoped to the organization rather than describing where a menu item sits. Behaviour ages better than interface geography, and it is what the aspect is really asking about.
Use the citation style your task names and reference inline rather than in a closing pile. Where a screenshot demonstrates a setting, crop it to the setting and caption what it proves; an uncropped window forces the evaluator to search for the evidence you meant to show.
What earns Competent here
Competent submissions read like a proposal a real team lead could act on tomorrow. Criteria come before choices, every recommendation names what it was chosen over, artifacts are attached and referenced by name, and the access and retention section shows the student understands that collaboration is a permissions problem.
The quickest way to lift a draft from adequate to convincing is to add the sentence students almost never write: what you would give up. Every tool choice has a cost, whether that is licensing, training time, another place for information to hide, or a dependency on a vendor. Naming that cost once per recommendation shows the evaluator you chose rather than defaulted, and it costs about twelve words each time.
Returns follow a predictable pattern. The proposal names tools without criteria, so every choice looks like personal preference. The workflow is described in general terms that would suit any team, with no reference to the scenario's actual constraints. Or the artifacts are attractive and the document never explains a single decision behind them.
WGU attaches no grade penalty to a revised and resubmitted performance assessment, so completeness beats polish when you are deciding whether to submit, because feedback is more precise than your own second guessing. If your section of E005 also carries an objective assessment, remember that WGU objective assessments are proctored, and our line does not move: we prepare with structured study plans, practice questions and an honest read on your preassessment result. Nobody here sits an assessment, do not assist while it is running, and portal sign-in details stay with you at all times.
Artifacts done, justification missing?
Send the E005 rubric and what you have built. We separate artifact aspects from justification aspects and hand back a plan with word targets.
Six mistakes that cost time in E005
- Assuming familiarity is competence. Having used a tool for years does not answer why it is the right tool for this team, which is the question being scored.
- Naming products before criteria. Criteria first makes every later choice defensible; product first makes the whole document look like preference.
- Citing comparison sites. They are commercial and they age badly. Vendor documentation for features, research for effects.
- Ignoring permissions and retention. Sharing scope is an access control decision and it is frequently its own aspect. Treat it with the seriousness you would give a file permission.
- Decorating presentations instead of structuring them. The aspect is about whether a non-technical reader follows the argument, not about the template.
- Producing artifacts you never reference. An attachment the document does not mention by name may as well not exist for scoring purposes.
- Writing a workflow with no owners. A process where nobody is named is a diagram, not a workflow, and the evaluator cannot judge whether it would function.
- Leaving out how you would know it worked. One measurable indicator per recommendation turns a wish list into a proposal.
Three questions students ask about E005
Is this course easy because I already use office software?
Which software suite should I base my work on?
Does ITEC 2106 appear separately from E005 on my plan?
Where E005 sits in WGU's programs
The July 2026 catalog places this code in 2 current WGU programs. Open a program page for the complete standard path and term positions. The live Degree Plan remains authoritative after transfer credit, substitutions, and mentor planning.
The assessments, one by one
The public catalog does not publish this course's PA/OA identity or task count. WGU Tutors publishes at most one PA manual per course and only from a WGU-controlled public rubric. Until that source exists, PA help begins from the student's real Course of Study and OA support remains preparation only.