SharePoint—The Collaboration Tool of Choice
March 12, 2010
For departments, units and project teams wanting to work remotely with colleagues from across campus, SharePoint is becoming the collaboration tool of choice. As of February 2010, there were 9200 active student, faculty, staff, and affiliate SharePoint users on our campus. 112 SharePoint sites have been launched and are in use, creating a total SharePoint database size of 190 Gigabytes (GB).
In response to this interest, Information Technology Services (ITS) staff members Shaun Evans and Tommy Oates recently presented an FYI on "SharePoint 'Gotchas' and Workarounds." The session was designed for current and potential SharePoint users. Here are some highlights.
Advantages
SharePoint allows you to produce, organize and distribute information by creating knowledge bases, surveys, discussion boards and chats. Benefits can include ease of remote collaboration, version control, and reduced email attachments. In essence, SharePoint acts like a smart file server, managing many of your documents for you. SharePoint sites also offer Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption and are safe for hosting Category I data. Some departments, such as the School of Law, have choosen to have their SharePoint site branded (law.utexas.edu) for an additional fee.
Site administrators have control over how their own SharePoint site is set up and managed. A key to success for all site administrators is taking the time to become familiar with SharePoint and to plan the details of the site prior to deployment.
Advice
The biggest caution presented during the FYI session concerned the issue of user control. SharePoint is not intuitive; browser support issues, permissions issues and other concerns are best addressed early in the process of creating and maintaining a site. While there are many plusses to users having full responsibility for their own sites, adequate training for site owners and administrators makes a big difference in the ultimate effectiveness of SharePoint sites.
Do's and Don'ts
With broad disclaimers, the ITS SharePoint team reminded everyone of the following Do's and Don'ts, all of them based on actual experiences:
Do
- Enable check out and versioning for document libraries
- Limit the number of versions you keep
- Provide an orientation or training for individuals new to SharePoint
- Review other SharePoint sites to see what colleagues are doing with SharePoint. Contact the SharePoint team to get suggestions on who to speak with.
Don't
- Accidentally delete your site
- Add 45 web parts to a single page
- Let Web addresses for documents become longer than 255 characters
- Delete user groups unless you really want to
- Set up your SharePoint sitemap as a mirror of your org chart
Conclusion
To simplify the process of acquiring SharePoint, ITS has created a tool that allows potential customers to submit an online request for service. ITS also offers a trial site for up to 30 days so customers can see if SharePoint meets their needs.
SharePoint can add value to your business processes by providing a central repository for important data, making it easier to secure and monitor important, shared information. Planning, design and training are essential to ensure a successful SharePoint site launch.
