SharePoint Deployment at the FSU College of Education This document presents benefits of Microsoft Share Point (SP) for the College of Education faculty and staff, highlights critical success factors, outlines steps for effective deployment of Share Point in academic departments and units, and provides examples of SP usage in the College. SharePoint Benefits The College of Education strategic initiative for SharePoint 2010 will bring users a rich collaboration environment. The benefits include, but are not limited to: Central calendaring solution with email client integration, if needed Announcements and news posting in one location accessible from anywhere Eliminating the need for mass emails Eliminating the need to search for information in email inbox Document libraries for important departmental files Electronic form submission (Go paperless!) Secure internal network for departmental files and procedures Automated workflows to track department procedures Project tracking Ad-hoc workgroup areas for collaboration on time-limited projects Internal discussion boards Integration with new ITS projects such as Exchange or Active Directory SharePoint Success Factors The success of SharePoint in the College of Education will be dependent on several factors: collaborative effort, effective communication, commitment, and continuous user training. Certain issues to keep in mind: SharePoint is currently hosted through FSU at no cost and will be supported by FSU s central IT group; Information Technology Services (ITS). In the case of server related errors, OIIT staff will act as an intermediary between College of Education users and ITS staff. However, COE OIIT staff members are not able to troubleshoot FSU servers. SharePoint is best used as a tool for business analysis and productivity for faculty and staff. Although students have access to SharePoint sites, this service should not be used as a BlackBoard content collection or a regular website replacement. SharePoint sites are easily edited and updated by any users who have the permission to do so. This can help create a perfect central resource location for your department users to access with any web browser. However, SharePoint should not serve as a replacement for the College of Education website. All content stored in SharePoint is accessed using an FSU ID. As such, it is suitable for internal documentation only. All COE departments and units will need to designate a SharePoint site administrator. This individual will have full ownership of the departmental SharePoint site and work in collaboration with OIIT to maintain site consistency and develop training materials. 1
Starting with SharePoint OIIT staff will coordinate the initial SharePoint deployment meeting. To facilitate the meeting and make it effective, please consider the situations below and analyze how they apply to your department needs. 1. Calendar If there was a main calendar that everyone in your department could check, how would you use it? What types of events do you think everyone should know about? Who would be responsible for adding these events to the calendar and why? a. If you already have a shared calendar, how do you currently use it? 2. Documents and restricted access Have you ever needed to restrict access for certain files or events for some users, but still need to work on them collaboratively with others? This can include financial documents that do not necessarily need to be viewed by all of the department staff and faculty. a. When these secure collaborative events are over, what happens to all of the documents? Where are they archived? What are the retention needs? 3. Reservation of equipment and/or rooms 4. What type of shared equipment does your department use and how do you keep track of it? a. Ex: Laptops, projectors, and conference rooms. 5. Electronic forms 6. What papers forms does your department use internally? Would it help if they were digital? a. If these forms require approval, who does this? 7. Requests for purchases Please be prepared to discuss these points in the meeting. With your help, we can start creating a customized and productive SharePoint environment. When you are ready, please contact OIIT using the help desk portal http://coe-help.coe.fsu.edu/portal and create a ticket for a Share Point site development. Examples of SharePoint at COE Below are examples of SP usage in the College of Education to illustrate cases presented in a previous section. Calendaring can be used to track vacation time, department events (Fig. 1), or even shared resources to avoid double booking (Fig. 2). 2
Fig. 1. Calendaring to track vacation time and department events Fig. 2 Tracking equipment and classrooms Any paper forms used by your department can now go digital. With Microsoft Office Infopath (included with your Office 2010 suite), you can design digital forms and host them in SharePoint (Fig. 3). From there, anyone with an FSU ID can login and submit 3
the form. Once the form is submitted, new tasks can be created to keep track of the process (Fig. 4). Fig. 3. Using forms Fig. 4. Tracking tasks and processes Work processes can be tracked using SharePoint workflows (Fig 5). You can send automatic emails to notify changes were made to documents, requests such as purchases can be approved or denied, and the history of each process is saved for easy reference. 4
Fig. 5. Tracking workflow The combination of SharePoint and MS Office 2010 offers a spectrum of document collaboration methods, whether it is co-authoring a spreadsheet or routing a business plan through a workflow. Understanding the ways you can collaborate on documents is vital to making the best choice for your needs and improving your productivity. Document libraries (Fig. 6) act as a portal to enable these features. Fig. 6. Document collaboration You also gain the ability to restrict access on your SharePoint site depending on membership (Fig. 7). Simply, you can specify what document libraries, forms, etc. users are able to view, edit, or create. This creates a versatile environment for a wide range of users who wish to collaborate and still keep data secure. 5
Fig. 7. Assigning permission to groups or users If you re interested in learning more about the tools in SharePoint and SP functionalities, please visit the Microsoft SharePoint site: http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/en-us/pages/default.aspx Additionally, we will be offering group and on-demand training to COE faculty and staff. Departmental SP administrators are encouraged to attend FSU provided training and review resources collected by OIIT. 6