Dear sharepoint gurus

[Little-Miss]

Im after some gentle nudges in the right direction.

I'm investigating the use of sharepoint in school, document libraries for the staff to start off with, then maybe more.

I know nothing about sharepoint and the tutorials I've found all seems to assume some prior knowledge and setup. I need something from the ground up!

I eagerly await your suggestions

[unixman_again]

I'm no guru, but we had SP in my previous school, and we use it now. Here is the best tool that you can useIBMAll.jpg Trust me; there are better CMS available.

[Michael]

As with a lot Microsoft products lately, Office 365 offers Sharepoint Online optionally. This is instead of buying SharePoint 2010 for example, along with CALs, which would cost thousands.

The same applies to buying Microsoft Exchange Server, along with its CALs. Live@Edu or Office 365 offers the e-mail component free for schools and saves you the headache learning Exchange Server, maintaining it and patching it.

[SYNACK]

I have just started in in the actual implementation of SP through Office365. From what I can see now it is a universal hammer situation. You can use it to hammer in any nail, you just need to know which of the 36.45 million buttons to push to get it done. In a primary environment this is not overly helpful so you need to customise it down using templates to be a little easier to handle.

There is a Campus template on offer from MS for 365 but stuff like Sharepoint Learning Kit (which has all the hard work done) won't run under 365. The Campus offering is nice but still has many buttons and no where near the functionality of SLK. At the moment 365 for education seems to be very much (Office365) as it is free "for education" with little focus put into it.

The solutions put foward usually involve talking to one of their partners to offer customisations like the apps in Google Apps but without the marketplace type area. I am hopeing that others may have messed about with 365 a bit and may have templates to share. I fully intent to share the ones I make for my schools when I get them done.

At any rate, if you are looking at a local Sharepoint or Sharepoint foundation server then take a look at Sharepoint Learning Kit which does most of it for you. If you are looking at 365 you'll be after some templates from someone who has already customised it a bit or spending quite a while building them from scratch yourself.

[MatthewL]

We started implementing Sharepoint and they cancelled the project, went for Liferay in the end as it was open source and we could not afford the CALS needed for its use with Sharepoint.

[MatthewL]

Also Liferay links well with AD.

[SYNACK]

Office 365 for education

SharePoint Learning Kit

[Little-Miss]

Oh, ok lol! Did think it had gone a little quiet on the SP front!

But with the 365 do I need to use the emails? There is no chance in hell I am making my lot move to another email account!

[Little-Miss]

Now I'm completely stumped. It all sounds very complicated for just wanting to organised staff shared documents....

[glennda]

Now I'm completely stumped. It all sounds very complicated for just wanting to organised staff shared documents....

For the love of god don't use sharepoint. It so over complicated for something which should be so simple its unreal!

[Little-Miss]

Lol! Ok ok! Thanks

[pete]

I've used Confluence as an end-user (Collaboration & Wiki Software | Atlassian Confluence) - it's very nice, but not seen the backend.

And I've deployed Alfresco (Open Source Enterprise Content Management System (CMS) | Alfresco , free and paid versions) at contract jobs. Developers and Engineers like it.

Alfresco Labs 3 Share Feature List - alfrescowiki
Under the Covers: Alfresco's SharePoint Services (WSS) Killer

[pcstru]

Now I'm completely stumped. It all sounds very complicated for just wanting to organised staff shared documents....

Sharepoint probably IS a little complicated just to organise staff shared documents if you are not going to take advantage of it's (many) other features ...

Just for documents on sharepoint 2010 that should mean :

Tight Integration with office
Controlled Multiuser Access
Document Version Control
Document MetaData
Document Approval / publicaton control
Alert Subscriptions to libraries or individual documents
Easy access from anywhere providing your sharepoint is accessible from the internet
Fine grained permissions with control easily delegated to end users

All that does involve a certain amount of complexity which has to be dealt with - you pays yer money and takes your choice.

[Michael]

@Little-Miss - Live@Edu is much better than the Zimbra offering from the LA. Running on Exchange Server, it has powerful tools and is compatible on a whole range of platforms. You also get 10GB mailboxes by default and not the default 50-100MB on Zimbra. It's also free, so you'd save your school anywhere between £200-£500 per year depending on the number of pupils.

[Little-Miss]

Oh I don't doubt that at all @Michael! I just can't bring myself to do it....I've just about got them using Zimbra!

I think I need to read about what else I can get from 365. Certainly don't have the cash at the moment for an exchange server.