Selling Sharepoint

[knightrider]

Hi folks,

 

Quick question. how would you go about 'selling' SharePoint to your SMT?

 

Knightrider

[psydii]

been wondering this. Conclusion: If you can't make a business case for it, then it is a waste of time.

 

SLT have to have problems to which Sharepoint features are the solution.

[jmak]

been wondering this. Conclusion: If you can't make a business case for it, then it is a waste of time.

 

SLT have to have problems to which Sharepoint features are the solution.

 

100% true - but it could be a problem that they don't know they have

 

One thing it seems to offer that we don't have available at all at the moment is live collaboration on documents, a document management system and potentially a big improvement on versioning. These are things that no one else in our school has experienced, so they don't know what they're missing.

[NewOrder]

I worked in the field of SharePoint in education for a number of years but I now work in the corporate world. Oddly this is the same issue businesses have. They all want document management and information management. Versioning is the biggie. If you succeed with the SharePoint buy in, the next step is start with a document policy followed by document storage rules. Then governance for your libraries. Versioning, retention and auditing.

 

Always use content types for your documents.

[zag]

Access to documents at home for staff and students was the big one here.

[jumpinjamez]

Hi folks,

 

Quick question. how would you go about 'selling' SharePoint to your SMT?

 

Knightrider

 

Put an Apple sticker on it

[glennda]

Put an Apple sticker on it

 

Well that could only make sharepoint worse! Sharepoint can be good but needs the time and effort put into it.

[joe90bass]

Put an Apple sticker on it

 

That gave me a well needed laugh!

[wiseoldowl]

As a company we use SharePoint but consider it's a lot of work vs benefits. Simpler to use, configureable and scaleable solutions would be things like Box but some schools can be reticent regarding non-SharePoint cloud-based solutions. Depends what the problem is you're trying to solve at the end of the day.

[Quackers]

Hi folks,

 

how would you go about 'selling' SharePoint to your SMT?

 

Knightrider

 

Download the free version and make it do things you feel would make the school work better.

 

One thing we use sharepoint for here is the school calendar / bulletin so the front screen shows whats happening Today and Tomorrow. As well as giving overviews of all our upcoming events.

 

We also use it for our ordering here, so teacher creates an order on an excel spreadsheet, attaches it to a list and a workflow starts where the member of SMT selected has to Approve the order, then once approved it goes to the bursar and within Sharepoint the person who created the order can track their order progress from Awaiting Approval, Approved, Ordered and Delivered so they don't pester the bursar going has X been ordered yet? Sharepoint also emails people along this process, so when the order is created the SMT member gets an email saying a new order by X for £X has been created click here to approve or decline.

 

You could log all 'On Calls' (where a teacher requests somebody to deal with a naughty child), then you can make it display graphs showing which periods are the most active, or subjects.

 

Anything thats currently logged on paper sharepoint can more than likely replace....

 

How much do your staff like using IT at your place? If they don't embrace it i would not bother.