O365 sharepoint, best way of configuring?

[maniac]

Hello all,

 

Long time no post from me, been quite busy lately settling back into my old job, long story.

 

Anyhow, I'm in the middle of an Office 365 deployment here, we've got the product chiefly to take advantage of the Mobile Apps on iPads for staff for whom we brought the A3 package, and the ability for students and staff to have a cloud storage area that we have some sort of control over. I've got all the basics in place, the ADFS for SSO and DirSync is all working really well so I've got to the stage of actually configuring the product. We're not using the e-mail side of the system yet, although I am planning of getting a hybrid mail setup working at some point so we can migrate people onto office 365 at will if we choose to, anyhow that's a different matter.

 

Obviously one of the most powerful features of office 365 is the inclusion of Sharepoint in the product, but in playing with it there seems a lot of different potential ways of configuring it to work. Have any schools got a template or can give me an idea of how they have configured sharepoint to work in their organisation and how well it's worked? Essentially I've two different options available to me at the moment as far as I can see. Firstly is to just have two sites, one for students and one for staff and use directories within the document library in each to give each faculty an area to deposit shared resources for both staff and students - essentially a virtualisation of our current P:\ - not terribly efficient use of the service, but quick and easy to implement and the structure and organisation is familiar to staff. The actual pages on the sharepoint site would be nothing more than a simple introduction and instructions on accessing the shared resources.

 

The second thought is to have a 'mini site' for each faculty that I will template in a certain way, then leave them to organise as they wish, delegating the appropriate rights. This comes with more support overheads of course and training needs as it's a new concept for pretty much all the staff, but does mean each faculty will be more in control of their own presence in the system. The main site would simply act as an index of these mini sites together with general information that's needed for all.

 

OR . . . . I don't know, any other suggestions??

 

Sharepoint is a new product to me, so I'm not fully aware of how it all works yet, but I can see the potential.

 

Cheers for your help all!

 

Mike. :-)

[funkyfin2000]

Hi Mike,

 

A lot of experience here in Staffs, rolled out SP2007 to over 300 schools over the last 8 years and now have over 170 schools using O365 SharePoint!

 

We actually use RM's Unify product paired with their SharePoint Site Creator tool but that probably isn't an option here.

 

That said, the tools just create the structure we want in O365 SP. In the main we have gone with your second option on sites. Create a Staffroom site/Governor Site etc and then create faculty areas (or if in a Primary, utilise class/yr groups)

 

It works well - although tbh, permissions can be a little tricky but we promote with schools in O365 SP a more open children area that everyone can see. Staffroom is a little easier as we have groups sent through from RM Unify that have all staff in etc, so permissions are easier to sort for this.

 

Is that anyway? If not, shoot away and I'll answer what I can!

 

Rich