Sharepoint

[chumpmonkey]

Does anyone use Sharepoint in a school. We have been introducing 365 to the school over the last year. I need a place where staff can share resources with all students easily. Past exam papers etc. We are using one not e for classes but it is difficult to show resources for the whole school. Is SharePoint easy to use and install. Any advice is appreciated.

[jslate1980]

Why don't you use 365 groups instead?

[chumpmonkey]

I have been recommended SharePoint as the best place to put large numbers of resources for whole year groups and subjects of students. Do you think groups is the best place to do this? Could you go into a little more detail?

[JordanT91]

We have on-premises SharePoint 2010 Foundation. If you've never done anything like it before it can be a bit tricky to install SharePoint and SQL server but I'm guessing it's all different in O365. SharePoint uses our AD groups so you can be as granular as you want. You can set up different 'sites' (for example, we have Home, School Information, SLT, Office, Pupil Information and Pupil Area) and restrict access to certain groups. Then within those sites you can restrict sections and even individual documents even more (so that salary information is not viewable by clerical assistants even though they can access the Office site). In general, yes, SharePoint is good for sharing resources but I wouldn't get sucked in to using it as a general file server.

[pcstru]

"Best" is always a dubious word in the context of technology solutions that inevitably involve both compromise (sometimes things will just not quite do what you want) and expertise (how much do you need to make it approach what you want). I'd always be wary of someone who's advice is that a product like Sharepoint is "best" unless they have done a detailed analysis of what is actually required and have then set out in detail how the product meets those.

 

We use sharepoint in school and it can do the job. It is reasonably easy to set up different sites and control who has access to what. If you have good groups set up in AD it will make that a lot easier. On the other hand, technically it is a bit of a monster - very powerful but also huge and time consuming to master (not that you need to master it but it is easy to run into things that suck up time getting up to speed). End users seem to find it anything but the basics quite intimidating so you need someone to put in some effort to mitigate that.

[jslate1980]

Here is info on 365 groups https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Learn-about-Office-365-groups-b565caa1-5c40-40ef-9915-60fdb2d97fa2. They are really easy to setup and lock down.

[karldenton]

I agree. We're starting to use 365 groups more, although cauciously at the moment until microsoft bring in a method of been able to restore a group if it gets deleted.

A group has a file limit of 20,000 so that's something to think about. Each group has a discussion group and calendar too.

[blueplanetit]

Team sites would be typical solution for this, be aware of the 5000 item limit in SharePoint Online, you can store more than 5000 items but you have to plan for it.

[apearce]

I agree. We're starting to use 365 groups more, although cauciously at the moment until microsoft bring in a method of been able to restore a group if it gets deleted.

A group has a file limit of 20,000 so that's something to think about. Each group has a discussion group and calendar too.

 

I'm finding that schools prefer to have Office 365 Groups for Staff so they can get the DL and shared calendar while everything else is SharePoint sites. The big difference is that groups will have everyone as members so they can edit while you can set SPO sites to have viewers. If you need to have people (normally students) as viewers, SP is the way while Groups can be very useful.

[agasiorowski]

I've started pushing out SharePoint team sites (Office 365) for a similar purpose to you (original thread). Each department has its own sub-site as well as a staff only file area.

 

I've created a StaffZone sub-site which has any important documents located in it as well as a news feed for important messages. This will start cutting down all staff emails eventually.

In AD I've created security groups for each department as well as all staff, all students groups. These security groups can only access and edit there own subsequent sites. The online recycle bin is a great feature as well as the version control on a document. The great thing is only an admin can delete SharePoint sites so the risk of data loss is reduced.

 

We are starting to push out editing documents on the cloud to avoid the locked document situation departments get themselves in.

So far it is positive from my perspective, although SharePoint online can be a bit fiddly and daunting at first.

 

I hope this helps