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 use Trust me; there are better CMS available. Edited August 1, 2012 by unixman_again

[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.

[glennda]

@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.

 

I'm not sure what version of Zimbra the LA run but I have found Zimbra very easy to administer (easier then Exchange).

 

I would like to see the costings for Zimbra in Education but Exchange is what £70pa of an EES agreement?

[Michael]

It's not so much the Zimbra product itself, but more the level of service and increasing costs. It was/is a no-brainer to migrate to Live@Edu which is hosted, managed and patched by Microsoft. Their infrastructure is going to dwarf what an LA has.

 

Have an in-house Exchange Server was an option, but of course there are costs associated with this, as well as the hosting, managing and patching (as I mentioned above) is all done by Microsoft themselves. It also means any new additions are automatically included and it's one less worry for a school

[psydii]

You could do worse than look through a copy of this book Beginning SharePoint 2010: Building Business Solutions with SharePoint Wrox Programmer to Programmer: Amazon.co.uk: Amanda Perran, Shane Perran, Jennifer Mason, Laura Rogers: Books. It is a bit of a deep dive and you'll still need google, but it should give you a good understanding on how to begin to customise Sharepoint to meet your needs.

[SYNACK]

I'm not sure what version of Zimbra the LA run but I have found Zimbra very easy to administer (easier then Exchange).

 

I would like to see the costings for Zimbra in Education but Exchange is what £70pa of an EES agreement?

 

For featureset given that its free and remotely hosted it is really good, it has some of the best antispan that I have ever used, you can tie it right into AD so provisioning is a snap, it has all the additional features afforded to it by being able to attach to the free lync client (presence, video chat, screenshare etc.). It also gives users lots of control over their own accounts if they need it, they can sync up their phone over activesync (free on the serverside) and even use their webmail controlpannel to wipe their phones if they want. They get rules etc. The UI is also very nicely done in comparison to certain others (squrillmail, roundcube and the like). You can also tie it into outlook seamlessly for free.

 

Little-Miss, if they use Outlook 2010 or 2007 at the school they would not even notice the difference, it ties in to outlook and the webmail looks and acts very simmilarly.

 

Back to sharepoint, I think it can definatly do what you want but to get there will require custimisation. You can also map network drives directly to it so it can look transparent to the users. One thing to be aware of though with the Office365 version is that under the free plan each user only gets 500MB free which could be quite limiting.

 

It looks like I am going to be pushed into the further development of 365 templates here for a number of schools so eventually I might have some stuff templates that can simplify things down a bit.

[shadowx]

Dear god no... PLEASE don't use sharepoint...

 

We use a "VLE" built on sharepoint and honestly I couldn't tell you what side of that is worse, SP or the VLE...

 

Sharepoint is pure vile... Anyone, and I mean literally anyone with any snippet knowledge about web design or the web in general could tell that sharepoint is not a solution it is just another problem. It's a non-web technology build on web technologies and accessed through a browser. It is an absolute nightmare to modify (and by modify I mean install mods such as office integration, or email integration, or editors, or templates, or themes. Each time it requires going onto the server itself and using VBS through powershell to install, restart, install, restart, restart again, enable, restart... It's endless. Once installed the theme then doesnt work or what you thought would get rid of the ribbon or modify it to actually work as a website just don't do what you thought owing to the fact that sharepoint cannot and never will be a website (Despite being coded in HTML, JS, CSS and ASP, running on IIS and being used via a browser). It is not suitable for ANYTHING!

 

Get yourself a LAMP server and then find a FREE php share documents server system. Point that system straight to your drives as they stand and you are done.

 

There is no need to use sharepoint to host your drives. I know you can but why would you? Why would you trust an IIS server running sharepoint to provide the critical data on which your school relies on 5 days a week, 7 hours a day?! Better to have the drives and the mapping handled by dedicated (or semi-dedicated) AD and file servers. Sharepoint can then look at those to provide seamless access at home. NOT the other way around!

 

You would be much better to look at either making a system yourself and putting it onto a HTML front end or finding a free PHP system to do it for you (Or if you have to, buying into a cheaper, simpler system for handling documents or even having one coded for you)

 

Sharepoint is an absolute disaster, it really is.

[NewOrder]

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.

 

Last year I completed a document mangement system for a Global organisation using 2010 server. I used everything you mentioned and more. Workflows retention and auditing. Content organiser, send to and routing. Content and document types. The only thing I did not use was folders. The problem is schools still use folders in sharepoint libraries what a waste. Recently I had to assess whether I could rebuild a similar system in Office 365 or foundation server. The answer was no.

 

But what I've seen of schools over the years using SharePoint most only need foundation or 365. Because most only replicate shared drives ( folders ) in sharepoint.

[alttab]

Dear god no... PLEASE don't use sharepoint...

 

We use a "VLE" built on sharepoint and honestly I couldn't tell you what side of that is worse, SP or the VLE...

 

Sharepoint is pure vile... Anyone, and I mean literally anyone with any snippet knowledge about web design or the web in general could tell that sharepoint is not a solution it is just another problem. It's a non-web technology build on web technologies and accessed through a browser. It is an absolute nightmare to modify (and by modify I mean install mods such as office integration, or email integration, or editors, or templates, or themes. Each time it requires going onto the server itself and using VBS through powershell to install, restart, install, restart, restart again, enable, restart... It's endless. Once installed the theme then doesnt work or what you thought would get rid of the ribbon or modify it to actually work as a website just don't do what you thought owing to the fact that sharepoint cannot and never will be a website (Despite being coded in HTML, JS, CSS and ASP, running on IIS and being used via a browser). It is not suitable for ANYTHING!

 

Get yourself a LAMP server and then find a FREE php share documents server system. Point that system straight to your drives as they stand and you are done.

 

There is no need to use sharepoint to host your drives. I know you can but why would you? Why would you trust an IIS server running sharepoint to provide the critical data on which your school relies on 5 days a week, 7 hours a day?! Better to have the drives and the mapping handled by dedicated (or semi-dedicated) AD and file servers. Sharepoint can then look at those to provide seamless access at home. NOT the other way around!

 

You would be much better to look at either making a system yourself and putting it onto a HTML front end or finding a free PHP system to do it for you (Or if you have to, buying into a cheaper, simpler system for handling documents or even having one coded for you)

 

Sharepoint is an absolute disaster, it really is.

 

i have to agree, i've never taken to it. Surely if an organisation was deadly serious about document workflow, version control etc. there are enough enterprise type solutions for that, Sharepoint seemed to take off from the point of view of silo's or islands of content sharing outside of the control of central IT, a bit like how you had islands of access implementations that no-one could really control and got a bit messy.

 

But fundamentally it's doc sharing through a web browser isn't it ?. And other stuff that meant it could be extended, which was just a means for wannabe guru's got to justify adding it as another string to their bow as they became stupefied in administering the thing. Now the rest of the workforce has finally cottoned on that what they were really asking sharepoint to do (if you strip away all the theming and templates) can now be done even simpler, even cheaper, and with even less central IT intervention via stuff dropbox....which is another mess waiting to happen, but at least it's the two things that justify explosive proliferation - simple and free. I never saw the same logical reasoning behind the explosion in share point usage.

 

And yes VLE's are finding the same problem, are they to course management systems what share point was to a true document management system, if your a teacher who's really only using a VLE as an online lesson planner with some feedback mechanism for communications with pupils then you have to ask whether it's an overly complex solution to a straightforward tasks. Just as share point can be an overly complex solution to in most cases extremely straightforward tasks.

[J_Worth]

I quite like Sharepoint to be honest. I have been using it since Sharepoint Portal Server 2003. We currently run Sharepoint 2010 in school. We have setup a IT Support site within it using Infopath forms for staff to submit IT support tickets. These are then emailed to us. We then approve them and submit them up to a form library on our IT support website. When we complete/sign off a ticket a workflow is triggered to move the ticket to a completed form library. We have also added an Email Update button to the form so that we can send the creator of the ticket email updates to let them know how we are getting on with solving their issue.

 

We also have a staff cover request form on there which staff can fill in and when they submit it is sent via email to the appropriate people. Up until the end of this term we had an Infopath form for reporting pupil incidences. It has been decided that this is now done straight into SIMS. One of the main reasons for using infopath for pupil incidences is that we had set up rules so that the incident was emailed to the appropriate people within the school - Head of House, Tutor, SLT, etc.

 

We have also used it to host our cover diary. When the cover administrator exports the cover for a particular date range it to html, we have set it to automatically put the cover diary onto our sharepoint site for all staff to browse with a click of a link/button on the front page.

 

The school calendar is also on there with colour coded events representing school holidays, meetings, etc.

 

Recently, we have added a form for reporting hazards to the site staff again staff can fill this in and submit it which then gets emailed automatically to the site manager to follow up.

 

Admittedly, it can take a while to set it up and it can sometimes have a funny 5 minutes, but once you have set it up and figured out some of its quirks (not all bad I hastent to add!!) I find that customising it is fairly straightforward especially with the help of Sharepoint Designer 2010!