Sharepoint 2007 Training

I just finished eight days of SharePoint 2007 training and I feel exhausted, but much more knowledgeable and confident in implementing MOSS for the college.

I feel it would be useful to both myself and the reader to note down the main points I learnt and sum things up.

MOSS 2007 is an enormous product, and as a result people find it difficult to understand, I will try to explain how i managed to get my head around it and how i benefited from research and then training.

I have been researching MOSS for a while now and lately i attended 2 Training courses, a 3 day course focusing on implementing MOSS 2007 and a 5 day course on customising MOSS sites with SharePoint designer. The courses are quite deferent and cover deferent areas but complement each other well.

Attending the implementation course before the customisation course was really helpful, because in order to build sites and customise them, you need to know how MOSS works.

The 3 day course was more like an administrator course, it focused on the MOSS architecture and overall understanding of the product and its main applications such as portals, CM, and search. I had previous knowledge of MOSS but i still found the course very useful, particularly best practices and how to plan for MOSS.

Here are few points that I learnt from this course.

·         MOSS needs a lot of planning, without careful planning, it could go out of control and become almost unmanageable leading to more work which contradicts with its purpose.

·         MOSS is about sites, be it a web application, site collection or sub site of any kind, understanding site Hierarchy is key to understanding MOSS, off course its more than just sites but sites will help with understanding other elements. 

·         It offers good out of the box functionality and templates, however customization will be needed to tailor it to the college’s requirements and user needs.

·         We will need to take several key decisions on what to implement, and what to leave out. For example take a decision on whether to allow (my sites) or even the activation of features on a site.

·         MOSS needs ongoing administration and management, a governance strategy will need to be put in place and followed to ensure user, site management, features and backups follow certain procedures.

·         MOSS has some limitations such as backup and restore, but there are ways around them.

·         End users will need some sort of training to get them started, and managing their expectations will be important.

Points learnt from SharePoint designer 2007 course

·         We will need to do some customization to sites in SharePoint to fit our needs and policy. MOSS offers starting points for creating sites, however we will have to customise these sites and templates to fit our needs.

·         MOSS sites can be created and customised using the browser or SharePoint designer, SharePoint designer is a tool that helps with the job to go that extra level.

·         SPD is a very powerful tool, but has some limitations, understanding these limitations are very important as they affect our approach on projects.

·         Requirements are key to success, creating sites that are not fit for their purpose is costly and will lead to failure.

·         Almost everything in MOSS is Customizable, but customisation requires time and effort.

·         Some of our business processes can be streamlined by using workflows, I can see use for workflows on sites and documents that need approval such as invoices and application forms.

·         There are several ways of creating Workflows, each has pro’s and con’s. We can use the browser, SPD or Visual Studio. This will depend on our needs and complexity of the workflow.  

·         Master pages: SharePoint uses several master pages to create the look and feel of sites. These pages use many dynamic controls to generate and display content.

Conclusion:

Both courses were very useful and complemented each other, it was important to understand the architecture of MOSS and how it works before going into the details of creating sites and customising them and i found it very helpful attending the designer course after the 3 day implementation course. Finally, learning is a continuous process and so It will take time and effort to fully learn and appreciate MOSS 2007.

My next post will be on installing Microsoft Virtual Server and then using MOSS on a virtual Machine.

 

 

Online Information exhibition, Olympia

I visited the online information exhibition at Olympia yesterday, it was useful and interesting to learn about the effects information management has on organisations.

Information is the backbone and jewel of an organisation, good management of information simply leads to good business and more productivity, however this is no easy task with the huge amount of information we have to work with.

there were many exhibitors each trying to market their solutions. the common thing among them is that all rely heavily on large IT systems and particularly CMS’s and database systems. its no surprise but it just shows how much things are changing in business.

it was also interesting and reasuring to see that Microsoft sharepoint had a big presence , i attended few seminars on sharepoint that focused on enterprise search and  web content management. I wasn’t suprised by its power and ease of use to provide a friendly, very detailed and accurate search results.

 sharepoint and other CMS solutions are great for managing information in an organisation, studies show that productivity and efficiency improves by 22-60 % when using an information management system.  however if an organisation doesn’t have a clear vision, policy and strategy to manage its content then the best system will prove pointless and expensive. 

this is just an intro on my trip to the exhibition, my next article will discuss how to build a corporate intranet and points to consider.  stay tunned.

for more information on the exhibition please visit http://www.online-information.co.uk/index.html

Sharepoint 2007 as the information systems solution for BPP College

with an over reliance on email for communication, shared network drives for storing content and an aging, expensive  intranet that offers very limited functionality, many tasks are becoming resource and time consuming. There is a need to find a solution that will allow the college to better manage its information assets, allow employees to find, share and manage information needed, and streamline the business process.

The college needs a new dynamic intranet that reflects its image, is up to date and personalised. This will facilitate knowledge sharing and empower staff which leads to increased productivity and a more skilled workforce.We have spent considerable time reading and researching the topic and looking for a system that will allow us to provide a solution to the above issues, Microsoft SharePoint 2007 was our preferred option.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is an integrated suite of applications that can help us manage our information assets by providing comprehensive content management and enterprise search, accelerating shared business processes, and facilitating information-sharing across boundaries for better business insight.

SharePoint Server 2007 supports all intranet, extranet, and Web applications across the enterprise within one integrated platform, instead of relying on separate fragmented systems. Additionally, this collaboration and content management server provides IT and developers with the platform and tools they need for server administration, application extensibility, and interoperability.

Using SharePoint, the solution we have in mind will help us deliver the following benefits to the business.

1.   Staff will be able to collaboratively work on slides and documents and easily publish them to make them available to intended audiences.

2.   The intranet will be dynamic, up to date and personalised, giving staff access to latest news, events and information.

3.   Staff will be able to find and share documents and information quickly and easily, thus encouraging knowledge sharing in the company.
4.   Staff/Teams will update their sites and pages on the intranet thus Reducing administrative cost.

5.   Content can be designed and delivered in a personalised way targeting specific audiences, giving staff access to what’s relevant.

6.   Reduce administrative time and cost by automating the process of submitting business forms using workflows.

7.   Ability to build customised business applications and solutions on a single integrated platform across the enterprise. 

8.   Provide a simple, familiar, and consistent user experience.

9.   Eliminate version control problems.

10.Replace shared network drives with the document management libraries

11. Automate the process of room booking.

12. Boost employee productivity by simplifying common daily business tasks.

13. Ability to integrate information from various systems into one solution enabling a single point of access to multiple applications and databases.

14.   Extend the benefits of Office applications through the integration with SharePoint.  

we are now in the final stages of completing a business case for implementing sharepoint 2007, i will be adding more content soon.

for a lot more on sharepoint visit  http://www.microsoft.com/sharepoint/default.mspx 

Microsoft Silverlight (alternative to Flash)

I had already read about Microsoft silverlight before visiting the Microsoft Campus in reading to attend a SharePoint seminar, it seemed very impressive.

At the seminar they introduced Silverlight and its main features, the first thing you notice is that Silverlight is like adobe flash player, its cross browser and offers very good video quality.

Silverlight is a cross platform, cross browser plugin for delivering next generation media over the web, with silverlight web applications can be more interactive and dynamic, something that’s not possible using just HTML. 

I believe we should start thinking seriously about using this technology at BPP college for the following.

we currently deliver a lot of materials in multimedia, we use several formats which is a problem sometimes for us and the end user, because end users must have right plugins in their browsers and java enabled to play correctly.

using Silverlight we can deliver all of our videos and other multimedia through the web in one format, and the tools for creating silverlight are cheaper and easier to use than flash and other software.  

using Silverlight we can improve the quality of media we deliver, for example we can deliver lectures and content in a scenario based format where events get triggered by end user action, this would be very useful in delivering cases and will engage the students more through interactivity.

this is just a very brief look at this new technology from Microsoft that we should be paying attention too.

for a lot more please check out the Silverlight site and amazing gallery. http://silverlight.net/Default.aspx  

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