Every job I’ve worked, I’ve come across people that don’t know what the purpose of SharePoint is, aren’t happy that they’re being forced to use it by company, and/or don’t know how to properly use it. I’ve come across many unhappy people and I hope that this post will clear up some of the questions and relieve some of the unhappiness.
First, I’d like to begin by clearing up the names. You may have heard people talk about the Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) site or the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) site or simply the SharePoint site. To be clear, they are all the same (sort of). SharePoint is the name of the product. WSS and MOSS are the names used to distinguish between the two versions of that same product. Think of WSS as SharePoint lite, and MOSS as WSS on steroids. (MOSS is WSS with extra features).
Now that that is out of the way let me talk about what it is and why you want to use it. SharePoint is a system designed to HELP you collaborate with your colleagues, find/share information, and connect with coworkers.
How Does SharePoint help you collaborate with others?
At a very basic level SharePoint gives you a central location where you can store any records or documents that you and your coworkers may need to share. SharePoint gives you access to various types of Lists and Document Libraries. Think of a list as an Excel spreadsheet and a document library as a shared network folder. While we’re talking about document libraries, I should mention that SharePoint IS NOT A FILE SYSTEM. What do I mean by this? You don’t want to store your grocery list in a document library. You don’t want to store temporary notes or an afternoon to-do list. I say this because your site will have administrators responsible for backing up the site and all of its content and your grocery list is taking up unnecessary space. Rule of Thumb: if a coworker can’t use it to help them do their work or get a report, if it’s a temporary and useless document, or if it’s a personal document, don’t put it on the site.
So, what else? SharePoint has workflow. What is workflow? Well, have you ever had a document or a report that you’ve written that needed to be approved by a supervisor before its passed on to his/her supervisor? Have you ever had a supervisor was always misplacing it or forgetting that you gave it to him/her? (That jerk). Well, with SharePoint, you have the ability to select several types of workflows and have them run on your document. So the next time you write one of those reports, you can upload the report to a document library where a workflow will run. The workflow can create a task in a list somewhere that will alert your supervisor to take a look at the report. Your supervisor can flag the report as approved or rejected. If approved, it will move up to the next phase or go back to you so that you can fix it. Now you don’t have to worry about finding that supervisor that’s always up and about.
There are more examples, but this should give you a simple idea of what SharePoint can do to help. You can set up calendars, task lists, and store documents in different kinds of libraries. You can also secure those lists and libraries so that coworkers that have no business seeing them won’t be able to.
How does SharePoint help me find and/or share information?
Well, there are a few ways. We mentioned above that you can share documents in document libraries and set security restrictions to narrow down who you want to share the document with. Same can be done with lists. You can set up your lists and libraries to alert you when a change is made to something in the list or library. Alerts will send you emails to make you aware of a change or a new item.
Wiki’s and blogs are nice new additions to the SharePoint environment. Wiki’s can be used to allow you and your coworkers to contribute content on a given topic. Blogs are another way to share information. The difference is that wiki’s are typically an ever evolving source of information, meaning that user’s can go in whenever and add/update/remove content. Blogs are typically run by a single user and that person can pass on information about what they want, when they want.
You can also find information with a good old fashioned search. SharePoint comes with search functionality that if configured, can index content on your site. Your administrator can also set up a search to find content from other sites. So, if your company is having trouble informing people about SharePoint, your admin can tell the search service to check out this site that’s going to be awesome some day (http://SharePointLessons.blogspot.com) and when you type in certain keywords like “what is SharePoint”, this post might show up.
How does SharePoint help me connect with coworkers?
The first method that comes to mind is MySites. MySites are personal sites for each individual user. You can use MySites to post info about yourself, who your coworkers are, projects that you’re on, anything. I remember having lunch with some people and I couldn’t remember someone’s name at the table. I didn’t want to ask him his name but I knew that he worked with someone else at the table. I went to the known coworkers MySite and saw a list of employees in his department. That helped me find out the other guys name. That’s a silly example but it helped me out.
You can also search for people by skills, colleagues, projects. You may actually find out that there were people that you talk to that were associated with your projects and didn’t know until you checked out their sites. You might also find out that they’re working on something similar and maybe you can share information.
I hope this post helped explain some things. I was going for a very general overview which is why I didn’t go into detail about some of the many, many features in SharePoint. I hope some of you are a little less angry at your company for forcing SharePoint down your throats and understand that in the long run, this technology could make your lives a little easier.Labels: End-User