SharePoint User Group UK

Hi I was wondering whether anyone out there has had any experiences of using Sharepoint for their company Intranet - what are the do's and dont's - what works and what doesn't?

I work in a medium sized public sector organisation with offices spread around the UK and many people working out of home offices.

I am very keen to get the most added value out of SP that I can, and make sure it saves people time and money as well as helping to imporve communication/data sharing across the organisation.

Thanks

Simon Fathers

I've been involved in to roll outs for internal use of share point and to be used to replace or complement there intranets. Key things (sorry if its teaching to suck eggs):

Planning is crucial, even for a smallish SP site, both cases I've come across they had just installed it and see how it went, next thing they know its a big jumble of sites and pages.

Get the basic structure of the company sorted (Sales, HR, etc), look at who should have rights to admin sites, etc.

Create groups in AD for admin, etc then add these to SP, don't try and create them all in SP.

Look at each of the companies departments and see if any workflows can aid there process, once these basics are mapped out, get a pilot running with one area.

Hope that helps for starters, each project has its own pitfalls, but planning will save no end of pain in the future (of course in the real world, planning can go down the pan with project time constraints)


Good luck

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Andrew Carter
.Net & SharePoint

It's really hard to answer such a general question - Sharepoint  (especially MOSS) is designed to serve as a platform for hosting a company intranet and most of it's features are there to offer as much added value as possible to companies who decide to implement the technology.

>>what are the do's and dont's - what works and what doesn't?
You would probably get much more info by listing what exactly you're expecting from your intranet, what features you're looking to implement and what issues/inefficiencies you'd like to solve. For example,
1) company is lacking a document management solution
2) company would like to build corporate knowledge base and make it easy for users to update.
3) company has a back-end SQL database and would like to surface some of the data in intranet
4) etc... you get the idea.

Sharepoint is really a collection of different "products" wrapped up together (enterprise search, document management, web content managment, business data catalog, workflows etc.). It can meet many standard business needs (collaboration, workflows) out of the box and if needed it can be extended to accomodate even the more 'fancy' requirements. Having said that, it's not a magic bullet and it does take time and resources to develop the product. First determine your company's current inefficiencies, issues, requirements (end users, management etc) and expectations. You will then be able to start researching how (if) Sharepoint can fit into the framework of your Intranet project.

regards,
Greg Osimowicz

Hi,

I can only endorse the views of your other respondents and stress that planning is the key. As is often the case with I.T. in general, solutions like SharePoint are often perceived to be some kind of magical solution that'll solve all information sharing issues in one foul swoop. Without adequate planning, it can often do quite the opposite.

I've worked with SharePoint in a large, private sector organisation and have seen it used very successfully.  We ensured that a tight, governance framework (who administers the site, who will make changes, permissions etc.) was drawn up prior to rolling out the product to ensure that all SharePoint related work was tightly controlled and didn't quickly become an unmanageable mess. Drawing up some simple service level agreements to manage user expectations also doesn't hurt.

I'm currently working on a project in the public sector to do something similar and so I'll endeavour to let you know how I get on.