|
Information Technology News You Can Use
Executive Summary
KEDC is currently implementing Office SharePoint Server 2007, new server software from Microsoft that is part of the 2007 Microsoft Office system. Office SharePoint Server 2007 will provide the KEDC staff new ways to facilitate collaboration amongst teams, provide web content management features to improve the KEDC and Kentucky Purchasing Cooperatives websites, implement business processes to achieve greater efficiency, and supply access to information that is essential to organizational goals and processes. The first phase of the SharePoint rollout has been to facilitate collaboration through the creation of team sites for KEDC.
Office SharePoint Server 2007 has provided the newly chartered KEDC teams an online, collaborative workspace to store documents, plan meetings, track tasks, and create a synergy of ideas.
Documents Libraries
Each team website includes one or more document libraries to store the work-product of that team. These document libraries allow team members to check-out documents for editing preventing users from overwriting others' efforts. Office SharePoint Server 2007 also tracks the version history of a document making it possible to revert to a previous version discarding unwanted edits.
Figure 1: Office SharePoint Server 2007 Version History Page allows users to
View, Restore, or Delete various versions of a file.
Meeting Workspaces
KEDC teams are able to create multiple shared meeting workspaces on each team site. Through integration with Outlook 2007 or from the team site members can schedule a meeting, create a workspace to list meeting objectives, invite attendees, store agenda items, provide documents required for the meeting, track tasks assigned, and record decisions made. A meeting workspace provides an alternative to scrambling through e-mail messages, attachments, and the file system for information related to past or upcoming meetings. A Meeting Workspace provides a convenient, centralized place for people to collaborate on a project and have a record of decisions made.
Figure 2: Team Meeting Workspace showing Objectives, Attendees, Agenda, Documents, Tasks, and Decisions
Track Tasks
An efficient way to track assignments and their completion, SharePoint Tasks offer new functionality in comparison to their Outlook counterparts including:
- SharePoint Tasks include an Assigned To field. Just like a task request, a SharePoint task has an "Assigned To" field. Unlike a task request, the owner of the task is posted to the SharePoint site, so everyone knows who is doing what.
- The body of a SharePoint Task is a shared, unstructured, space. One big difference between SharePoint Tasks and Task Requests is that SharePoint Tasks can be re-assigned by anyone, rather than just the person who requested the task. As the task travels between different people they can add comments to the body in whatever style they like. When the task is completed the body will have become this rich record of the decision making process. That record will also be more accessible to peers because it's stored on SharePoint rather than just in one person's mailbox.
- SharePoint Tasks come with context. At the bottom of a task you can see who last owned the task ("Last modified by:"), when it was changed, and a link to the SharePoint site.
Synergy of Ideas
SharePoint offers increased opportunities for KEDC team members with varied skills and experience to create synergy through the use of Blog's and Wiki's. A Blog is a website designed to facilitate the sharing of information. Blogs are typically displayed in reverse chronological order, and consist of frequent short postings. Blogs are most useful when one person is trying to communicate to a team or group. Think of a blog as pushing out information from a single source to anyone willing to listen. The listener has the ability to participate in the communication through comments, but the main direction of the message is controlled by the person writing the blog posts. Blogs can be used as a team communication tool to keep team members in touch by providing a central place for discussion, links, and relevant news allowing the entire team to benefit from the research and thoughts of others.
A wiki site (derived from the Hawaiian word for quick – wikiwiki) is a website in which users can easily edit any page. The site grows organically by linking existing pages together or by creating links to new pages. In general, someone sets the basic beginning structure of the wiki by creating a table of contents and some starter pages. From there, user generated content drives the expansion of the wiki, based upon the needs of the participating audience. If a user finds a link to an uncreated page, he or she can follow the link and create the page.
A wiki site provides a low-maintenance way to record knowledge. Information that is usually traded in e-mail messages, gleaned from hallway conversations, or written on paper can instead be recorded in a wiki site, in context with similar knowledge. A wiki is an extremely useful method of letting content experts participate by contributing in their area of expertise.
Other example uses of wiki sites include brainstorming ideas, collaborating on designs, creating an instruction guide, gathering data from the field, tracking call center knowledge, building an encyclopedia of knowledge, and just writing down daily information in an easily accessible and modifiable format.
Next Steps
As KEDC teams continue to learn the SharePoint web interface and become more comfortable with posting information on the KEDC intranet (inward facing web presence), the IT team will begin to move the KEDC and Kentucky Purchasing cooperatives internet (public facing web presence) websites to SharePoint. The web content management skills that team members are currently learning will be the same skills that will allow content experts to share knowledge with KEDC members in a timely manner. The IT team is also continuing to research and test the implementation of online business processes (online timesheets, travel reimbursement, vacation requests) through SharePoint to achieve greater efficiency. Again, once tasks such as the above have been completed the IT staff can apply the same principles to providing staff and members access to information that is deemed essential to "Help Make Our Schools Great". |