Sharepoint - how do you use it?
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@scottalanmiller said:
SharePoint would definitely spiral out of control if you give end users the ability to create their own sites and stuff. Few companies do that. Most use IT as a gateway and make end users request new sites or pages through IT.
Oh, right, that's not what I was led to believe from talking with some Sharepoint consultants. I had it in mind that department managers would manage their own sites and not be a drain on IT resources.
An option, of course. But not one that I would recommend. Non-IT people lack the oversight, training, taxonomy and other disciplines to do this alone.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
Indeed. The first two departments I'm looking at implementing Sharepoint in are HR and QA. By the nature of their roles, these two managers are highly organised and already have good manual document control in place that they want to replicate in Sharepoint. Sharepoint effectively becomes the Quality Manual that we're audited on for ISO certification (do you have ISO in the US?). It's a lot of work, and I want the majority of it to be carried out by them, not me. They know more about what they're trying to achieve than I ever could.
But if you let them have control, how to do you prevent other departments demanding control of their own sites? I'm sure I'll figure it out.
Make approval flow through management. Let management provide that gateway.
Is consider making a Sharepoint training a requirement for that type of access.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@scottalanmiller said:
SharePoint would definitely spiral out of control if you give end users the ability to create their own sites and stuff. Few companies do that. Most use IT as a gateway and make end users request new sites or pages through IT.
Oh, right, that's not what I was led to believe from talking with some Sharepoint consultants. I had it in mind that department managers would manage their own sites and not be a drain on IT resources.
That's typically what I've done. I'll make a site for a department, set their lead user as an admin, and let them have at it. Sure, I'll do some basic training and give guidance along the way, but I leave it as a blank canvas for them to mold.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
Indeed. The first two departments I'm looking at implementing Sharepoint in are HR and QA. By the nature of their roles, these two managers are highly organised and already have good manual document control in place that they want to replicate in Sharepoint. Sharepoint effectively becomes the Quality Manual that we're audited on for ISO certification (do you have ISO in the US?). It's a lot of work, and I want the majority of it to be carried out by them, not me. They know more about what they're trying to achieve than I ever could.
But if you let them have control, how to do you prevent other departments demanding control of their own sites? I'm sure I'll figure it out.
Yes, ISO is an international standard. With permissions and version control, SharePoint is a fantastic Quality management system. If you get into workflows, you can start to use it for other things like corrective action tracking, purchase orders (If your LOB application doesn't have it), and much more.
Some departments couldn't care less about SharePoint. From what I've seen, those that want to be able to choose their own destiny with SharePoint are the ones that will actually use it, and the others could really care less.
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Thanks. I'm about to start my Sharepoint journey. It's exciting, but scary, as I have absolutely no idea what I am doing. Sharepoint is such a difficult application to describe. I think the biggest challenge is to know when Sharepoint is the appropriate solution for a business problem, and when it isn't. For example, to what degree should Sharepoint replace a file server? Some files are better on Sharepoint, some are better on a file server - but how to decide which is which? To what degree should we integrate our CRM, ERP, ECM, and field service tracking applications into Sharepoint? How do we encourage users to engage with Sharepoint? I guess it's going to be a case of having to suck it and see.
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Get some books that talk not just about Sharepoint from a technical perspective but also about data theory and how Sharepoint can be used. MSPress has a few.
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Can anyone recommend any good Sharepoint books? I'm currently half way through Sam's Learn Sharepoint in 24 hours and I'll only give it a 3/5. I'm really bored of studying it.
Also, am I right in saying OneDrive for Business is Sharepoint? And that being the case, will Microsoft drop the Sharepoint name in the near future and we'll just have OneDrive? OneDrive implies file management and Sharepoint implies websites, so I'm a little confused about their direction.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
Can anyone recommend any good Sharepoint books? I'm currently half way through Sam's Learn Sharepoint in 24 hours and I'll only give it a 3/5. I'm really bored of studying it.
Also, am I right in saying OneDrive for Business is Sharepoint? And that being the case, will Microsoft drop the Sharepoint name in the near future and we'll just have OneDrive? OneDrive implies file management and Sharepoint implies websites, so I'm a little confused about their direction.
You get a sharepoint site as part of most Office 365 subscriptions. You may choose to sync part (or all) of that sharepoint site as a library on your desktop and the sync process uses groove.exe (OneDrive for Business), but it is NOT OneDrive.
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OK. I just read this article http://www.fiftyfiveandfive.com/sharepoint/onedrive-business-not-onedrive/ and got kinda confused about the differences.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
OK. I just read this article http://www.fiftyfiveandfive.com/sharepoint/onedrive-business-not-onedrive/ and got kinda confused about the differences.
Well OneDrive and OneDrive for Business are not the same thing either. They accomplish the same task, but are different products.
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@Carnival-Boy MSPress has several good titles on Sharepoint. Just go to their site and search on Sharepoint 2013. They have all different levels from high level for end users to the certification paths.
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On my W8.1. update 1 I have both OneDrive for Business and OneDrive on my PC. I believe the OneDrive for Business has replaced the SharePoint connection.
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@technobabble correct. ODfB is Sharepoint sync. OD is a separate MS hosted service.
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SharePoint is amazing but loaded with almost overwhelming numbers of features. You can use it in so many ways. And then comes running custom code on top of it. Then it really gets intense.
SharePoint in the last few versions has really started to address file server needs and can covet many aspects of traditional file serving.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@technobabble correct. ODfB is Sharepoint sync. OD is a separate MS hosted service.
More specifically, you now have a personal OneDrive and a Business OneDrive (that is part of your sharepoint site, but personal, note the URL).
The business one drive will also sync to the actual sharepoint site's documents space that is included with Office 365. You have to manually set that up if you use chrome (well the version of chrome i had 6 months ago). If you use IE it should do it automagic.
If you click Sync it will create a "SharePoint" library in your favorites in addition to the OneDrive for Business.
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OneDrive is brilliant. Been using it a bit lately and it works quite well. I use the personal one as much as the business one.
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Yeah, we have moved to OneDrive for a ton of stuff that we do now too. That is, One Drive for Business. That it is coming right from our own SharePoint server really makes it a no-brainer. It has been working great for us.
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My next goal in ODfB is to set permissions on OneNote so that users can't edit notes. (would rather have pending edits that have to be approved)
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@scottalanmiller said:
For example, we make one "site" for each division: HR, management, general "whole" company, IT, Software Engineering, Client Services, etc. About seven or eight of them. Each has the same basics but with slight variations depending on need. Some are globally visible (IT and CS are available to all staff to see, SE only to the development team to keep things tidy for other people, management only to executives, etc.) People without access to a site literally don't even know that it exists, its tabs in the menus vanish so they don't even know that they are missing anything.
I'm about to create my first sites (gulp).
HR. I don't know whether to have one or two HR sites. Two sites would be a whole company one, where, for example, we'd keep Employee Manuals. And a private, departmental one, where HR would keep confidential internal documents. I don't know if it's better to have one HR site and use permissions to control access.
Project sites. We have a Lean Manufacturing Team - with cross-departmental team members working on various projects related to the company's commitment to becoming a lean organisation. I don't know whether to have one site containing all the projects the team will be working on, or to create multiple project sites - one for each project that the team embarks on. The latter could get out of hand, as there are likely to be multiple projects being worked on simultaneously. But a single site could get confusing and cause the team to lose focus.
You can problem tell from the above that I'm a complete newbie to all this!
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@Carnival-Boy For HR, in a case like that, I might lean towards two sites. That way you have the extra peace of mind that one is clearing for sharing and one is clearly now.
