Microsoft SharePoint?

[John Harbison]

Interested in hearing how many of us are using MS SharePoint. If so, can you share some of the innovative ways you are using it, i.e. KM research database, internal Wiki, Library screencast media collection?

[Roger Skalbeck]

John, at Georgetown, we're using SharePoint for our intranet, and it works pretty well. We used it to replace our homegrown intranet, and it is much easier to manage content. We are using it for an internal wiki, limited project management, and shared document storage for library materials. It has some quirks, but it works very well with Office 2007 for checkin/checkout.

[John Harbison]

Roger -

Thanks for the reply!

We are using MOSS 2007 "out-of-the-box" for internal blogs, wiki's, practice group pages, KM repositories, and are just about to embark on a site collection of screencasts and CLE material. It's a powerful CMS, with many built-in tools, but beyond the OOTB implementation, it can be a so much more. Adopting more of its social networking capabilities is our next frontier, but the billable hour juggernaut may strangle widespread adoption.

Roger Skalbeck said:

John, at Georgetown, we're using SharePoint for our intranet, and it works pretty well. We used it to replace our homegrown intranet, and it is much easier to manage content. We are using it for an internal wiki, limited project management, and shared document storage for library materials. It has some quirks, but it works very well with Office 2007 for checkin/checkout.

[Wendy Reynolds]

I work for a small administrative tribunal in Toronto Canada. We purchased Sharepoint 2007 while it was in beta (interesting war stories available from the developers). In the past three years, we have developed two portals - one for adjudicators and one for staff. Inside those two portals are several really interesting resources. Examples:

- the library built a searchable repository of policy documents related to the jurisdiction of the tribunal (as an appeals board, it's very rare that the most recent policy is the required document, but the only electronic version available is the current policy)

- current awareness/media monitoring is delivered through another document library, which contains a couple of different kinds of widgets ("news" and "blogs" in Sharepoint speak)

- a wiki houses a taxonomy of research documents - different lawyers contribute content, which is reviewed and approved by a senior lawyer. The library provides support by building hypertext links from cited legislation, policies and decisions.

- a repository of materials from adjudicator training days has been built. In some cases, we recorded the audio of the session, and edited the sound onto the slides, then compressed the file with Flash. Don't know how much that has been used, but it was an interesting experiment!