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?

[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!