CIO Council Report: Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server
Author: Paul Moorman
November 2007
"No man is an island" wrote John Donne back in the 17th century, espousing the idea that people are not isolated from one another, but that all mankind is interconnected. Four centuries later, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server delivers solutions that enable mankind to share and collaborate like never before. Matt Demmy from Lexis/Nexis and Mike Harmer from Miller-Valentine Group shared their experiences and led a highly interactive discussion with a large audience of existing and potential users at the September 2007 meeting of the CIO Council.
SharePoint offers an integrated set of services, available from either a rich or web browser client, that include collaboration, portals, search, content management, business processes and forms, and business intelligence. Uses for these services include document repositories, personal and departmental team sites, corporate communication portals, project management and internal product development.
Like many successful Windows-based programs, SharePoint at Lexis-Nexis originated and grew as isolated implementations, each demonstrating the business value of the new technology. Over time, however, it became apparent that a distributed approach limited the sharing of information, provided no company-wide knowledge search mechanism and under-utilized their licensing and infrastructure investments. The current focus at Lexis-Nexis is to consolidate their SharePoint environments, eliminate the aforementioned issues and provide a consistent branding across their many business units.
Miller-Valentine Group uses their SharePoint service to deliver each employee a personal web site where knowledge management begins at the personal level. Their key enabling SharePoint technology is search, which requires careful planning to deliver a balance between effective search results and the effort required to tag documents with appropriate meta-data, which is "data about data", and is used to facilitate the understanding, use and management of data. This can be accomplished using full-text indexing, where every word can become a searchable key, but not a technique useful for documents such as graphics or drawings. Indexing the mounds of data typical within a growing SharePoint environment also needs attention to insure acceptable levels of performance over time.
Perhaps the most interesting challenge in establishing an effective SharePoint service is the cultural change required. A certain number of people will not embrace the idea of openly sharing their knowledge and experience, feeling their value is diminished if they share too much. Others may undervalue their contributions and feel the time required to learn and use a new technology not a good use of their time. And still others may contribute but not use other's contributions. Don't underestimate the difficulty of overcoming our human feelings and tendencies.
The Greater Dayton IT Alliance's Training Exchange program lists seven different Microsoft SharePoint courses in their catalog. Check out these and many other training opportunities at ww.trainingfinders.com or contact Linda Hanaway, Director, Training Services, at 937.229.9084 or email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .
For more information on this topic or discuss your IT leadership joining the CIO Council, please contact Ann Gallaher, Chief Operating Officer, at 937.229.9072 or email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .
