Sharepoint

[jakkjakk]

Hi guys,
I know this isn't really attached to VB, but there seems to be a lot of people around here that use Microsoft Products. I was wondering if anyone uses Sharepoint?

The company I work for is trying to force my department to build a sharepoint website. However, I have yet to see what this sharepoint website could do for us.

My department has 16 programmers. Twelve of us deal with support and the other four deal with development.

The support part gets a lot of its work from a sister department that talks to the clients and finds out their problems or things they want done and then hands off any programming components to us. We don't talk that much other than work dealing with client related projects. We don't have documents that we share and we don't do the same thing. We just handle their programming needs.

The development team also deals with writing new parts into our software. The support part and the development part are put under one department and we talk regularly. Some support programmers write code to deal with bugs that people find in our software and the development team backs those programmers up.

Our Information layout:
We do have a network drive where we keep all our department documents on. These are things like specifiations for the 3rd party software that we have to adhear to, department policies, training documents, and notes on our department meetings.

My problem is I can't see how sharepoint is suppose to help us. We could put the department documents on the sharepoint site but the people in the department are the only ones who use them in the first place so it works just fine for us. A forum where people could ask coding questions and put them before the group would be nice, but those just go through email.

From what I know of sharepoint its a website where people can do blogs, put dates together, and share documents. I don't see it helping us out in anyway. Any idea's on how sharepoint could help us? I'm the one who got stuck with designing the Sharepoint website but haven't figured out how its going to help me.

thanks.

[techgnome]

We use ours for company wide messages.... department messages, even team messages. It's also used by the various departments to publicly publish things that people outside of the department might be interested in. We also use it to announce & track training. It's real power (at least for me) comes from the alerts. Want to know when a new announcement is made - create an alert. Want to know when a document is added, updated, or deleted? Create an alert. Want to keep track of who is on vacation, and when? Link it up with Outlook, publish a vacation calendar.

In a nutshell it's a web front end to pull together data from all over the enterprise, it can be as simple or as complicated as you want. Also, at my last shop, where they were jsut getting into it, they used it for document versioning, so they could see who made what changes to what document when, and from time to time, allowed them to pull up older copies of a document. We also used it integrated with TFS to track work items. QA put the work items into the system via their QA front end of the tracker, and it would show up on our end - each developer then had a custom view that displayed only their items.

-tg

[Jenner]

Good answer. We have Sharepoint as well but I'm in the same boat as jakkjakk. I don't see how it could benefit us. We're a small company though with about a dozen and a half employees. Everyone is pretty content with a network share drive and email. It sounds like the kind of system that really helps for larger businesses.

[techgnome]

"We have Sharepoint as well but I'm in the same boat as jakkjakk. I don't see how it could benefit us."

Same here... which is why I'm glad I'm not on the MOSS dev team (yep, we have a dedicated dev team specifically for MOSS) I'm not brilliant enough to see the point of it either until someone does it and points it out... at which time it becomes blindingly obvious. I think that's why there was a slow adoption at my last shop... here though.... yeah, the company is big enough that MOSS is used heavily. 1) I can fill out my timecard on it, 2) fill out vacation requests (which are then automatically routed to my supervisor, then onto HR & Accounting) 3) I can even get the weekly cafeteria menu online with MOSS. It's the little things like that where I get the most benefit.

-tg

[Jenner]

@tg: Yea, at my last job, we has Lotus Notes for all that jazz. It was powerful, but man, it was a royal mess to find anything in there.

[techgnome]

A big part of the problem we had was that we kept changing our minds on just how to store the stuff.... after 10 years, the shared folders had gotten out of hand. Then each of the account managers for our clients had their own way of organizing the docs for their clients.... MOSS cleaned a lot of that up, and gave us single point access so that no matter what clie3nt we were looking for, their stuff was organized the same as all of the other clients.

-tg

[jakkjakk]

Whats MOSS?

[techgnome]

Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server .... the full "official" name for Sharepoint.... sorry... MOSS is easier to type than Sharepoint.... :P

-tg

[jakkjakk]

We use ours for company wide messages.... department messages, even team messages. It's also used by the various departments to publicly publish things that people outside of the department might be interested in. We also use it to announce & track training. It's real power (at least for me) comes from the alerts. Want to know when a new announcement is made - create an alert. Want to know when a document is added, updated, or deleted? Create an alert. Want to keep track of who is on vacation, and when? Link it up with Outlook, publish a vacation calendar

For all this stuff we use email and a company internal website. We use a shared calender to track who's on vacation and things like that. Team messages come through as emails. Email is the primary means of communication in my company.

So I still have no idea what to do with this sharepoint stuff. I dont' think its going to help us.

[techgnome]

In our case, there's company wide... then COMPANY wide.... we have offices all over the country (and in a couple of other countries).... so it's a way to hit EVERYONE, or selected companies....

I realize that doesn't help your situation. Here's what you do... setup a generic page... give everyone their own page, where they can put their pic and/or contact info.... and call it good. At the moment it doesn't sound like you'll get much benefit out of it... but who knows... that could change down the road.

-tg

[Gambit001]

For all this stuff we use email and a company internal website. We use a shared calender to track who's on vacation and things like that. Team messages come through as emails. Email is the primary means of communication in my company.

So I still have no idea what to do with this sharepoint stuff. I dont' think its going to help us.

is the idea not to move all your existing stuff into Sharepoint so that all your data is in one central location rather than having it being passed across networks etc

so rather than relying on the email arriving, you know the one place to look instead for it? and everything else basically

basically Sharepoint can do massive amounts to help the business but it takes massive amounts of time & resource to get it up & running to suit your needs