We’ve now got a SharePoint site up and running here at the office. I’m naturally excited to have a collaboration platform to jump into. My initial impressions: It’s a middling forum, wiki, and blog all in one. It’s got some upsides though – single sign on should be a huge benefit to adoption. Profile pics help personalize contributions. Chew on some screenshots and observations below.
Does a unified search excuse redundant communities? I hope so!
Once I got local admin access to my own little corner of SharePoint I tossed off a few blogs, forums, and wikis. I’m rerouting as much of my workflow as possible out of email and our file server and into SharePoint. My coworkers are going to be getting SharePoint URLs from me in most of our future conversations. Don’t expect file attachments or long e-mail reply chains. I want to work in public as much as possible.
Are we helping or hurting ourselves with top-down organization?
Our SP network came to me segmented with a tab for each contributing team. I don’t know that it’s beneficial to split knowledge and collaboration along the same lines that we split our org chart. I think we’d be better served by focusing on communities of practice – groups for people who perform similar jobs rather than people with a common manager. Again, I’m hoping the unified search can help us overcome any problems here.
Overall, I’m really excited to have a persistent collaboration platform to contribute to here at work. Sharepoint 3.0 has plenty of warts but it’s still miles ahead of what we had before. I’m looking forward to abandoning e-mail and networked file shares as much as possible in the coming weeks.
