Elearning! Magazine: Building Smarter Companies via Learning & Workplace Technologies.
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sharepointforcollaboration more later and talk about SharePoint, there is no discussion of collaboration, but rather all the discussion is on "sites" and the ability to share documents. SharePoint's architecture comes from a time of "non-transparency" where securi- ty was more important than sharing. Each site can be its own mini-silo and It is also hard to figure out a topology for SharePoint sites, which can be expen- sive to set up and can require a lot of I.T. resources. It is often hard to find docu- ments on "sites" — sometimes even for the people who created those documents. One of the issues with SharePoint is the prolif- eration of sites, many of which are "aban- Even so, it is often hard to find specific information in SharePoint unless you are in a site at the top level of the hierarchy; otherwise you can rarely see what is going on in other SharePoint sites. In some client cases, we used a Google search appliance (GSA) to deal with these issues. This is exactly what Lockheed Martin did I.T is an appropriate resource for ERP applications, but the wrong resource for 'situa- tional applications'; that is, applications you need right away for specific purposes that may be used for a short time or specific situation. – David Coleman can't see any others (based on topology and access settings); Microsoft recom- mends a "governance framework" to fix this. SharePoint sites are, functionally, ASP.NET 2.0 Web applications that are served using IIS and an SQL server data- base as a data storage back-end. If you are not technical, all this means is that there are lots of I.T. guys behind the curtain making sure things work. doned," have not been updated, have been deleted or archived. This is more of a poli- cy problem than a technology problem. Additionally, the search functions in SharePoint (MOSS search provides the ability to search metadata attached to doc- uments) are very limited. Microsoft has focused on fixing this in 2010 by adding FAST search technology to make search not only more useful but more granular. with its "Unity Spaces" project, which took one year to implement, required 40 FTE and $2.5 million. It was built on top of SharePoint and used ATOM as a publication tool and NetGator as an RSS reader. The company also integrated with S.A.P. employ- ee portals. The estimated total cost to imple- ment Unity Spaces was $8.5 million (which includes integration costs). NO SOCIAL OR COLLABORATIVE SharePoint is not really a "social" tool, despite what Microsoft marketing says. It is document management and workflow process tool. Although Microsoft touts SharePoint as the "Swiss Army knife" of collaboration, people can't share what they can't find. Wiki, blog, profiles and other social functions were very minimal in 2007, somewhat better in the 2010 version. If they actually worked well, there would be no market for third-party developers like: >> Atlassian Confluence >> Social Text >> Jive (Clearspace) >> Connectbeam >> Mindtouch >> Telligent (build on top of SharePoint) >> NewsGator Social Sites (built on top of SharePoint) Although 2010 is the current version of SharePoint, most I.T. organizations have not yet migrated to the new version. 40 May / June 2011 Government Elearning!