Back in 2004/2005, I started looking at SharePoint Portal Server 2003 to resolve my needs regarding self provisioning and self management of “collaboration spaces”. I was working in the finance industry where the concept of “Chinese Walls” was very important, i.e. project teams popped up all over the place, had different members from various departments (Accounts, Sales, Credit Control, Risk, etc), were geographically dispersed and required total privacy from everyone else. It was a pain to try resolving their needs using file shares:
- We had to secure them.
- They popped up so often that there were days where we felt like all we did was create file shares.
- The needs of the business were so dynamic that IT was slowing things down.
- We tried to put procedures in place to get data owners to take some responsibility and to get an audit trail but they were reluctant to participate.
I envisaged this in advance and had started researching. I had put in a pilot that was working well, until the company reorganised and my job didn’t exist any more J
Anyway, in my current role, I’ve sent the need to have a look at Windows SharePoint Service 3.0, the free component that is the core of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007. Using WSS 3.0, we can set up web based sites and applications, have a single point of communication and collaboration, enable self provisioning and really make working together a lot easier.
I installed WSS 3.0 onto a VMware ESX virtual machine running Windows 2003 with 1GB RAM. I am impressed. It is so much easier to set up and manage than 2003 was. It seemed that 2003 was scattered all over the place with little planning. WSS 3.0 seems to have had much more thought put into it, with a consistent look and feel throughout.
What I really like is the speed to provision. In just a few hours I was able to set up multiple sites with customised permissions and dedicated roles. I have a root site with announcements, calendar and a discussion board. Calendars and shared contacts lists have been set up and can be integrated into a user’s Outlook installation. I have a HR site with an absence request web app. There is a facilities site with a room and resource booking system. There are blogs with RSS feeds. I’ve got a departmental site with team child sites with customised permissions. The department team heads have a recurring meeting arranged with a meeting workspace that has customised contents depending on the date of the meeting. Document libraries have been set up with approval workflows, check-in/out and versioning. I’ve tried out the recycle bin and it works. We don’t have Exchange (yet) so I haven’t been able to try out some of the nice stuff that we could do with that. We also don’t have InfoPath so we can’t do any digital form stuff (I really liked that before!).
All of this is done using components from out of the box or by using free downloads from the Microsoft website. I’m no web slinger, so I also had to do this without using FrontPage or HTML coding. I know that with a web developer on hand, we could customise this like crazy and create our own web applications.
Looking at the WSS server, I reckon I’ve put together a fairly feature complete corporate portal. It only took a few hours. Furthermore, once the owners and contributors have been defined, IT can step back and let the business manage their sites and their content on their own. As far as I’m concerned, that’s a result!