Wes Preston

Agenda  Quick Intro  Overview  Site Details  Notes and Resources  Questions

Quick Intro  Wes Preston SharePoint Consultant at Inetium MVP – SharePoint Server MCTS – WSS and MOSS Configuration Minnesota SharePoint User Group

Overview

What is this site for?  Empower the users Be the single point of reference for users of SharePoint in the environment. On-demand training Two-way communication between users and SharePoint team  Put the user base at ease Answer questions before they’ve asked them Show that you’ve planned for this Reduce call center calls/tickets

What is this site for?  Container or starting point for other resources Training Administrators web User Group site/schedule  Define roles and responsibilities  A checklist for farm administrators

Why are we talking about this?  Get buy-in from the user base  Governance – One of the things that should be done as part of a SharePoint deployment  Sites like this are commonly talked about, but not frequently done  Give administrators a starting point

Good, Better, Best  A site like this is a good starting point, but there are a lot of improvements that can be introduced Automation User content  Dependent on your environment  Dependent on the tools available

Governance  TechNet: Governance is the set of roles, responsibilities, and processes that you put in place in an enterprise to guide the development and use of a solution based on SharePoint Products and Technologies.  Governance isn’t rocket science, but the platform site is just one example of a governance item that is traditionally forgotten

Site Details

Taxonomy  The site is a web somewhere in your environment This specific example is self contained and can be used as a site collection or a sub web Platform Site Platform Admins Dev webTrainingOther…

Welcome Text  Content Editor Web Part  Welcome message and overview of what users will find here – maybe links to major areas.  You may want to remove a site description or include the text in the Welcome Text

Announcements  Use for platform announcements System outages New functionality or web parts Training availability  Encourage alerts or RSS feeds

Links  The typical usage…  Keep a list of reference URLs  Use the list to populate a Quick Links web part on the home page  Use categories, filtering, etc…

Shared Documents  Reference documents  Training docs or tutorials if you don’t have a training web  SLAs  Lots of options!!

FAQ – Frequently Asked Questions  Discussion List  Lock the list down, or at least require approval  May want to use a service account for admins submitting  I need to… web part (MOSS)  Limit or filter the number of items displaying on the home page  Create another page with multiple web parts and grouped by category, etc…

Knowledgebase  Extension of the FAQ  More information, more complete answers  Identify processes and standards Custom development Adding 3 rd party products  What types of sites are available, what do they look like, what are scenarios for using  Scenarios and use-cases

Other Forums  User forums on the main site Users Site Administrators  Other forums on deeper sites Training SharePoint Farm Administrators Developers

Contact Information  List users of the SharePoint Team  Who is the manager (so things can be escalated)  Phone numbers? IM?  Have an account that the team monitors – link to message from the site

Feedback List  Offer a method for submitting feedback  Could be a list with some categories  Admins should set alerts or RSS  Put approval on  Allow others to see the feedback  Add a ‘highlight’ flag to expose a view on the homepage

Request Processes  Starts to get a little fuzzy… Some processes should be isolated more  Site Requests  Security Requests  Solution Requests  Help Requests

Calendar  User Group meetings – internal and MNSPUG!  Scheduled labs  Maintenance windows (outages, upgrades)  Meeting workspaces

Advertise it!  Let people know about the site however you can Link from the intranet/portal signature Reference information with links to the site whenever possible

Training Site  Reference documents  Links to relevant materials  Office SharePoint Server 2007 Training Portal and Stand-alone editions PortalStand-alone  SharePoint Designer 2007 Training Portal and Stand-alone editions PortalStand-alone  The SharePoint Shepherd’s Guide for End Users The SharePoint Shepherd’s Guide for End Users

SharePoint Admin Site  Reference documents  Links to relevant materials  SharePoint Issues List  Operational documents  Platform documents  (Backup to an offline location)

SharePoint Dev Site  Reference documents  Links to relevant materials  Dev Best Practices  Templates  Tools PowerShell SharePoint Designer Visual Studio

Notes and Resources

…More to do…  Seed additional content  Clean up  Add a checklist for administrators to go down when implementing

Additional Notes  Have a SharePoint Admin account that administrators can use to submit content  Keep the content relevant Set schedule reminders  Publishing site – same idea, different implementation

Resources  Download this presentation and template Wes’s Blog:

Resources  Minnesota SharePoint User Group Latest Governance presentation: %202008%20MNSPUG.ppt %202008%20MNSPUG.ppt  SharePoint Joel Governance Slide Deck: avoiding-failed-deployments-and-newbie-mistakes-10-steps-to-success- keynote-by-joel-oleson avoiding-failed-deployments-and-newbie-mistakes-10-steps-to-success- keynote-by-joel-oleson  SharePoint Deployment Guide and Checklists

Questions

Thank you for attending!