Implementing SharePoint - Part 2

The best place to start when attempting to understand SharePoint is your favorite internet browser. And we could easily get sidetracked into a discussion about browsers, but I’ll pass on that. SharePoint plays well with all Internet Browsers, but as you may have already guessed, it works optimally with Internet Explorer…. no surprise there!

So let’s browse right on over to the Office 365 for Education Portal. And if you don’t remember or write down anything else in this series of articles, remember this: https://portal.microsoftonline.com. This is the portal or gateway into all of the services offered in the Office 365 for Education solution. Once you log into the portal, you will have access to all of the services. And if you are an administrator, this is where you will also manage services for your organization.

Upon logging into the portal, you will see a link at the top for Team Site. This is your default SharePoint site. Once you are comfortable with accessing your SharePoint site, you can browse directly to it, rather than from within the Office 365 for Education Portal.

During signup or trial, your domain name will be assigned a default domain name similar to myschool.onmicrosoft.com. You will want to add your own domain name to the service as soon a possible, otherwise the URLs in this article might be confusing. Ultimately, the URL you you use to access SharePoint you will be something like myschool.sharepoint.com and that will also be the shortcut I referred to earlier.

Note: The “myschool” part of the domain name represents a third level name that belongs to your organization, names are available on a first come first served basis, and once accepted by the Office 365 for Education system, is registered with Microsoft as belonging to your Office 365 for Education subscription.

So now that we have got through all of the preliminaries of getting access to your Team Site, lets focus on what you can do there.

Your first experience with SharePoint may be similar to my first experience with a Personal Computer back in 1982. I anxiously hooked it up, powered it on, and was presented with a black screen and a blinking cursor. Hmmm, reality is such a harsh companion. SharePoint is not really like that, but the analogy is fair.

If you are expecting a default SharePoint site to be automatically customized to your organizational structure, filing system, internal process and work flows, you will be disappointed. In fact, the first takeaway from this article is that SharePoint requires you to become an information architect. You really need to think about your organization, how you manage documents and information, then begin the process of configuring SharePoint accordingly.

And since this is a team effort, it is essential that you engage your team. Doing so will accomplish two things. First it will improve your design and configuration experience, but perhaps as important it will engage your users so they will take ownership of SharePoint project and participate. Adoption among team members is always a challenge when rolling out SharePoint in your organization.

Admittedly it is unfair to be tasked with designing an information system for your organization when you do not know the capabilities of the information system at hand (SharePoint); hence my attempts at education in this series of articles. But as counterintuitive as it may seem, I would suggest that you start not with SharePoint, but with your own organization.

Take inventory of the types of documents you create, share, and file. Consider how you schedule events, meetings, and appointments. Evaluate how you create, update, and share lists and directories. And look closely at important relationships between organizations and groups and the projects they manage. Only after you have done this homework assignment, will you be capable of bringing your ideas and SharePoint’s efficiency into your organization.

Of course you will need to understand the basic capabilities of SharePoint in order to complete your design project, so let’s summarize the major SharePoint features and see if the workflows and processes you’ve dreamed up are possible.

Here are my top 10 favorite capabilities of SharePoint as it would apply to a charter school. Think about these ideas as you consider your SharePoint design project. SharePoint is:

A cloud based centralized filing system for all of your school documents

SharePoint is like a hard drive on the internet or a cloud based network share that gives access to authorized users and denies access to those unauthorized.  It stores documents of all types and formats, including forms, manuals, letters, reports, lesson plans, policy manuals, tests, assessments, lunch menus, etc. If you create, modify, or store information on a PC, it generally can exist in SharePoint.

A centralized store of lists, directories, and databases

Consider all of the lists you have in a busy school, everything from addresses, to school supplies, to vendors.  SharePoint can serve as the single repository of these lists and other data sets, that is both search and filter enabled. Consolidating all of your lists, directories, and databases, to the extend possible will greatly improve the efficiency of referencing information for all of your staff.

A centralized calendar of events for the school

Do you have challenges managing your calendar? SharePoint can serve as the one authorized and consistently updated calendar for all school activities. This calendar can be managed by one or several individuals and can provide automatic notifications for changes or pending approvals. This calendar can also be published to your public facing website eliminating the never ending process of updating the schools calendar on the website.

A discussion board, forum, or online meeting place

Amazing things happen when creativity and collaboration collide. SharePoint can serve as an internal meeting place where questions and documents can be posted and then discussed, without formal meeting times. The byproduct of this dialogue is a very useful knowledge base.

A Wiki

An intersting phenomena called Wikipdia, exists on the same platform as SharePoint. A SharePoint wiki can be a free flowing digital asset where all team members can contribute ideas, thoughts, insights or resources and links to resources.

A school wide issue resolution & tracking system

Technology and facilities management can be greatly improved when all interested parties have the latest information on issues and problems. SharePoint can serve as an issue tracking system that is continuously updated and available to all users. It can be created with complex work rules, time stamps, escalations, and automated communications or be as simple as a system a tod do list, with a status indication and user identification.

An image library

An important legal requirement for using photos at school includes protecting the identity of students and others. SharePoint is an excellent centralized storage facility for all approved imagery for use in school publications, communication, and presentations.

A video library

Yes, there is You Tube and other video sharing sites, but carte blanche access to these resources can put you at odds with CIPA requirements.  SharePoint can serve as a centralized storage facility for instructional videos. This can include both actual videos or links to approved videos for use in the classroom or for administrative purposes. And you can keep these organized by groups or simply lump them all together and allow the built in search features of SharePoint to provide you the access needed.

A social media system

Many schools prohibit the use of Facebook at school, which may be wise; but in doing so they limit students ability to learn important behavioral skills in the social arena. SharePoint, in the default Office 365 for Education configuration, provides a robust social media system that is restricted to the school, yet enjoys many Facebook like features. And the entire system can be managed by school administrators.

A Learning Management System

Some of the worlds most well know universities run on SharePoint LMS, a learning management system built on SharePoint. While this may not be appropriate for your school, SharePoint is a great way to share lesson plans with precise groups of students, discussion forums for each teacher/grade, resource listings, links, and social connections within classes.

All of these features listed above can be configured for your organization with SharePoint. And all of these systems would be present to you when you login as an authorized user at myschool.sharepoint.com or at the Office 365 for Education portal.

Next week we will discuss ways in which the management of SharePoint documents can be improved.

Implementing SharePoint at Your School

One of the core technologies I recommend for managing information at school is SharePoint, a core element of the Office 365 for Education system. I have mentioned SharePoint in several articles over the past two years and it continues to be a favorite tool at some of our partner schools. And while SharePoint is an enormously popular solution in larger commercial enterprises, it tends to have poor adoption in the Charter Schools community, as well as many other smaller organizations. 

While working with our partner schools, I constantly evaluate the barriers to implementation and have come to the conclusion that the primary reason SharePoint has lackluster adoption is its complexity. My purpose in the next few articles is to explore different ways you access SharePoint and what it can do for your organization.  Like many complex systems, SharePoint can be mastered - and the benefits are quite compelling.

 

SharePoint is a web based technology that allows you to share information from most endpoints with an Internet browser or from one of a myriad of applications on those endpoints. An application can exist on either a desktop or laptop (Windows or Mac), on a tablet (Windows, iOS, Droid), or on your smart phone. Understanding the difference between accessing SharePoint from the browser vs. an application installed on an endpoint is a key to understanding how it works. 

Once you understand the mechanics of connecting to SharePoint, using it becomes a little less confusing. It is probably helpful to also broadly categorize the kinds of SharePoint sites you might use.

SharePoint sites exist in two broad categories. There are public facing (Internet) websites and private facing (intranet) websites. Public SharePoint sites are just like other sites on the World Wide Web, containing images, text, forms, and features. Private SharePoint sites are collections of data that you share internally, or at least share in a controlled manner. Access rights is another very important SharePoint concept and mirror the access rights to files found in all computer operating systems. 

One of the most popular uses of SharePoint is document collaboration, which is often associated with sharing documents as we once did using “Shared” folders. But, this is not just document sharing, rather it includes a wide array of features associated with creating, sharing, storing, distributing, securing, and archiving documents. Furthermore, SharePoint provides clever notifications about your documents and automates the filing of those documents. And finally SharePoint contains a built in search mechanism which enables you to quickly located documents within a variety of site collections – like a Google search, except just for your website.

There are a number of reasons we use SharePoint instead of SkyDrive, DropBox, Google Docs, Evernote, or another cloud based sharing service. It boils down to features, function, and capacity. SharePoint has many features not found in consumer grade sharing sites, it functions well with all types of computing platforms (Windows, MAC, iOS, Droid, etc.), and has the capacity to grow with us into a fully integrated system. Consumer oriented technology that works well for a few users , does not always work well in larger organizations.

Document sharing, the most prevalent use of SharePoint, is the most common starting point for an organization. Unfortunately, many organizations don’t get beyond this functionality to enjoy the more robust features of Sharepoint.

Think of SharePoint as a cloud based shared folder, with all of the advantages and none of the disadvantages of a network “Share”. The advantages are numerous – collaborative work, document libraries, forms repository, document control, revision tracking , anywhere and anytime access, convenience in working from multiple locations, platform independence, and the list goes on.

The disadvantages associated with normal “shared” drives are significant, but do not apply to SharePoint. They include having your document overwritten or deleted by another user – intentionally or otherwise, lack of security for sensitive documents, and lack of controls to prevent simultaneous edits of a document. SharePoint solves all of these and other problems associated with collaborative work.

So how does one access documents on a SharePoint site? There are a number of ways, but they boil down to three overall methods:

1.       Browser based access

2.       Mapped Folders on your computer

3.       Apps or program that automate SharePoint Access

Over the next few weeks, we will address each of these access methods in detail giving you an introduction to the basics of using SharePoint.

With that introduction in mind, let’s take the next few weeks to consider the different ways you can access the SharePoint in your organization. And let’s approach this from the perspective of using Office 365. Few of our schools have the technical resources or capabilities to do SharePoint on premises. It requires servers, configuration, and administration resources that are not typical for most Charter schools.

See you next week...

Migrating to Office 365

OK, you’ve watched the cool videos from Microsoft, read review after review about the merits of Office 365 for Education, and decided it’s just what the doctor ordered for your school’s ailing IT infrastructure. And it's time to act on that New Years Resolution of improving your school.

Now what?

Fair question. Regardless of the current state of affairs in your school, you will need to manage this migration in an orderly and methodical fashion. This, most likely, will involve a weekend, holiday, or other day off for your staff in order to minimize the inconvenience.

There are three major components of Office 365 for Education solution which you will address in this migration. In order of most to least difficult difficult to migrate, at a typical school, they are:

1.       Email - Hosted Microsoft Exchange
2.       Lync – Unified Communications
3.       SharePoint – Team and Public Websites

This is also the order in which I would recommend the migration or setup occurs. And please note, this is not a technical support document, but an overview of the process. If you are not comfortable with the subject matter at hand, you’ll want to get some help.

Practically speaking, the only real migration is email, as the other services generally do not yet exist.  Most everyone already has an email account. The closest thing to unified communications in organizations without Lync is texting from a cell phone or other mobile device. And the starting point for a SharePoint migration is normally a Team site for each organization in your school and a document library. Neither of these is difficult to setup, once you have done the harder task of designing how you want to organize your intellectual goodies.

One final thought before we dive in. It is very important that you have full buy in and the moral (and organizational) authority to do this. Change is difficult and there will be resistance. Furthermore, unless you have made a persuasive case as to the benefits that will flow to each of your end users, they may not follow your lead. In my experience most migrations spend 80-90% of the energy on the technical process and 10-20% (or less) on staff introduction, orientation, and training. Be wise and considerate.

OK, so let’s get started with a few generalities in the administrators control panel. There are several basic setup tasks that are not covered by the clever wizards that Microsoft provides. These steps can be done without impacting your users.

1.       Select the right licensing Plan and purchase sufficient licenses for your organization. (This is a bit tricky because most of you will select the A2 Plan for Staff and Students, which is free; but you still have to add it to the shopping cart and checkout).

2.       Add all of your users to the correct domain name to eliminate having the convoluted default domain name of you@yourschool.onmicrosoft.com . If you have not yet obtained a domain name from Godaddy, Network Solutions, or another registrar – STOP and do so, then follow instructions on how to verify that domain name so it is available within the administrators control panel. (Note: we recommend different domain names for staff and students)

Email

The general idea with most technology migrations is to establish the new solution while keeping the old one intact to the extent possible. Then we do a cutover at a minimally impactful time (weekend, holiday, etc.) while keeping the old system available for fallback should the migration fail. Finally we have a period of validation where we confirm the new system is working and then at an appropriate time deactivate the old.

If you do this properly, you will not lose any email and the change will be mostly transparent. If you plan and execute poorly, you will have an email outage and could lose important messages permanently.

Your email migration begins with the modification of Domain Name Records at your Domain Name Registrar. So when you are ready, head on over to Godaddy, Network Solutions, or your registrar and make the necessary zone file modifications. If you are not 100% sure how to do this, get assistance. This is the most crucial step for a successful migration. It only takes a moment to modify the actual Domain Record, but it can take up to 72 hours for those changes to distribute to the right places – so be sure you know what you are doing.

While DNS changes are propagating throughout the World Wide Web, you can start gathering the data from each of your users email accounts. The primary data you are gathering is email, but don’t forget the contacts. You should know which email accounts are most important to your organization and which users actually engage in email messaging, focus your priorities accordingly. Hint: I would probably start with the principal.

Your email migration will take different paths depending on three key factors:

1.       The type of email server in use – commercial or private, IMAP, POP3, Exchange, etc.

2.       The degree to which personal and school email is comingled
3.       The method by which your users currently access their email – webmail l or Outlook

Note: This is not technical support article on the particulars of exporting and then importing your email, contacts, notes, etc. But in one way or another, you will have to export email from each user’s old account into their new account if you wish to retain existing messages. This process gets a little tricky if your users are on Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, etc. as these email accounts are their personal property and you can’t do this without their permission (as demonstrated by a username and password).

For the end user, email migration begins when you deliver the welcome message and temporary passcode to them. This temporary passcode is generated when you create a new user, but you can (and probably should) delay delivering this information to the user until you are ready to start the migration.

Write in big bold letters the following URL on any migration documents (email or paper) you hand out.

https://portal.microsoftonline.com

This URL is the sole place to acquire, modify, and access all of the Office 365 services. We will discover shortcuts to the various services later, but this single URL is vitally important. Before a user can do anything with the Office 365 for Education system, they will need to visit this URL and change the temporary password issued at the creation of their account, to a permanent one that ONLY they should know.

Once logged into the Office 365 for Education Portal, the Outlook link at the top of the screen will take your users to their new email account. And if you have managed this migration well, all of their messages and contacts will be waiting for them.

For some of your users, the Outlook Web Access experience will be all they desire. And while there is nothing wrong with using Outlook Web Access, they may enjoy a much more productive email experience if you install Outlook on their main desktop. For more information about Outlook on the Desktop vs. Outlook Web Access go here.

At this point, your Microsoft Exchange email hosted on the Office 365 for Education is setup. Your users can now access it from any browser capable device or email enabled phone or tablet.

Lync and SharePoint

As mentioned at the outset of this article, there is generally not a migration involved with Lync and SharePoint services within Office 365. For Lync it really boils down to getting your users to try it. We have literally had schools almost shut down when the staff had that ‘ahah’ moment regarding Lync. They were so excited to try all of the cool features, like instant video chat that they almost forgot to teach their classes.

With Lync, you can communicate with your team using a variety of methods all based upon an indication of presence or availability. These methods include text, voice calls, video calls, desktop sharing and file sharing, and of course email. Lync has the ability to transform the communication within organizations that utilize it wisely.

Likewise, SharePoint is a very transformational technology, but it requires a serious commitment to train and develop the system to the advantage of your organization. Watch for a series of articles about SharePoint over the next few weeks.

Summary

Implementing Office 365 for Education can be very straightforward for schools with chaotic or non-existent informational technology infrastructure. On the other hand it can be fairly complex for schools that have significant on premises facilities and resources in place. At either end of the spectrum, Office 365 provides a robust communication and collaboration platform that requires no hardware or no administrative staff onsite. The business case for Office 365 for Education is compelling and we recommend it enthusiastically.