SharePoint administration can be a full-time gig

Post #258,752 by drewk 6/13/06 11:06:40 AM Reply	SharePoint administration can be a full-time gig From the sound of it, they want something that runs itself, with end-users maintaining content. IMO that never works. When everyone can post content, and no one actively maintains it, you end up with an unusable hairball. Someone has to have a primary mission of maintaining and pruning the site or it's little better than a shared network drive. The easiest way to get what you want probably would be SharePoint, but turn off nearly everything. Don't give admin rights to anyone. Lock it down as much as possible, with only a very few limited ways to post content. You can get the Outlook and Project integration pretty easily ... assuming you can get it set up correctly the first time. Doing this is apparently harder than it sounds, because I've used it three different places and it never worked right out of the gate. My personal preference is a Wiki, but when your office is MS Office document-centric you probably have to view supporting those as your primary goal. And I haven't seen anything other than SharePoint that does Outlook and Project integration. === Purveyor of Doc Hope's [link\|http://DocHope.com\|fresh-baked dog biscuits and pet treats]. [link\|http://DocHope.com\|http://DocHope.com]
Post #258,878 by JayMehaffey 6/14/06 11:45:20 AM Reply	They havn't fallen into that rabbit hole From the sound of it, they want something that runs itself, with end-users maintaining content. IMO that never works. When everyone can post content, and no one actively maintains it, you end up with an unusable hairball. Someone has to have a primary mission of maintaining and pruning the site or it's little better than a shared network drive. Lucky for me, they have not fallen down that rabbit hole. SharePoint pretty much encourages that view, and like you, I have never seen it work. The problem with SharePoint is that it is a collaboration tool, and what I'm looking for is more of an information distribution tool. We have a monthly processing cycle, and a bunch of little 2 and 3 person groups responsible for parts of that cycle. What we want is a good way for those groups to keep the other groups updated on where they are in the processing cycle. SharePoint would work great for what I need, except that I can't pick a few pieces and integrate them into a framework I setup. Rather SharePoint is a huge framework of it's own and I'll have to integrate my stuff into it. Jay
Post #258,891 by Another Scott 6/14/06 12:50:31 PM Reply	Would a Gantt-like tool be better? It sounds like you want a 'collaborative project management'-like tool rather than a collaboration framework. Maybe something from [link\|http://www.kidasa.com/Compare/compare.htm\|Kidasa]? I've used Milestones Simplicity for simple Gantt charts, but haven't attempted to incorporate it into a collaboration. I don't know how flexible their tools are to fit your requirements/desires. I don't think a wiki or the like would be my choice for what I understand to be what you're looking for. HTH. Good luck! Cheers, Scott.
Post #258,909 by JayMehaffey 6/14/06 1:59:52 PM Reply	That is one piece of it The internet publishing part of Milestones looks like one part of what we are looking for. But we are looking for a full portal not just one part. The goal is to use it for document distirbution, news distribution, project status distribution, report distribution, company calendar distribution and so on. There will not be a lot of updating done through the portal. But since there is going to be many parts to this I'm looking for a decent framework, or what I really want, which is a set of components I can drop into a application I build. If it was just one thing, I would dig in and do it by hand. I've built frameworks for applications before, I've built most of these components at one time or another and I've done automation against MS backends. But there is too much here to do it that way. Jay
Post #258,960 by drewk 6/14/06 5:26:19 PM Reply	You good with FrontPage? Since you can create new components in FrontPage to include as "page parts" in SharePoint, you might be able to pull the SharePoint components you like and put them into something else. === Purveyor of Doc Hope's [link\|http://DocHope.com\|fresh-baked dog biscuits and pet treats]. [link\|http://DocHope.com\|http://DocHope.com]

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