Sharepoint

At the company I work for we’ve started using Sharepoint for some of our internal intranet stuff.  Sharepoint is billed as a platform that aids content management and business processes. 

As far as functionality goes it allows you to store documents in libraries, store information in what Sharepoint calls lists (they’re essentially just database tables), and create web pages by placing modules on a page template as you see fit.  These pages can can then be customised by the user.

Originally I was just playing with the technology, but after a while I started using it for To Do Lists, Support Rotas and the like.  Although we could write web pages to do this in house this ultimately takes away resources from stuff that makes us money.  Plus I was setting this up and my PHP experience is fairly limited, and I don’t really have a great desire to learn it! :-)

With things like the TODO lists, Sharepoint allows you to easily change the information that’s stored in the list and automatically provides forms to display and edit the data without having to write any code.  It also gives you a lot of functionality for free, for example- login management, email notifications, version control and site search etc.

So far the simple to do lists, rotas etc have all been fine, and as long as you don’t want to do anything fancy then the project tracking template can be useful as well.

One thing that’s been needing a bit of a revamp for a while is our Help Desk system (a set of pages written in house by a summer student).  We’re currently trying out moving it to Sharepoint which will be much more of a test of Sharepoint’s capabilities.  Hopefully I’ll be covering how we get on with this in future posts.