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By Josh Griffin, Director of IT
Whoa how about that Michael Phelps! He is shattering world records and winning gold each time he hits the water – it’s an exciting thing to witness. But what does all this have to do with IT you ask? I just read two great articles in this month’s Windows IT Pro: “SharePoint Goes to the Olympics” and “Gold Medal SharePoint Applications in Beijing.” Both articles focus on how NBC is utilizing Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) to bring the coverage of the Olympics to us on TV and the Internet. They are also using it to simplify data entry, form requests and set up a help desk.
Geonetric recently unveiled our very own MOSS in house to help with collaboration. Prior to MOSS we had file shares, a wiki, and scattered documents, and we didn’t have any blogs or discussion boards. We also had users forget where they saved a file (if only we had an enterprise wide search solution). Voila MOSS to the rescue! Utilizing our Gold Certified Partnership, we were able to use MOSS Enterprise Edition for free and repurpose some internal process and servers. We did this project at little to no cost making a great ROI story.
MOSS has too many features for one post so I will focus on the document libraries and wiki for the purpose of this article.
Document libraries are the file shares of the future – they act as a good old file share, and they allow you to assign workflows to documents. Say you want to create a new Standard Operating Procedure for IT. Go ahead. Create a document library and go to the document library settings and workflow settings. In my case, I gave my folks permission to upload, but only as a minor revision until I signed it off as a major revision. And with the ability to link your outlook to a document library, users can work in offline cache mode and access the file while they are off the network. We took this a step further for our road warriors and allow the SharePoint document library access to the Outlook Web Access in Exchange 2007. If our employees need to get a file and can’t VPN in (we use IPSEC, so if you aren’t behind a firewall with IPSEC enabled you won’t get in) to update their connected list, they can access it over the Internet. Another feature in a document library is the “check out and in” feature – your folks working on documents will know who is doing what and when. This prevents the mid air collisions of folks downloading a document, changing it and then saving over another’s changes.
The best feature in MOSS 2007 (purely in my opinion) was the enterprise search. We set up an enterprise search that goes through our file shares, and after porting out Wiki over to MOSS, we are able to search wiki and anything on our network in one simple interface. We then added Windows Desktop Search 4.0. We deployed the program and setup to our network and put the enterprise search on everyone’s desktop. Users can search their machine, the wiki, file shares and document libraries in one place! Oh by the way, WDS 4.0 is a free download as well.
These were just two features that I chose to highlight about MOSS and how we used them. I didn’t even touch on the discussion boards, calendar, Web parts, our directories, etc. MOSS is a very powerful tool that you should consider adding to your arsenal.
About: Josh Griffin
Josh assists clients and provides technical support for their VitalSite implementations.
He's also responsible for the daily IT operations at Geonetric, including network security and disaster recovery, and works with both the development and project management teams to establish best practices for client support.
Prior to working at Geonetric, Josh ran an IT department of 60 personal supporting a network of over 6,000 on an aircraft carrier, serving as Lead Systems Engineer for the Ronald Reagan Strike Group and was responsible for the USS Ronald Reagan’s MEDWeb eHealth platform.
