101 Questions Before Implementing Share Point In Education

101 Questions before Implementing SharePoint in EducationAlex Pearce

Learning Platform Solutions Architect

About the Speaker….

Alex Pearce, SharePoint MVP, Redstone I4E

Learning Platform Solutions Architect Blog: www.learninggateway.net/blogs/ajp Email: [email protected] Twitter: @alex_pearce Founder of the Learning Gateway User Group http://

www.learninggateway.net Co-Founder of the Learning Gateway Conference

101 Questions

before Implementing SharePoint in Education

Who is going to use your SharePoint Portal? What do they want to achieve? What information do they already

have, use and where is it stored?

Information Architecture

What are your top level sites? Where will each department have

their collaboration site and where will they be able to

interact with their pupils? Do you want parents to see the

curriculum area of the portal? Where will sites such as ‘after school clubs’ and ‘gifted and talented’ go?

Information Architecture

Do you use the ‘out of the box’ templates? Do you create a set of templates for staff to use? Publishing or Collaboration sites?

Information Architecture

Management buy in... Which members of staff can add and edit information across the whole portal? Which members of staff can create and edit their own department sites? Who can contribute information to each of these departments?

Management - Staffing

Whose role is it to contribute information to the staff, pupil and parent site? How often do they update this information?

Management - Roles

Do you have a brand guideline? How will a user recognise it’s your portal?

Design - Branding

Do you have a brand guideline? How will a user recognise it’s your portal? Are you going to create a new master page? Are you going to allow each department to have their own branding?

Design - Branding

What templates do you need? What should be included in a site template? How many webpart zones are you going to have? What is the default layout? Are you going to allow a blank site template to be created? What quotas will each site have?

Design – Template

What is the best topology for your requirements?

Infrastructure - Server

What is the best topology for your requirements? Are you going to run your servers in a virtualised environment? Which servers are going to be x64? Are you going to use SQL mirroring or clustering?

Infrastructure - Server

Which server is your SMTP server, search server, excel services etc..? What are your Alternative Accessing Mapping (AAM)? Are you going to have different IIS sites for internal and external access? How many content databases are you going to have? SSP/My Sites

Infrastructure - Config

• Do you need anonymous access?• SSL?• How are you going to secure access to the site from the internet?

• Are you within the guidelines of the new data security from BETCA?

• Do you need access to all sites?

Infrastructure - Security

Integration What other applications can you integrate into your SharePoint portal? Does your MIS supplier offer webparts? Can you use BI or PerformancePoint to show pupil behaviour? InfoPath, Excel Services, Groove, Remote Apps, OCS/CWA, Exchange, Media Steaming, Podcasting for SharePoint, SLK, Moodle.....

How many users can access the site at the same time? Can secure or sensitive information be seen by anyone? Can a student see staff information? Can staff only add data where they are allowed to? How long does a document take to upload? How are you going to monitor usage?

Going Live - Testing

Does it work? Does the site meet expectations? Are all stakeholders happy? Can staff do what they want? Do you have the permissions correct? Can you access the same information external to the school?

Going Live - Evaluation

Does anything appear in the IIS log, Application log or SharePoint logs? How do you know if a user can’t access the site? Does your load balancing work? How are you going to back up your site? Do restores work? What is your Disaster Recovery plan?

Day to Day Operation

Education How are you going to educate staff? How are you going to educate pupils? Who are going to be your difficult staff and who are going to be your champions? How are you going to support the difficult staff? What training are you going to provide throughout the academic year? How about new staff?

What is your taxonomy?Definition:A taxonomy is a structured way of

ordering words, labels, tags for a website What are your meta tags? Are you going to meta tag documents? Are you going to index these tags? Are staff going to tag?

Taxonomy and Tagging

There’s a lot more than this....

Alex Pearce

[email protected]

www.learninggateway.net/blogs/ajp