SharePoint - Review It !

As you may have noticed from my photograph on the right I am a touch follically challenged but still last weekend I visited the hairdressers. It was slightly later on Saturday morning than usual because I had been watching Soccer AM which meant that for once there was a queue waiting, so I had to take a seat. However, I was delighted to see a copy of the football magazine Four Four Two even if everyone thinks this formation has had its day. I was soon engrossed in reading the magazine and about how England were going to win the World Cup in 2010 and that Ivory Coast could reach the semi finals. Soon I realised how out of date this May edition was in October. It made me think about how important it is to keep your SharePoint sites up to date.

SharePoint has the advantage over the printed word of being dynamic and hopefully up to date. It is important that individual departments do have Super Users who are responsible for continually checking the information is relevant and frequently changing. It is no good having a photograph of Rosie from Reception marrying her childhood sweetheart when she is now divorced shacked up with Tom from Packing. Also having a list of qualified First Aiders that include Ken and Harry who were made redundant in 2008 is also not acceptable. Your SharePoint needs to be monitored and frequently updated. It needs to reflect your company today. It is easy to create all your new documents in SharePoint but equally important to remove the ones that are no longer relevant.

Office Talk the SharePoint Specialists (ok company I work for) offer a one day workshop with the Super Users every six months to review the SharePoint Sites and see how they could be improved. If you would like us to hold a Workshop for you please drop an email to frank.faulds@office-talk.com. If you are using WSS 3.0 you might want to ask about upgrading to SharePoint 2010 Foundation but remember you will need 64-bit servers. There are lots of ways you can enhance your SharePoint 2007 sites though and easily add video, audio and lots of new Web Parts. Have a look at the Web Part section at the new SharePoint Village to see some of the great new Web Parts including a ‘Holiday Request System’ from Pentalogic.

It isn’t just your SharePoint that might need revamping. After two terrific years and nearly 100 posts on Blogger I have decided that it is time for a change and from next week ‘About SharePoint’ will be moving to WordPress. Now, first thing I know people will say is why not SharePoint? A fair question and really it comes down to three factors; Cost, Ease of use and SEO tools. I could easily write a whole blog on comparing WordPress with SharePoint but this has already been done by Bill Senser in his superb article “WordPress versus SharePoint, another big smackdown”.

So why am I changing from Blogger to WordPress? I suppose I want to try and keep up with other SharePoint Bloggers like Veronique Palmer who have videos, podcasts and pictures in their blogs. The chance to have some of my favourite funny videos (like this ‘Silly Walks’ one) embedded in the text is part of the appeal. So next week all being well this blog will contain more pictures, videos and hopefully get more readers. Don’t worry the address http://aboutsharepoint.com will still be the same and there will still be lots of mentions of the great Aston Villa FC.