SharePoint
So, I’ve volunteered myself to head up the SharePoint project here at GCC. It’s something that’s been shoved to the back while we deal with more pressing matters.
Our needs are a little different than most companies, as we need to find a way to allow our volunteers who don’t have an AD account to get access to information, files and schedules. AND we need to make the site volunteer-centric.
Phase One of the project, is setting SharePoint up for Drama (which I’m a part of) who have been using Basecamp successfully for a few years now. We decided to leave Basecamp mostly because we saw how great it is, and decided we wanted something like that for our whole church. I’m finding that the possibilities are endless with SharePoint, I just need to learn how to do all the things that I’m promising 
As we progress from just getting access for drama and music, we’re going to try to build in workflows. So if there’s going to be a drama 3 weeks from now, the producer and/or director can request mics and lighting enough ahead of time, that our techarts guys can plan for it. I have no idea how we’ll do that, but it’s definitely something to shoot for. We have some great guys on our team who are a lot smarter than me, so I think we’ll find a way.
Final stage of the process will be using it internally, which I think will be the greatest benefit. There are so many random systems that we’re using that can all be replaced/combined into SharePoint. Our Room Reservation system for instance and even our Time Cards that some of our employees use can all be done in SharePoint.
The biggest thing we want to do with this is not manage it. I want to set things up, train the people who will handle the day to day operation of it, and let them go. I don’t want to have to add users, or give rights to things as needs change. We’re going to need some big training and some smart staff members. Luckily we have the latter.
… or is it the former?
Umm… whichever one means we have smart staff members. Because we definitely have those.
May 14th, 2007 at 9:23 pm
Keep us posted on what you learn - I’ll be taking a good hard look at SharePoint once we get our VMWare infrastructure deployed.
Speaking of basecamp, do you know of anyone who uses it as part of the worship planning process? at COR, the process is one incredibly convoluted Excel spreadsheet that’s used for all kinds of pieces of the process, and there’s GOT to be a better way to do it.