Continuing our research into content management systems and management approaches adopted on campus, the DLSC invited John Osborne and Chris Marshall, both with Vanderbilt ITS, to discuss ITS' Microsoft Sharepoint project, their experiences with the product, current users and pros and cons.

SharePoint is a web-based collaboration and document management platform from Microsoft. It can be used to host web sites which can be used to access shared workspaces and documents, as well as specialized applications such as wikis, blogs and many other forms of applications, from within a browser. SharePoint functionality is exposed as web parts, such as a task list, or discussion pane. These web parts are composed into web pages, which are then hosted in the SharePoint portal. SharePoint sites are actually ASP.NET applications, which are served using IIS and use a SQL Server database as data storage backend.

Windows SharePoint Services is a free add-on to Windows Server. WSS offers the base collaborative infrastructure; supporting HTTP and HTTPS based editing of documents, as well as document organization in document libraries, version control capabilities, wikis, and blogs. It also includes end user functionality such as workflows, to-do lists, alerts and discussion boards, which are exposed as web parts to be embedded into SharePoint pages.

John and Chris indicated the primary use on campus, so far, is for departmental collaboration and/or small intranets. The largest departmental user at this time is DAR. ITS has no plans, at this time, to enable "anonymous" web access which might make it useful as a content management system.

John offered a 30 day test account for us to use to gain direct experience with the product. We will likely do this at some point in the summer.