Microsoft SharePoint Governance Whitepaper - Download Center

SharePoint Governance For Education K12 Version: 001 Publication Date: 06/15/2014 Latest Revision Date: 06/15/2014 Contributors: B2B Technologies Microsoft Corporation Product: SharePoint Online Office 365

B2B TECHNOLOGIES | MICROSOFT SHAREPOINT GOV ERNANCE WHITEPAPER MICROSOFT SHAREPOINT GOVERNANCE WHITEPAPER

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REVISION AND S IGNOFF

CHANGE RECORD Date

Author

Version

Change reference

5/19/14

B2B Technologies

1.0

Developed first draft

5/21/14

XE Eyee

1.1

Authored content, incorporating feedback from Microsoft

5/28/14

David Norris

1.2

Revised content, refined outline, and added comments

5/28/14

XE Eyee/T Tesfamichael

1.3

Revised/labeled diagrams, addressed reviewer comments, authored/revised content

6/2/14

Matt Tinkler, Brad Kazmer, David Norris

1.4

Authored/revised content and added diagrams

6/5/14

Xango Eyee

1.5

Revised content, added diagrams

6/11/14

Jennifer Bluemling

1.6

Branded content, editorial review.

REVIEWERS Name

Version Reviewed

Organization

Date

Mark Dunkel

1.0

Microsoft

5/21/14

Mark Dunkel, Erik Desbois

1.4

Microsoft

6/2/14

MICROSOFT SHAREPOINT GOVERNANCE WHITEPAPER

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T ABLE OF CONT ENTS

REVISION AND SIGNOFF ............................................................................................................ 2 CHANGE RECORD ................................................................................................................... 2 REVIEWERS .............................................................................................................................. 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS ................................................................................................................ 3 ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................................ 5 DEFINITION OF TERMS ............................................................................................................... 6 UNDERSTANDING SHAREPOINT IN AN ACADEMIC SETTING.............................................. 8 OneDrive for Business in Education ...................................................................................... 8 Site Templates ........................................................................................................................ 9 Enterprise Site Templates ..................................................................................................... 12 Document Center ................................................................................................................... 12 Records Center....................................................................................................................... 13 Basic and Enterprise Search Centers.................................................................................. 14 Business Intelligence Center ................................................................................................ 14 Publishing Site ....................................................................................................................... 15 SharePoint Apps and the Office Store ................................................................................. 15 APPS AND WEB PARTS IN EDUCATION ............................................................................ 17 SharePoint Online Apps ....................................................................................................... 17 WHAT IS GOVERNANCE AND WHY IS IT IMPORTANT? ...................................................... 25 Importance of an Executive Sponsor .................................................................................. 26 What do we want to build, and why? ................................................................................... 26 Academic scenarios for SharePoint .................................................................................... 26 Site Taxonomy ........................................................................................................................ 28 School District Intranet Taxonomy ....................................................................................... 28 School Site Intranet Taxonomy ............................................................................................ 29 Shared Drive Taxonomy ....................................................................................................... 30 Public Facing Site Taxonomy ............................................................................................... 32


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How will permissions be managed? .................................................................................... 33 SharePoint Permissions Levels............................................................................................ 33 Active Directory Security Groups ......................................................................................... 34 Managing Personally Identifiable Information (PII) .............................................................. 35 IMPORTANCE OF ENVISIONING, PLANNING, AND DESIGN................................................ 37 Envisioning Phase ................................................................................................................ 37 Planning and Design Phase ................................................................................................. 38 How will success be measured? .......................................................................................... 39 Identify priorities for using SharePoint Online? ................................................................ 40 Why use a controlled/phased approach? ........................................................................... 40 How will administrators and end users receive training?................................................. 41 Is assistance needed for any phase of the project? .......................................................... 42 How is change management handled? ............................................................................... 44 Which features (licenses) will be provided to end users? ................................................ 46 How to activate SPO licenses?............................................................................................. 46 What is the best use for Yammer? ....................................................................................... 47 Activating Yammer ............................................................................................................... 48 Encourage feedback from end users for continuous improvement ................................ 48


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ABSTRACT SharePoint Online is a powerful, web-based collaboration platform providing academic institutions with virtually limitless options to build education-centric solutions at all levels within an organization. The flexible nature of SharePoint Online empowers institutions to deploy many different types of environments that bring value to their end users, including: -

University/District Portals School Portals Faculty/Staff Intranets Research Portals Social Networks Student Extranets Vendor Extranets Departmental Team Sites Project Management Sites Public Facing Web Site Classrooms Sites Ad Hoc Collaboration Sites Personal Sites More…

Academic institutions have complete control over what types of environments that will be deployed. This decision is often based on strategic goals and existing technologies used throughout the university or school district. In many cases, SharePoint Online is used to consolidate duplicate workloads across an institution—thus, providing consistency and reduced total cost of ownership. SharePoint Online includes a vast array of features and Apps that can help institutions build solutions to meet the needs of practically any collaboration objective. Institutions may simply choose to deploy OneDrive for Business, providing all users with 1TB of personal storage; Office Online; External Sharing; and Co-Authoring capabilities. In more advanced scenarios, institutions may choose to leverage SharePoint Online to reduce their dependency on files shares, use forms or workflows to drive processes, create dashboards, manage projects, integrate with existing systems, or create communications portals across an institution, school, or department. This whitepaper was written to assist academic customers in understanding the governance process. Although the content is primarily targeted at a K-12 audience, much of the information applies to higher education customers as well. Topics covered will be:       

What governance is and why it is important Usage scenarios for SharePoint in K-12 districts How to plan a SharePoint site Best practices for using SharePoint features Change management OneDrive and Yammer How to measure success

The intent is for this document to become a guide for your deployment or upgrade.


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Definition of Terms Term

Definition

Intranet

An intranet is a tightly managed navigation structure to provide authored content to faculty and staff within the organization. For example, you might use an intranet to distribute policy among district/school administrators, or to allow teachers to collaborate on lesson plans. An extranet provides access to targeted content to users outside of the organization, which may include vendors, partners, or parents. An extranet may be opened up to a vendor providing continuing education credits (CEUs). A public website is used to provide information about your organization to the public at large, usually in an anonymous format. Examples of such information include school closings, superintendent letters, academic calendars, meeting minutes and similar announcements. A site collection is a top level site and all of the sites below it (subsites). See Figure 1 below. Site collections provide unique permissions, storage quotas, scalability, and customizable look and feel.

Extranet

Public Website (internet)

Site Collection

Figure 1: Example of a site collection

Subsite

Metadata

A subsite is a site that is created underneath a main level site. Unless permissions are specifically changed, subsites inherit their permissions from their parent site. Subsites are built using many types of prebuilt templates or can be created using custom templates. Examples include sites for departments, projects, classes, clubs/committees, wikis, and blogs. Metadata is information about site content. For example, the title and author is metadata about a book. SharePoint allows for centrally managed metadata. An organization may use metadata to tag and group documents by grade level, department, or subject. Furthermore, metadata can drive navigation, workflow, retention, and how content is viewed and/or filtered within a list.


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Site Definition

MySite Web Part

A site definition serves as the foundation of a SharePoint site. They determine the appearance and behavior of the SharePoint site and its default content and functionality. SharePoint includes some site definitions such as a blog, for example. When a site is created using the blog site definition, the site contains the lists, web parts, and other items that a blogging site requires. In custom site definitions, preconfigured lists, content types, event receivers, images, and other items can be placed as needed. A MySite is a personal site for individual users in an organization. Web Parts are server-side user interface controls that can be added to run inside of a SharePoint page to modify the appearance, content or behavior of that page. Web Parts are commonly used to present and allow user interaction with data contained in SharePoint lists, display content from external sources, or provide rich presentation of content such as embedded video or interactive Excel charts. The “SharePoint Online Web Parts ” section of this document provides more details and an overview of Web Parts included with SharePoint Online. “Apps for SharePoint are easy-to-use, lightweight web applications that integrate popular web standards and technologies to extend the capabilities of a SharePoint website.” - http://msdn.microsoft.com/enus/library/office/dn736058(v=office.15).aspx

Apps

SharePoint Apps offer a powerful and flexible means to extend SharePoint functionality and can integrate with data from SharePoint or external sources. However, since they are self-contained and do not require server-side code, SharePoint Apps are simpler to distribute and install when compared to No-Code SharePoint Solutions. The “SharePoint Online Apps ” section of this document provides more details and an overview of the SharePoint Apps included with SharePoint Online. Authentication

Authorization

Authentication is the process by which SharePoint verifies that a user, device, or application is who they claim to be. SharePoint 2013 does not have its own system for authentication or identity management, but instead relies on external systems, whether Windows authentication or non-Windows authentication. Authorization refers to the process by which SharePoint provides security for websites, lists, folders, or items by determining which users can perform specific actions on a given object. Users, devices, and applications must successfully authenticate before they can be authorized to determine what they can do.


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UNDERSTANDING SHAREPOINT IN AN ACADEMIC SETTING OneDrive for Business in Education In Office 365 and SharePoint Server 2013, Microsoft introduced OneDrive for Business. OneDrive for Business, which was formerly called SkyDrive Pro, provides each user online storage for personal documents and content. Despite the misleading name, OneDrive for Business is an extremely compelling option for K-12 districts and schools. Many districts will cite OneDrive as a primary reason for adopting SharePoint Online. OneDrive for Business offers a vastly enhanced alternative to the mapped network shares commonly provided as “Home Drives” to students and teachers. The benefits include: -

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Up to 1 terabyte of storage – OneDrive for Business provides each user with up to 1 terabyte of storage. This is in addition to the SharePoint storage already provided with Office 365. By comparison, a typical individual quota for mapped “Home Drives” is about 1 gigabyte due to storage related costs. Access from anywhere – Mapped network “Home Drives” allow users to access their stored documents from any machine on the domain. As a component of Office 365, OneDrive extends this access to any internet connected device, allowing a student to access files from a home PC, Mac or even mobile devices Integration with Office 365, the desktop and devices – OneDrive is included in the top most navigation of Office 365 and is readily accessible throughout the environment. OneDrive is also tightly integrated with the Office desktop applications, making it easy to save and open documents. Users can navigate with Windows Explorer to browse their OneDrive and even sync the contents automatically using the OneDrive Sync tool to facilitate working offline. Sharing – In some cases, K-12 users are provided additional mapped drives to facilitate sharing documents within a department or other group. OneDrive simplifies sharing content by including a default “Share with Everyone” folder and using SharePoint permissions for more granular access control.

Given the amount of storage and the sharing capabilities included with OneDrive for Business, it can be unclear when to use OneDrive and when to use a Team Site. General guidance is provided here: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/office365-sharepoint-online-enterprise-help/should-i-save-mydocuments-to-onedrive-for-business-or-a-team-site-HA104105232.aspx?CTT=1 In brief, it is best to use the following guidelines: - If the document or content will be shared regularly by a group of people or is distinctly relevant to a particular group or project, it is best to save the content in the appropriate Team Site.


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For personal documents and content which will not be shared or only require limited sharing, OneDrive is the best option.

SharePoint sites, such as Team Sites, provide additional collaboration tools including discussion boards, calendars, task tracking, etc., which are often useful as teams work together on documents. In an academic environment, classroom collaboration, student group projects, and departmental work would be better served by Team Sites. Beyond storing personal documents, OneDrive is a great way for students to easily maintain and share a portfolio of their work. Site Templates SharePoint Online is an extremely flexible platform allowing the same environment to support tightly managed district wide content, formal departmental collaboration, and even ad hoc project sites created and maintained by students. To help users take advantage of SharePoint’s diverse capabilities, the service includes numerous built in site templates designed to accommodate a wide variety of needs. Careful planning related to site templates will ensure a positive user experience and encourage adoption. This section provides an overview of the included site templates and examples of academic use cases for specific templates. As you explore the use of templates within your environment, it is helpful to consider the roles and responsibilities of the users which will dictate the permissions assigned to specific groups. It is important that groups with site creation permissions understand how to select the best template given a site requirements and anticipated audience. For more information on setting up permissions, see the section “ How will permissions be managed?” or refer to the general guidance provided here: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/best-practices-for-creating-and-managing-team-sitesHA102779556.aspx Collaboration Site Templates When a user creates a new site within SharePoint Online they must choose a template which will serve as a starting point. The templates are organized across several groups: Collaboration, Enterprise, Publishing, Custom and sometimes others, depending on the features enabled in the site collection.


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Figure 2 Selecting Templates

As the name suggests, site templates provided in the Collaboration group are designed to help groups of people work together and share information effectively. Collaboration sites and custom sites based on one of the Collaboration templates are typically the most common sites implemented. The other site template groups such as Enterprise and Publishing contain templates that are typically used for managed content maintained by IT and related departments, and therefore not relevant to most end-users. Team Site “A place to work together with a group of people.” The Team Site is a general purpose site template and is set as the default template when creating a new site. Team Sites contain a Document Library, a Site Notebook, and a standard web part home page, and can easily be expanded by adding additional libraries, calendars and other custom lists. In education, Team Sites are used for a wide range of purposes. Some examples include: - Departmental Sites – Used by faculty on both the academic and administration side, department sites help groups manage day to day tasks. - Classroom Collaboration – With modest modifications such as renaming Document Libraries and adjusting version control, a Team Site can facilitate the collection of student assignments. Additional apps such as a class calendar and a custom list for syllabus information can keep both students and faculty informed. Incorporating a newsfeed or other social features encourage engagement among students and can enhance the overall learning experience. - Individual Education Program (IEP) Development & Monitoring – Team Sites provide a perfect environment for educators to work together on developing and monitoring education plans for individual students. As an added benefit, the content created can easily be referenced and audited for required reporting.


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These are only a few examples of how Team Sites might be leveraged. As the default site template there is really no limit to how it might be used within a K-12 environment. Blog Site “A site for a person or team to post ideas, observations, and expertise that site visitors can comment on.”

Blog Sites are, by definition, more structured than a standard Team Site. Obviously, the Blog Site is organized as a blog where users publish articles which are presented in reverse chronological order. Blog Sites also support comments to encourage dialog among authors and readers. Blogs can be very useful in education, whether it is simply disseminating news or providing a powerful platform for reflective learning. Here are some examples: - District / School / Class news – Blogs are particularly well suited, and most commonly used, to share news. In education, the audience for this news might be teachers, students, parents, or even the community at large. Superintendents and teachers alike might use a blog to share news, thoughts and ideas with others. -

Student Learning Journals – Journaling in education affords students an opportunity to reflect on their learning experiences both in and out of the classroom. Blogs provide a simple platform for this reflection and provide the added benefit of peer to Useful Tip – By default, Team Sites peer learning through comments. include an OneNote notebook which is an In SharePoint, it is also easy to add excellent place for knowledge sharing, class a document library to store artifacts policies and capturing collaborative research related to learning experiences..

notes.

Project Site “A site for managing and collaborating on a project. This site template brings all status, communication, and artifacts relevant to the project into one place.” More narrowly focused than a standard team site, project sites focus on tasks, schedule and content relevant to time constrained projects. Project sites employ customizations such as a Gantt chart view of tasks, and a Timeline web part to provide insight into progress.


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Like Team Sites, Project Sites are applicable to a wide variety of situations in education, for example: -

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Project Based Learning / Service Learning Projects – Project sites can encourage students to plan, delegate tasks and collaborate in a structured way while providing teachers visibility into individual contributions and team dynamics. Teaching Across the Curriculum – Educators are encouraged to work together to develop cross-disciplinary curricula. District Strategic Planning – When developing the strategic plan or embarking on particular projects, SharePoint can be an invaluable resource for School Boards Student Event Planning – Prom, Pep Rallies, Fundraisers and similar events require coordination among the planning team, and are perfectly suited for a Project Site.

Community Site “A place where community members discuss topics of common interest. Members can browse and discover relevant content by exploring categories, sorting discussions by popularity or by viewing only posts that have a best reply. Members gain reputation points by participating in the community, such as starting discussions and replying to them, liking posts and specifying best replies.” Community Sites facilitate discussion among larger groups with a common interest, and feature many of the social tools which are familiar to users. Here are some examples of how Community sites are being leveraged in K-12: -

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Clubs and extracurricular activities – Clubs can use community sites to allow its members to plan events – e.g., voting for prom theme or what food to eat at the next club meeting. Professional Learning Communities – Teachers are encouraged to share ideas and best practices with other educators. With limited time outside of the classroom, a Community Site can provide the perfect forum for educators to share ideas and best practices including related documents and other content.

Enterprise Site Templates Enterprise Site Templates are generally used by Site Collection administrators and provide the foundation for sites which provide specific functionality such as Search, or contain content that is best managed centrally. Document Center “A site to centrally manage documents in your enterprise.” The Enterprise group includes both a Document Center and a Records Center which may seem similar or even redundant. However, they offer different features and serve distinct functions. The Document Center is an organization wide document library which provides


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features to support a large number of documents either as a centralized authoring environment or, more commonly, as a content archive. The Document Center provides support for metadata navigation which allows users to view contents organized by tags. In addition, each piece of content saved to a document center is assigned a unique document ID to ensure documents can be moved or renamed without breaking links to the content. Document Centers also make use of the version control and content types to assist with organization. More details about Document Centers can be found here: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint-server-help/use-a-document-center-siteHA102773263.aspx In education, Document Centers are extremely useful for sharing standard forms, policy documents and other district managed content with users that are often dispersed among many locations. Example documents might include: -

Disciplinary forms, permission slips and similar materials required by teachers Human Resources documents and other administrative documents Policies and procedures Maps and logistical information Standards and curriculum content

Records Center In contrast to a Document Center, a Records Center is intended to store and maintain legal and financial records. It includes policy enforcement features such as auditing, content disposition and expiration, and barcoding to support e-Discovery and legal hold, and similar compliance related requirements. Records management is certainly relevant to education, as many schools and districts must adhere to state and local compliance policies, and education specific compliance requirements such and CIPA and FERPA. Planning for compliance is beyond the scope of this document but an essential consideration for SharePoint Online. For general guidance related to compliance within SharePoint please review information located here: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/business/office-365-trust-center-cloud-computing-securityFX103030390.aspx


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Basic and Enterprise Search Centers The Search Center templates provide dedicated search sites designed to simplify discovery of information and resources. Both feature advanced search results that offer interactive previews of documents and powerful filtering making it easy to locate the best content before navigating away from the page.

Figure 3 Search Center Template

Enterprise Search includes additional capabilities to help users further refine results, and allow districts to provide a more customized search experience. In addition to standard filtering, Enterprise Search provides tabbed pages known as “search verticals” which provide customized views for certain types of results. By default these include Everything, People, Conversations and Videos. Districts can create custom search verticals as well. In addition, Enterprise Search can be configured to include results from other Site Collections or external data sources.

Business Intelligence Center School districts are increasingly looking to leverage available data to make informed decisions and increase effectiveness. Whether it is using student achievement data to improve learning outcomes or reducing costs by improving administrative efficiency, access to the right data and analytical tools is critically important. The Business Intelligence Center template provides a basis for creating compelling dashboards, scorecards and other data visualizations using already familiar tools such as Microsoft Excel.


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Publishing Site Publishing Site templates are designed to allow a high degree of branding flexibility while simplifying the authoring and publishing of Web Pages. They are especially useful for maintaining top level sites for the district or school where content, publishing and design is tightly managed. Multiple contributors can create content while an approval workflow ensures that content is only published following a proper review. In addition, Page layouts and Master pages dictate the overall design and user experience, restricting what aspects of a page a contributor can modify to ensure a consistent look and feel. More details on using the publishing features of SharePoint Online can be found here: http://community.office365.com/enus/b/office_365_community_blog/archive/2012/01/30/features-of-a-sharepoint-onlinepublishing-site.aspx

Enterprise Wiki The Enterprise Wiki template is a publishing site template designed specifically for creating and maintaining a knowledge base with many content contributors. The wiki structure is especially useful within education where sharing ideas and best practices is encouraged but often difficult due to time constraints and geographical separation of faculty. Examples of some of the ways wikis are used in K-12 include: -

Curriculum Sharing – Educators can share lesson plans and other curriculum related content, and work together to refine these materials. Training – Wikis are excellent for consolidating training information and material for technical resources or processes such as procurement.

SharePoint Apps and the Office Store With SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint Online Microsoft has introduced the concept of SharePoint Apps. Without going into technical detail, Apps are custom SharePoint solutions which are self-contained and do not require managed code to be run on the SharePoint Server. This allows Apps to be simpler to distribute and install when compared to No-Code SharePoint Solutions while providing developers a powerful and flexible platform. SharePoint Apps can integrate with SharePoint as well as external systems, either on premises or cloud based, via web services. For additional information and to get started developing SharePoint Apps visit http://dev.office.com


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Figure 4 Overview of Apps in the Office Store

There are 3 ways that a user can find and install a SharePoint App within a specific site: - Choose a built in app – These include the lists, libraries and other core SharePoint functionality. - Install an app from your organization – These are custom apps developed by the district / school and distributed to district / school users without publishing to the Microsoft SharePoint Store. - Find and install – Search for apps from the SharePoint Store. The app model and the SharePoint Store option is very suited to K-12. Teachers often require and wish to install specialized education software which is typically difficult to vet and support. SharePoint Online can be configured to only allow users to request an app from the SharePoint Store. An administrator can choose to approve or deny this request. As a result, administrators gain insight into the most widely needed apps, can ensure only trusted apps are installed, and costs can be controlled for apps which require licensing fees. For additional information on configuring access to the App Store visit: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/configure-settings-for-the-sharepoint-storeHA103021825.aspx


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APPS AND WEB PARTS IN EDUCATION There are numerous Apps and Web Parts included with SharePoint Online and many more available to extend functionality. SharePoint Online Apps App Description Announcements

A list of news items, statuses and other short bits of information.

Asset Library

A place to share, browse and manage rich media assets, like image, audio and video files.

Calendar

A calendar of upcoming meetings, deadlines or other events. Calendar information can be synchronized with Microsoft Outlook or other compatible programs.

Contacts

A list of people your team works with, like customers or partners. Contacts lists can synchronize with Microsoft Outlook or other compatible programs.

Custom List

Using a list gives you the power to share information the way you want with your team members. Create your own list from scratch, add any other columns you need, and add items individually, or bulk edit data with Quick Edit.

Notes A simple list which is easy to update and is commonly used for district, school and class news. Audio, video and other rich media is commonly used in education to make information more engaging and more accessible, especially in the case of learning content and students. Whether it is a district wide calendar or the schedule for an individual class, calendars are essential. Within SharePoint the Calendar provides custom views and even allows multiple calendars overlaid in a single view. A district might maintain separate calendars for academics, sports, administration, etc which can be presented in a single multilayered view. Primarily used for external users rather than faculty, staff, and students.

Creating Custom Lists or customizing other list types such as Document Libraries or Calendars provides the ability to address academic specific needs. For example, a very functional Assignment Dropbox can be created by customizing a list. Fields for due dates, grades, notes and attachments can be added. By requiring approval of list items, students are limited to only seeing their own assignments while a teacher can view all assignments in a single list.


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Custom List in Datasheet View

A blank list which is displayed as a spreadsheet in order to allow easy data entry. You can add your own columns and views. This list type requires a compatible list datasheet ActiveX control, such as the one provided in Microsoft Office.

Data Connection Library

A place where you can easily share files that contain information about external data connections.

Discussion Board

A place to have newsgroup-style discussions. Discussion boards make it easy to manage discussion threads and can be configured to require approval for all posts.

Document Library

Use a document library to store, organize, sync, and share documents with people. You can use co-authoring, versioning, and check out to work on documents together. With your documents in one place, everybody can get the latest versions whenever they need them. You can also sync your documents to your local computer for offline access.

External List

Create an external list to view the data in an External Content Type.

Form Library

A place to manage business forms like status reports or purchase orders. Form libraries require a compatible XML editor, such as Microsoft InfoPath

Import Spreadsheet

Create a list which duplicates the columns and data of an existing spreadsheet. Importing a spreadsheet requires Microsoft Excel or another compatible program.


Data Connection Libraries allow SharePoint sites to incorporate data from external systems. With minimal custom development, enrollment data might be used to provide a view of a student’s schedule or achievement data might be included in a data analytics dashboard.

Storing, sharing and managing documents is required throughout all aspects of K-12. Whether it is curriculum content being shared with students, contracts managed by procurement, policies and procedures, or standard forms such as permission slips or disciplinary forms, Document Libraries can be used.

NOTE: InfoPath is being deprecated in favor of HTML based forms. Therefore, this App is no longer relevant and should not be used.

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Issue Tracking

Links

A list of issues or problems associated with a project or item. You can assign, prioritize and track issue status. A list of web pages or other resources.

Picture Library

A place to upload and share pictures.

Promoted Links

Use this list to display a set of link actions in a tile based visual layout.

Generally used to direct users to important and / or top level sites.

Report Library

A place where you can easily create and manage web pages and documents to track metrics, goals and business intelligence information.

Useful for education analytics such as tracking and improving student performance, and for state and federal reports.

Site Mailbox

The Site Mailbox app helps you keep email and documents close together by connecting your site to an Exchange mailbox. You can then view your email on SharePoint, and view site documents in Outlook.

Surveys

A list of questions which you would like to have people answer. Surveys allow you to quickly create questions and view graphical summaries of the responses.

Surveys are commonly used in the classroom to encourage discussion or assess the effectiveness of a lesson.

Tasks

A place for team or personal tasks.

Wiki Page Library

An interconnected set of easily editable web pages, which can contain text, images and web parts.

Tasks are especially useful for team projects As indicated in the Site Templates setting Wikis are great for sharing ideas and best practices, and maintain a knowledgebase.


A list of Links might direct students to external learning materials, teachers to professional development or HR resources, etc. Like video and audio, images are useful for teaching and learning, and many other scenarios in K-12. The Picture Library provides views which are optimized for managing images. Included pictures can even be used as a source for a slideshow.

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SharePoint Online Web Parts Category Web Parts Apps

App Parts are a special category of Web Parts which display content from lists included in the site. Since the lists and their names will vary from site to site, the Web Parts included in this category will also vary. For example, if the site contains a calendar titled “Class Calendar”, the Apps category will include a corresponding App Part titled “Class Calendar” which can be used to add a view of the calendar embedded within the page. The same will be true for other lists on the site such as documents, site feed, tasks lists, etc. NOTE: Lists are considered types of Apps within SharePoint Online hence the name of this category.

Blog

Blog Archives Provides quick links to older blog posts. Blog Notifications Provides quick links to register for blog posts notifications using Alerts or RSS feed. Blog Tools Provides blog owners and administrators with quick links to common settings pages and content lists for managing a blog site.


Notes App Parts will likely be the most commonly used type of Web Part within the district’s SharePoint environment. The ability to “surface” information from a sites lists and libraries on the landing page provides a useful snapshot for users of the site and allows them to quickly interact with items without navigating to the lists themselves. For example, the landing page for a specific class site might include: - Upcoming due dates from a task list or calendar - Recent assignments posted to a custom assignments list or document library - A class discussion board When blogs are used to share information within a district, school or class, these web parts help blog authors manage their sites and help users connect with the content.

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Business Data

Community

Business Data Actions Displays a list of actions from Business Data Connectivity. Business Data Connectivity Filter Filters the contents of Web Parts using a list of values from the Business Data Connectivity. Business Data Item Displays one item from a data source in Business Data Connectivity. Business Data Item Builder Creates a Business Data item from parameters in the query string and provides it to other Web Parts. Business Data List Displays a list of items from a data source in Business Data Connectivity. Business Data Related List Displays a list of items related to one or more parent items from a data source in Business Data Connectivity. Excel Web Access Use the Excel Web Access Web Part to interact with an Excel workbook as a Web page. Indicator Details Displays the details of a single Status Indicator. Status Indicators display an important measure for an organization and may be obtained from other data sources including SharePoint lists, Excel workbooks, and SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services KPIs. Status List Shows a list of Status Indicators. Status Indicators display important measures for your organization, and show how your organization is performing with respect to your goals Visio Web Access Enables viewing and refreshing of Visio Web Drawings. About this community This web part displays the community description and other properties like established date. This web part will work on Community sites or any other site that has Community Features turned on. Join Provides the ability for non-members of a community site to join the community. The button hides itself if the user is already a member. This web part will work on Community sites or any other site that has Community Features turned on.


Business Data in this case refers to data from external applications and services accessed through SharePoint’s Business Data Connectivity services. And most of the Web Parts in this category relate to this specific functionality and, therefore, have limited relevance for most users. For District Leaders: However, this category also includes Web Parts which are integral to Business Intelligence. Indicator Details and Status Lists are building blocks for data analytics dashboards. In education, such dashboards may be used to display aggregate student achievement data and other strategic information to enable better informed decision making. For everyone including Educators: The Excel Web Access Web Part extends the accessibility and relevance of SharePoint based data analytics to most users. Anyone with intermediate Excel skills and appropriate permissions can publish Excel based charts, tables and reports as interactive elements displayed within a page. For example, a teacher might ask students to collect data relevant to a lesson within a shared Excel Workbook. A chart which summarizes the data could be incorporated into the class site landing page. As indicated in the Site Templates section, Community Sites are often used for clubs, professional learning communities and similar groups. These web parts simplify participation in Community Sites.

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Content Rollup

My membership Displays reputation and membership information for the current visitor of a community site. This web part will work on Community sites or any other site that has Community Features turned on. Tools Provides community owners and administrators with quick links to common settings pages and content lists for managing a community site. This web part will work on Community sites or any other site that has Community Features turned on. What's happening Displays the number of members, topics and replies within a community site. This web part will work on Community sites or any other site that has Community Features turned on. Categories Displays categories from the Site Directory. Content Query Displays a dynamic view of content from your site. Project Summary Displays information about a project in an easy to read overview Relevant Documents Displays documents that are relevant to the current user. RSS Viewer Displays an RSS feed. Site Aggregator Displays sites of your choice. Sites in Category Displays sites from the Site Directory within a specific category Summary Links Allows authors to create links that can be grouped and styled. Table Of Contents Displays the navigation hierarchy of your site Term Property Displays the specified property of a Term. Timeline Use this timeline to show a high level view of data from another web part or tasks list. WSRP Viewer Displays portlets from web sites using WSRP 1.1 XML Viewer Transforms XML data using XSL and shows the results.


Content Rollup Web Parts are useful for both site owners and users within an academic setting. Site Owners can use these to organize their site and bring visitors’ attention to the most important information, documents and subsites. Users benefit from a simpler and more personalized experience when viewing the site. In addition, the Timeline web part offers a useful and engaging view of tasks which in the case of education could be used for displaying assignments.

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Document Sets

Document Set Contents Displays the contents of the Document Set. Document Set Properties Displays the properties of the Document Set.

These web parts simplify the use of Document Sets. Document Sets are groups of related documents which can be created in a single step using a Document Sets template within a Library. Once created the set of documents is managed like a single document. Document Sets are useful in many scenarios where an end product requires a consistent set of documents. For example, a district could use a Document Set to standardize curriculum by requiring that lesson plans include several standard documents such as one document for Teacher Instructions, another for Grading and Rubrics, another indicating required materials, etc. When developing new curriculum, an educator could use a document set to create all of these documents at once from templates. More details on Document Sets can be found here:

Filters

Apply Filters Button Add this button to a page so users can decide when to apply their filter choices. Otherwise, each filter is applied when its value is changed. Choice Filter Filters the contents of Web Parts using a list of values entered by the page author Current User Filter Filters the contents of Web Parts by using properties of the current user Date Filter Filter the contents of Web Parts by allowing users to enter or pick a date. Page Field Filter Filters the contents of Web Parts using information about the current page


http://office.microsoft.com/enus/sharepoint-serverhelp/introduction-to-documentsets-HA101782466.aspx Filters enable a more personalized experience by either allowing users to control what content is displayed within another web part or automatically filtering to show content related to the specific user.

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Query String (URL) Filter Filters the contents of Web Parts using values passed via the query string

Forms

Media and Content

Search

SharePoint List Filter Filters the contents of Web Parts by using a list of values SQL Server Analysis Services Filter Filters the contents of Web Parts using a list of values from SQL Server Analysis Services cubes Text Filter Filters the contents of Web Parts by allowing users to enter a text value HTML Form Web Part Connects simple form controls to other Web Parts InfoPath Form Web Part Use this Web Part to display an InfoPath browser-enabled form.

Content Editor Allows authors to enter rich text content. Get started with your site This web part displays a set of tiles with common SharePoint actions Image Viewer Displays a specified image Media Web Part Use to embed media clips (video and audio) in a web page Page Viewer Displays another Web page on this Web page. The other Web page is presented in an IFrame Picture Library Slideshow Web Part Use to display a slideshow of images and photos from a picture library Script Editor Allows authors to insert HTML snippets or scripts Silverlight Web Part A web part to display a Silverlight application Refinement This web part helps the users to refine search results Search Box Displays a search box that allows users to search for information. Search Navigation This web part helps the users to navigate among search verticals


Forms obviously serve many purposes within education and these web parts allow information to be captured using a browser. NOTE: InfoPath is being deprecated in favor of HTML forms. Therefore, development using InfoPath is not recommended at this time. Images, video and other rich media are commonly used in education to make content more engaging and to appeal to a variety of learning styles. The web parts in this category make it easy to embed video, create slideshows from image libraries and incorporate media from external sources.

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Social Collaboration

Search Results Displays the search results and the properties associated with them. Contact Details Displays details about a contact for this page or site. Note Board Enable users to leave short, publiclyviewable notes about this page Organization Browser This Web Part displays each person in the reporting chain in an interactive view optimized for browsing organization charts Site Feed Site Feed contains microblogging conversations on a group site. Site Users Use the Site Users Web Part to see a list of the site users and their online status Tag Cloud Displays the most popular subjects being tagged inside your organization User Tasks Displays tasks that are assigned to the current user

As a group, the Social Collaboration web parts enable an engaging and collaborative experience similar to many social networking sites students and teachers already use. The Site Feed and Note Board allow users to share ideas and participate in discussions while the other web parts help users find and connect with people and information that is important to them. NOTE: Yammer offers similar social features and will likely replace some of the social capabilities currently included in SharePoint Online.

WHAT IS GOVERNANCE AND WHY IS IT IMPORTANT? Governance describes how a SharePoint environment will be managed. As such it is tightly coupled with policies and procedures for an organization. Governance activities include:    

Identify stakeholders Project short and long term goals Evaluate challenges and solutions Training and communications plan

A governance plan will provide benefits such as:       

Security and compliance, including controlled access to sensitive information [i.e. personally identifiable information (PII)] Proper use of social features Site sprawl prevention & space management Branding consistency Increased and measurable user adoption Proper archival and backup of key information Proper use of streaming media


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Importance of an Executive Sponsor The Executive Sponsor provides a very high level of accountability for a project’s success. An Executive Sponsor is essential to a strategic technology project, such as a SharePoint Online implementation, because of the broad reach of SharePoint throughout the organization. Specifically, an Executive Sponsor will be responsible for:  Securing funding for the project  Aligning the project objectives to the organization’s strategy  Provides leadership and facilitates participation in governance to a group of stakeholders that span multiple functional areas Examples of executive sponsors include: District Superintendent, CIO, IT Director, department heads, school board members, principals and other chief academic officers. It is also advisable to seek sponsorship from governing bodies such as a Department of Public Instruction, school board, and school council.

What do we want to build, and why? A district’s decision to build a new SharePoint portal stems from the value that it intends to provide. Once the district objectives have been identified, ideas for SharePoint projects will follow. The chart below lists common district objectives and SharePoint projects that can fulfill that objective. District Objective

Sample SharePoint Projects

Transforming Education

  

Expense Reduction

Decision Support Faculty/staff Efficiency Administrative Efficiency

Community Engagement

          

Collaborate on projects across internal departments and with other schools Enhancing learning experiences Discover what content is generating interest using social discovery Replace student home drives with OneDrive for Business Migrate file shares Education analytics and dashboards for schools Expertise discovery Tear down information silos Transfer knowledge to new faculty or staff Process improvement and automation Centralized communication between schools, departments, class, or subject Public website to provide communication and reinforce school identity External collaboration with parents and vendors Athletic sites and schedules

Academic scenarios for SharePoint The following table defines the various types of deployments and value provided by SharePoint Online for your organization, as commonly used in education:


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Scenario

Benefits of SharePoint Online

Intranet

There is a clear advantage to using SharePoint Online for an intranet. Advantages include:       

Anytime – anywhere access Outsourced datacenter Managed security & upgrades Software cost Reduce file share dependency Built-in versioning, workflow, records mgmt., eDiscovery, and compliance Reduce IT burden by empowering end users to manage content

Faculty/Staff/Student Extranet

The lack of hardware to maintain and the fact that the extranet will be accessible from any computer with an internet connection as soon as it is set up make a very compelling case for SharePoint Online in this scenario.

Parent Portal

SharePoint Online provides access to external users through the Partner Access Licenses. These can be lifted with an exception from Microsoft’s business desk. Yammer for Education is an excellent way for institutions to securely share and communicate with parents.

Public Facing Website

It is recommended that SharePoint on-premises or Windows Azure be used for public websites for most districts at the time of publishing this whitepaper. However, the Public Website in SharePoint Online provides a quick and easy way to create a professional online presence that can be suitable for some customers. Simple design tools are provided to create and maintain the website.

For a full list of feature differences between SharePoint on-premises and SharePoint Online follow the link below. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/sharepoint-online-service-description.aspx


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Site Taxonomy A taxonomy is a formal classification system that groups the words, labels, and terms that describe data together and arranges those groups into a hierarchy. Your site taxonomy is one of the most important aspects of a portal design. School District Intranet Taxonomy The audience of a school district portal is all faculty and staff in the district. Here is an example of a school district taxonomy:

Figure 5 District site taxonomy


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In this taxonomy, the school district’s intranet stems from one main site collection, and is then broken out into departments. These departments can be either subsites or site collections, depending on your organization’s needs.

Useful Tip – Any site that hosts personally identifiable information (PII) should be hosted in its own site collection. See the “Managing Personally Identifiable Information (PII)” section for more details.

School Site Intranet Taxonomy The audience of a school site is all students, faculty, and staff in a school. Here is an example of a taxonomy for an individual school:

Figure 6 School level taxonomy

In this taxonomy, the school has a main site collection that hosts several subsites (or subsite collections). The Student Government site should use the Community Site template. The Class Sites should use the Class Connect Template. The Shared Drive site should be a Publishing Site template, and, if possible, use managed metadata term stores to classify documents. The professional development, Class Connect, and the training registration templates can be found here: [INSERT] Link to where content is stored once location is decided by Microsoft– this is a link to download templates.


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Shared Drive Taxonomy Using SharePoint document libraries, your portal can become a viable replacement for, or addition to, your current network drives. The two most efficient ways to setup your document libraries to serve as network drives are to use folders or managed metadata. To make an exact mirror of your current shared drive, you open the document library in Windows Explorer mode, then drag and drop the documents and their subfolders into the new library. While mirroring folder structure will garner more immediate end user adoption, using multiple levels of nested folders may not always be the most effective approach. Several levels of nested folders will cause the document’s URL to become longer, and Microsoft Office cannot open documents with URLs that have more than 260 characters. Alternatively, you can setup your document libraries to appear as though they are hosted in folders using managed metadata term stores. Terms stores are created and maintained at the site collection level. They allow you to create a set of commonly used terms (i.e., class subject) and then group the data by those categories. Any time you want to add or remove one of those terms, you do so in the metadata term store instead of having to edit every single instance that the terms are used.

Figure 7 Shared drive taxonomy

Instructions on how to setup a term set can be found here: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint-help/set-up-a-new-term-setHA102922634.aspx?CTT=5


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Instructions on how to setup the metadata column can be found here: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/office365-sharepoint-online-enterprise-help/create-amanaged-metadata-column-HA102832524.aspx?CTT=5

Once your term store has been created and imported as a column in the document library, edit the default view of the document library to “Group By” the column with your term store. In the example below, that column is called “Department.” The end result is a document library that gives the appearance of folders:

Figure 8 Managed Metadata Taxonomy Library Example

There are limitations to using the managed metadata method as well. If users upload documents using Windows Explorer mode, they will not be able to edit any metadata in that mode. Instead, they will have to navigate to the document library in a browser and edit the properties of the documents to change any custom metadata.


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Public Facing Site Taxonomy It is important to have structure to content viewable to the public as well. Here is an example of a public facing website for K-12 school districts:

Figure 9 School district website

In this example, the School District website is its own site collection, with a separate page for each important branch of the district. The Community site could be a page that utilizes the announcement web part to make important announcements to parents. The Schools site should contain links to all of the school sites within the district.


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The “Schools” site collection hosts all of the public facing school websites. While in this taxonomy each of the sub-sections are pages, it is also possible to use subsites instead of pages. How will permissions be managed? Permissions provide a means by which to ensure that users have access to the resources they need while also preventing them from seeing resources that they should not. Permissions management requires careful planning to protect your data from unauthorized and/or unnecessary access. Permissions are an important consideration when it comes to content organization and classification planning. SharePoint Online offers granular permissions down to the item level, and while this is a useful feature it can also cause permission management to be very difficult. Permissions are assigned by Site Owners.

Useful Tip – As a general rule, when creating a subsite, permissions should be inherited prior to assigning unique permissions. The objective is to prevent rework in the assignment of site permissions. This practice maintains continuity in security policies.

SharePoint Permissions Levels The following chart demonstrates what each permission level can and cannot do inside of SharePoint lists, libraries and sites.

Permission

View Only

Restricted Read*

Limited Access

Read

Contribute

Approve*

Edit

Manage Hierarchy*

Design

Full Control

List / Library Permissions     

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

View Versions Delete Versions









































Create Alerts



















 

 





 



Override Checkout Manage Personal Views Manage Lists / Libraries













































View Item Add Item Delete Item Edit Item Approve

Site Permissions


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View Only

Restricted Read*

Limited Access

Read

Contribute

Approve*

Edit

Manage Hierarchy*

Design

Full Control

View Pages





















Self-Service Site Creation





















Add Pages





















Delete Pages Browse Directories Personal Web Parts Customize Pages Apply Themes Apply Style Sheets Create Subsites Manage Permissions

































































































































































*These permissions levels are only available with the publishing template. A more in depth look at permissions can be found here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262690%28v=office.15%29.aspx

Active Directory Security Groups SharePoint allows for the creation of Security Groups at the site collection level. Security Groups are a very useful tool for managing permissions. They become especially useful when they are combined with Active Directory Security Groups. Active Directory Groups can be added to SharePoint Groups which allows permissions to be managed from Active Directory. The table below describes how this could be implemented. Class Site User Site Permissions Scenario Teachers

Top Level Class Site – this site serves as the parent site for all class sites.



Students

Top Level Class Site



AD Group for all teachers is added to a SharePoint Group that has been granted permission to create sites. AD Group for all Students is added to a SharePoint group that has been granted permission to access the site in order for students to be able to get to their class sites.


Suggested Permissions Level Full Control – the teachers should be able to make changes to the top level class sites. Restricted Read – Students should only be given access to view content on the Top Level Class Site.

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



Teachers

Individual Class Site



Students

Individual Class Site





The students’ views are security trimmed, so that they can only see and access sites that they are in. This will change automatically as they are added or removed from classes. The teacher owns and has full control the site. A SharePoint Group called students is populated with an AD Group that contains each of the students in the class. The student’s views are security trimmed, so they can see only what the teacher wants them to see.

Full Control

Restricted Read & Contribute – Students should not be allowed to edit the content of the actual class site. However, the teacher should give the students Contribute permissions to any document libraries that they will be submitted documents to.

This simple example illustrates the ability to use AD to manage permissions within SharePoint. Using AD permissions groups allows for the automation of additions and removals of users from groups without having to make changes within SharePoint. An example of this would be a student who switches out of a particular class; instead of having to manually remove that user from several permissions groups inside of SharePoint, systems administrators can make the change once in Active Directory and have those changes reflect across the SharePoint portal. Regular audits are a necessary part of keeping permissions in line with a Governance Plan. The schedule and procedure by which these audits are performed should be defined in detail in a Governance Plan. Third party tools are also available that make permission management and auditing easier.

Managing Personally Identifiable Information (PII) Personally identifiable information (PII) is information that is linked, or can be linked, to a specific individual. PII is generally divided into two classes: PII and Sensitive PII. The difference between PII and Sensitive PII is that latter can result in “in substantial harm, embarrassment, inconvenience, or unfairness to an individual” (http://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/privacy/Guidance/handbookforsafeguardings ensitivePII_march_2012_webversion.pdf).


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The following table provides some examples of data that should be classified as PII and Sensitive PII: PII Full Name Date of Birth Address Phone Numbers Last 4 of Social Security Number Mother’s Maiden Name Ethnicity / Race

Sensitive PII Social Security Number Birth Certificate Medical Records Protected Health Information (PHI) / HIPPA Info Citizenship Status

Religious Affiliation Sexual Orientation Account Passwords Disciplinary History Citizenship Status / Residency Information

Anytime PII is combined with Sensitive PII, it becomes Sensitive PII. It is extremely important to safeguard students, teachers and staff members from a spillage of PII. The following guidelines will help your organization protect PII in SharePoint online. Permissions/Sharing When it comes to proper management of PII, permissions play a key role in preventing unauthorized access to sensitive data. In SharePoint, site permissions are inherited from the parent site by default. There are certain circumstances when inheritance should be broken and custom permissions should be assigned. Any time a site collection, site, document to host PII, especially sensitive PII, permissions should not be inherited from the parent site. They should be custom assigned Follow these steps to break permissions inheritance: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint-foundation-help/edit-permissions-for-alist-library-or-individual-item-HA101805400.aspx Document Management It is highly recommended to put any PII or Sensitive PII in its own site collection. Doing so will add an extra layer of security to that data. SharePoint has the ability to set permissions at the site collection, site, page, document/list, and even document/list item levels. With the ability to dynamically control who can access what data in your site, it’s important to lock down areas of your site that contain PII. As a general rule of thumb, all PII should, if possible, be confined to one site collection, and all document libraries inside of that site collection should have custom permissions. For example, if a school wants to scan copies of sick notes from parents, and also saves copies of report cards, both of those pieces of data should be within the same site collection, in different subsites with document libraries that give permissions only to the users who need to regularly access that data. If an individual document contains PII or Sensitive PII, permissions should be assigned for that particular document. MICROSOFT SHAREPOINT GOVERNANCE WHITEPAPER

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IMPORTANCE OF ENVISIONING, PLANNING, AND DESIGN Every institution, every business challenge, and every project is unique. At the same time, every project follows a similar path and employs similar activities throughout the life-cycle of the project. In particular, the bookends of our projects – Initiation Activities and Wrap-up Activities – are virtually identical on every project. This is the essence of Project Management, and by utilizing a consistent delivery mechanism, and by sharing reusable artifacts across projects, project sponsors can enable teams to deliver business solutions that are costeffective, delivered on time, and of the highest quality.

Envisioning Phase Beginning with the Initiation Activities, the project management framework is internally established and a kickoff meeting is conducted. This is followed by a series of stakeholder interviews where a vision for the intranet is formulated. The stakeholders should represent various departments or business units. The interview results are organized into the 6 strategic categories of a successful SharePoint portal:  Content Strategy and Management. Who will use SharePoint Online? What problems need to be solved? What types of SharePoint sites need to be built?  Technology Foundations. Can technologies be consolidated? What infrastructure modifications are needed to support SharePoint Online?  Creative Design. Are different themes needed for different sites, such as unique themes for each school?  Governance. Who will be responsible for planning, managing, and advocating the SharePoint portal?  Information Architecture. How will users find content?  Metrics. How will success be measured for this project? This insures that the requirements have been gathered that will provide a thorough roadmap for the new intranet. An additional benefit to interviewing various stakeholders throughout the organization is that by engaging them early in the process a team of internal advocates is established. This is an important aspect of driving user adoption of a new intranet. The requirements are assembled into a matrix and assigned a value for business impact, effort, strategic category, and risk. In a meeting with the sponsor, the requirements are prioritized. A matrix example allows the prioritization process to be driven by ROI, deadline, budget, quick wins, or a combination of these factors. The prioritized requirements serve as the scope for the initial implementation as well as a roadmap for future iterations of releas es.


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In an education context, it’s important to design the portal according to the needs of the individual users. Personas include school administrators, teachers, staff members, students and parents. The specific needs will vary, but it’s recommended to consider the following questions: 1. What specific value does SharePoint Online provide to each group? 2. How can existing processes be simplified/improved by using SharePoint as opposed to many other systems? 3. How can process automation and management be centralized, enhanced and integrated to save time and make each group more efficient? 4. How can the end user be empowered to collaborate more efficiently? 5. How can the organization become less dependent on IT Staff? Focus on the portal experience for each persona

Planning and Design Phase The Planning and Design phase lays out a plan to address each and every aspect of the project including not only detailed designs for the solution, but also plans for addressing environmental and operational tasks. It defines how the system will look, how a user will interact with it and what it will do for the user. The objective is to visualize the complete system in a variety of ways to ensure all requirements are completed. The scope of the Planning and Design phase is determined in the Initiation phase and will often include:  Information Architecture. Information architecture defines the way content is organized in SharePoint. Project sponsors often look to partners with deep experience in SharePoint projects. It’s effective to start with a taxonomy from prior engagements that are similar. If the taxonomy needs to be refined, conduct guided focus group sessions and determine use-case scenarios using techniques such as personas, storyboarding, and card sorting. This will yield the site map and navigation of the portal.  Site Template Design. To address specific district needs, an intranet is often comprised of 2 types of sites: sites to share information within a department and sites to share information between cross-functional teams, like a teacher excellence program. Create blueprints for each site template included in the project and determine the best technology to implement, including SharePoint features, 3rd party SharePoint components, or custom-developed enhancements.  Creative Design. Implementing school or district’s custom branding plays an important role in a new SharePoint portal. On internal sites, custom branding reinforces school spirit and promotes a familiar environment that increases user adoption. On external sites, the custom branding provides a digital brochure for the school or district that can promote an image of excellence to the community.  Document Management. Many districts have multiple terabytes of documents stored on shared network drives that are not sufficiently organized to be dumped into SharePoint. Initially, it is recommend only certain documents be migrated into


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







SharePoint, such as HR forms and policies. The rest can be left in the shared network drive and crawled and searched by SharePoint. Over time, pieces of the shared network drive can be scheduled for decommission, and that content can be migrated to SharePoint. SharePoint Infrastructure. To provide a strong foundation to support a new intranet, detailed technical plans are developed for internal and external authentication and authorization, capacity planning, network plans for remote access, and backup/recovery plans. Governance. To guide the growth of the intranet in an organized fashion, a series of meetings are facilitated with the institution’s representatives to establish the governance committee, determine guiding principles, and agree upon policies and standards, communication plans, and training plans. The outcome of these meetings is a Governance Document that contains all information and decisions collected during the meetings. The Governance Document is a living document that will evolve over time with the governance committee’s decisions. Security Plan. Based upon the site map and the governance plan, a granular security plan is determined that specifies the level of access each group of users has for each securable resource. The security plan is presented in matrix format. Project Plan for Implementation. This includes milestone dates, resource requirements, and revised budget.

For additional information about SharePoint 2013 governance, visit this Microsoft TechNet resource: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff598584(v=office.15).aspx

How will success be measured? The metrics for the success of the SharePoint implementation should be defined before the implementation begins and continuously monitored and refined after the initial implementation is completed. The governance committee typically reviews the metrics in order to take appropriate action. The metrics should be determined by the project objectives. The following are common metrics that can provide a good starting point for any SharePoint project: 

Search usage. Increased search activity from repeat visits indicates that the search results are relevant to the users. In the SharePoint admin center, usage reports are available.



Age of content on homepage and other landing pages. Content should be up to date, relevant, and easy to modify and maintain



Social Interactions/Communication. Verify usage of commenting, rating, and tagging



Support calls or emails from users inquiring where to find content



Fulfillment of ADA requirements and objectives



The intranet team successfully achieved its project goals and objectives


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Identify priorities for using SharePoint Online? The decision to use SharePoint Online should be based on the organization’s priorities. The cloud-hosted version of SharePoint is called SharePoint Online. The on-premises version of SharePoint is called SharePoint Server, and offers a few more features than SharePoint Online. Each version uses the same code base, but the cloud implementation provides a different value proposition. The key benefit of SharePoint Online over SharePoint Server is the lower total cost of ownership, as no physical servers are needed. The considerations listed below are good reasons to adopt SharePoint Online:      

Lowest Total Cost of Ownership Reduce Cost of Upgrades Get New Features Sooner Tighter Integration with other Office365 Products Geographic Redundancy Lots of free storage

Why use a controlled/phased approach? End user adoption is one of the most important goals of a new SharePoint portal, and the project delivery schedule plays an important role in adoption. Users must see value in the new portal or else they will fail to integrate it into their daily workstream. On the other hand, if there is too much rapid change for the users, they can become confused and overwhelmed with the new portal. So the delivery team must balance these needs and plan out a phased approach of functionality. During the Envisioning phase of a project, the project team will analyze the requirements and prioritize them in matrix format, identifying impact to district goals, rough cost to implement, risk, and traceability to the requestor. Additional district goals include improved budgeting, student learning outcomes, strategic planning, and community partnerships. A roadmap should be developed that outlines a rough implementation schedule and budgetary requirements.


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This will allow the project team to work with the sponsor to identify the highest priority requirements. From this, the requirements can be planned into phases. Schools often implement different SharePoint features in different phases:  Phase I – OneDrive for Students o Eliminate home drives o Provide 1 TB per student for academic storage o 24/7 access to files o Offline access available o Easily share files with teachers, students  Phase II – Intranet for district and schools o Eliminate legacy system o Reduce file share dependency o District site, department sites, school sites to publish information and control their own content o Custom workflow, digital forms, knowledge management dashboards and other education analytics tools o Yammer for fast and fluid communication  Phase III – Public web site o Custom design (i.e. school logos, colors) o Alerts, notifications, and calendars o Parent extranet to access student information

How will administrators and end users receive training? Training is an essential component to SharePoint adoption, and multiple types of training for organizations exist: 1. Administrator training will cover the basics of managing a SharePoint farm, including performing backups, monitoring activity and performance, activating new services or features, and troubleshooting issues.


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2. Power User training helps technically-inclined users to build solutions using out-of-thebox SharePoint tools to solve business problems. 3. End User training teaches novice users basic SharePoint features, such as lists, libraries, and search. There is a wide variety of free end user training available on the internet: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/sharepoint-2013-overviewcollaboration-software-features-FX103789323.aspx 4. Internal lunch and learns: Microsoft frequently hosts live virtual training sessions. Organizations can facilitate their own informal training events by gathering key stakeholders across both instructional and non-instructional units to view either live or previously recorded sessions. 5. Institution led webcasts: If the organization has a designated technical trainer or subject matter expert that would like to share their knowledge, Lync can be used to host and record these training sessions. Lync can also be used to upload recorded sessions to SharePoint online. This sample training plan could be implemented in parallel with the initial launch of a new SharePoint portal:  The team that implements the portal provides Administrator training to select members of the school’s IT department  A 3rd party trainer provides Power User training to select faculty and staff resources, including the governance committee and site managers. Here’s an example of Power User training offerings: http://www.b2btech.com/services/training/Pages/default.aspx  A 3rd party trains an internal school resource, often a member of the IT department, on how to train End Users. This type of training is call train-the-trainer. This internal resource then conducts a series of internal trainings. These trainings can be delivered via Lync or in person, lasting for 1-2 hours. Class sizes may reach 50 attendees.

Is assistance needed for any phase of the project? The SharePoint platform allows organizations to start with a small implementation and grow into a larger implementation through planned phases. Part of this planning requires the identification of all possible roles that might be involved. Individuals can perform more than one role, and most roles will not be needed for the full duration of a multi-phase release. According to the Nielsen Norman Group, the majority of the best-designed intranets have a project team comprised of both internal and external resources. It is recommend to examine the list of roles below and determine which roles might be best suited for external experts. Most often, the project team contains mostly external resources and the ongoing support and development team contains mostly internal resources.


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SharePoint Implementation Project Team Role Responsibilities Project Manager

Business Analyst Information Architect

    

Technical Architect

 

Graphic Designer Front-End Developers Solution Developers

  

Systems Integration Engineers



Trainer

   

Curriculum Technology Coordinators

Creates project plan, monitors progress and reports status, tracks budget, manages scope, identifies milestones Manages project resources Interview SME’s Identify and prioritize functionality Organize information and corresponding site taxonomy to make Specify the appropriate technical foundations Determine the best method to implement required functionality Design the look & feel of the portal Implement the look & feel of the portal Implement custom solutions such as web parts, digital forms, workflow, and dashboards Build interfaces between SharePoint and others systems, such as Shibboleth or a Student Information System Perform Power User trainings Perform Administrator trainings Train-the-trainer for end user trainings Teacher professional development and knowledge transfer

Ongoing Development and Support Team Role Responsibilities Governance Committee

Site Managers Content Owners Technical Administrators

Developers Trainer Curriculum Technology Coordinators

                

Provide governance, program management, evangelism, and oversight of Site Managers Continuously improve the portal using metrics Plan for new content and features Create top-level content, such as department news Identify new features to support end users Update content in their sections or sites Execute backup and DR plans Deploy apps and sandbox solutions Manage quotas Manage permissions throughout the environment Create site collections and assign owners Assign SharePoint licenses to end users Develop custom solutions based on ongoing user needs Maintain and enhance existing custom solutions Perform end user trainings Enhance curriculum by incorporating SharePoint into instruction Teacher professional development and knowledge transfer


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How is change management handled? A change management process will allow user and administrators to deploy new content, features, and fixes to the SharePoint farm in a way that minimizes impact to other users. Adherence to this process is an important way to ensure uptime. To help define a change management process, specific models have been defined to address each technical component of SharePoint change management: 1. 2. 3. 4.

SharePoint Installation Custom Configuration Custom Development SharePoint Content

Unlike the on-premises version of SharePoint, SharePoint Online does not require a manual configuration of servers. Once the Office 365 subscription has been purchased, simply login and navigate to the Office 365 Admin Center. SharePoint Online Installation

Figure 10 Office 365 Admin Center

In order for Office 365 to link to an existing domain, click the “domains” option from the left menu, then click “add a domain.” Follow these steps to configure the domain:


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Figure 11 Adding a domain

Once the domain is configured, the global administrator will need to add users. To do this, return to the Admin Center, and select the “users and groups” option from the left navigation bar. From this page, configurable options appear, such as: single sign-on, Active Directory synchronization, password policies, multi-factor authentication and mailbox management.

Figure 12 Adding and importing users into Office 365


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The SharePoint Online Management Shell (SOMS) allow global administrators to use PowerShell to manage and configure SharePoint Online. When SOMS is installed, global administrators can manage site collections, upgrade site collections to a new version, configure SharePoint Online company-level settings, and get logs from data connections between SharePoint Online and other services through Business Connectivity Services. Detailed instructions on how to install and configure the SOMS can be found here: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint-help/set-up-the-sharepoint-online-managementshell-environment-HA102919087.aspx Custom Configuration

SharePoint has many out-of-the-box features. If these features do not meet requirements, custom development may be needed. With the introduction of apps in SharePoint 2013, solutions are now easier to develop than ever before. SharePoint apps can be created in almost any modern web language, including: JavaScript, jQuery, Ruby, and more. Microsoft created Napa for Office 365, a specialized tool to streamline the development of apps for Office 365 and SharePoint. Napa for Office 365 allows a developer to build apps for both Office 365 and SharePoint inside of a browser. Step by step instructions on how to build apps using Napa for Office 365 can be found here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/jj163230%28v=office.15%29.aspx Custom Development

Apps can also be created using Visual Studio. In SharePoint online, full-trust solutions that use the server side object model are not supported.

Which features (licenses) will be provided to end users? Office 365 for Education offers three plans: A2, A3 and A4. A2 plans are free for Students, Faculty and Staff. A3 and A4 have a per user/month pricing model. Follow the link below for details on feature differences between plans. http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/academic/compare-office-365-education-plansFX103045755.aspx

How to activate SPO licenses? In education, it’s advisable to determine what subgroups of users should have access. Just because a user has an account in Office 365, does not mean they will have access to SharePoint online. In order to grant users permission to access SharePoint sites, a license must first be assigned to the user. Instructions to assign or remove licenses can be found here: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/office365-suite-help/assign-or-remove-licenses-or-view-a-listof-unlicensed-users-HA102816053.aspx#_Toc383721312


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What is the best use for Yammer? Yammer is a private, enterprise social network for organizations that allows people to collaborate securely across groups, departments, schools or districts. Yammer is a standalone enterprise social network that integrates with SharePoint online via an app. The Yammer App for SharePoint allows the addition of a real-time social layer to the SharePoint environment, replacing the SharePoint Newsfeed. While SharePoint newsfeed provides some of the same functions as Yammer, Yammer is a much more robust product that allows users to engage in team and organizational-wide conversations, collaborate around files and projects from both SharePoint libraries and OneDrive Pro. As of the publication of this document, Yammer Enterprise and single-sign-on between Yammer and Office 365 is not yet available. Microsoft plans to release Yammer Enterprise to existing Office 365 users at no additional costs; the licenses will be included with current Office 365 education plans. Yammer Enterprise provides the ability to share ideas, content and documents between staff members. It also allows for users to send private messages, participate in discussions via statuses and track all posts relating to a particular topic via hashtag. Since the mailbox size limit for Office 365 is 50 GB, Yammer can play a crucial role in streamlining communication between staff, teachers and students. Yammer’s wide variety of features makes it an invaluable tool to educational institutions. Yammer allows for the creation of pages, which can be restricted to certain users – i.e. a project team, teachers in a particular grade or a class of students. Instead of sending a multitude of e-mails back and forth regarding a document, staff can upload the document to SharePoint, post it in a status via Yammer and other staff members can then comment on the document. District staff and school administrators can use pages with specialized permissions to interactively collaborate and discuss policy documents and reports and compile meeting minutes and notes. Internally, teachers can use Yammer to collaboratively create lesson plans. To do this, IT Staff should setup a separate page for each grade level, and restrict permissions to only the teachers and staff who work at that grade level. Teachers should create pages in Yammer to promote student collaboration. These pages should be restricted to students within a particular period or subject in order to protect student data and ensure academic integrity. Using Yammer’s tools, teachers can then post documents (presentations, notes, or media) for students to discuss and assign discussions to students by tagging them in particular posts. This allows for the group discussion dynamic to go one step further, as students can then bring their own documents, presentation or third-party media in the discussion. Using Yammer’s private messaging feature, students can reach out to teachers via private message or vice versa.


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Activating Yammer When Yammer Enterprise becomes available, tenant admins will be able to activate it by a link provided in the Office 365 Admin Portal. A step-by-step guide to activating Yammer can be found here: https://about.yammer.com/success/activate/activation-guide/

Encourage feedback from end users for continuous improvement Soliciting feedback from users is critical to user adoption of the SharePoint platform. SharePoint has two key out of the box apps that can streamline the feedback process: discussion boards and surveys. Schools can use the discussion board app to allow various user groups (e.g., teachers, students, etc.) to discuss their experience using the portal or suggest ideas for customization. Discussion boards should be used when seeking only qualitative feedback from users. The survey app allows for the solicitation of both qualitative and quantitative feedback from end users. The data submitted to a survey is automatically summarized inside of SharePoint. This response data can then be viewed as a standard list, in an Excel spreadsheet or in a bar chart. Once a survey is created, users can respond directly from their browser. Links to surveys can be shared via e-mail or from an announcement on a school/district site. Instructions on how to setup a survey can be found here: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint-help/create-a-survey-HA102775328.aspx


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