Classified Staff

Cooperative Extension’s Intranet Future

History provided by Greg Johll, Cooperative Extension Technology Services Director

Awhile ago, Tech Services conducted a planning event to determine how we go about using the web. The results of that work shows us that we need to divide our Internet presence into a couple of areas – a public content and issued focused presence and an internal “administrative work” type presence. To accomplish this, one step that is to create an Intranet - A private network that uses Web technologies for the sharing of information internally.

To accomplish this task we have selected a product called Microsoft SharePoint. SharePoint can be thought of as having 3 primary functions 1) Team Spaces 2) MySites 3) Portal functionality. Each will serve an important role in organizing and improving internal communications and storage of information.

Team Sites – Teams, whether they are formal program area teams, offices, units, centers etc. may have a space to work collaboratively. Within SharePoint teams can easily have a calendar, document storage, a blog or wiki, gant charts, and many other features. Documents (word, excel, powerpoints, etc) can easily be placed in the team space for others to work on or share. All of it uses your web browser and MS Office suite to make it easily happen (e.g. you can save directly from MS Word to the team site).

MySites – Each person will have their own personal place within the Intranet. Parts of your personal site will be viewable by others who can Login to the Intranet (eg. Name, county, program area, email), and other content can be kept private. So, for example, you could store a paper or curriculum you are working on for your personal programming on your MySite. Because it is on the web, you can access it from anywhere you have Internet access – but no one else can. Then, maybe a colleague or a group of people are interested in what you’ve developed. YOU decide who can access the document and grant only that person (or group) access. When a person who has been granted access to the document visits your site, they will see the document and other won’t. A nice feature of the MySite is that it will keep track of all the Team Sites you are officially a member of so you can quickly get to them AND it also knows which documents your team is working on and makes them accessible through the MySite. There’s a lot more…

Portal – Having all of this information and content in one location doesn’t do us much good if it isn’t somewhat structured. The portal functionality of SharePoint allows us to a structure in place so that people may easily find what they are looking for. This can be accomplished by locating some things at a central location (for example, a division-wide discussion forum or policy document repository), by putting in place an easy way to browse the content, and by providing a search function that only looks where we define. For example, maybe when this is going the budget office, HR and the Dean’s office all have their own blog (in their team site) where they post announcements. Instead of having to go to each of the team sites to get the news, the portal will aggregate that news on a central News portal page.

There are ways that many of these features listed above integrate with Outlook so they work within a way that you are already doing your work. Example: You can set the Dean’s blog to send you and email when it’s updated instead of logging in just to get that (ok, I didn’t mean “just” that, but I think you know what I mean).

IT JUST SO HAPPENS THAT CLOSE TO THE SAME TIME…

There was an expressed need to get rid of the Planning and Results System (PRS) and replace it with something new. This system IS NOT the replacement for PRS, but it is the structure within the new system will be designed and deployed. The details of this new system are still being decided, but once they are we will use the tools within SharePoint (and maybe some custom programming by my staff), to implement the new system. THIS IS ONLY AN EXAMPLE AND NOT SET IN STONE, but… for example, MAYBE when you log into the SharePoint Intranet (we’ll try to come up with a better name), and go to your MySite page there will be a tab that you could click on and record your programming contacts. That way all of your data, documents etc. are in one spot. And because it is in a known location, we could use it to generate many different reports – e.g. a county committee report or maybe civil rights or a federal report. We are still working out the details but that is an example of what is possible.

What’s next? My staff and I are working on building the Intranet and at the same time working with a group lead by Larry Jones, Dave Hinds and myself, to identify what we will be building to replace PRS. We are looking to launch the Team Spaces, MySites and some of the portal structure at the October All Colleague conference.

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