The iSchool has a reputation at the University of Washington as a leader in technology innovation and deployment to support staff, faculty and students. The iSchool IT department is often asked to beta-test new software or serve on UW-wide committees to make decisions on technology acquisitions. IT Connect featured the iSchool's use of SharePoint in a May news article.
From the article:
SharePoint’s built-in features, with a bit of configuration, sufficiently meets needs of the iSchool. They use SharePoint as an intranet, making it the go-to place for policy, procedure and process documents. Its 245 sites keep customizations to a minimum, with a standard scheme and the iSchool logo. The iSchool’s support organization can provision new sites as the need arises and provide help and guidance. The creation of standard practices and recommendations make it easier for teams to collaborate across different sites. For example, iSchool Facilities site (managed by Carmen Cook) and the iSchool IT site (managed by Martin Criminale), feature common elements, such as contact names and phone numbers on the main page and a link to people in the left navigation.
The following list illustrates some of the ways that iSchool uses SharePoint to facilitate routine administrative tasks and track important inventory:
- Archiving official iSchool IT Announcements, which frees individuals from saving email
- Inventories: furniture, keys, hardware
- Reservation calendar for shared office, classrooms, meeting rooms
- Requests for help with maintenance issues
- Templates for forms and documents, signs
- Calendars for all IT staff and student employees
- Tracking: software licenses, shared UW NetIDs
- Project tracking and budget monitoring – great for shared work and collaboration
- Staff meeting calendar, agendas and document archives
- DNS info: with a list and views for each subnet that we manage, IP addresses are easily tracked.
- Internal documentation posted on a SharePoint wiki.
In addition to its existing SharePoint site, the iSchool is currently evaluating SharePoint Online as a future location for its SharePoint content.