SharePoint

“What is SharePoint?”

This is perhaps one of the most common questions that we hear. Microsoft SharePoint can be used to support a wide array of business functions, but simply stated, it supports collaborative electronic work. UMW’s SharePoint implementation, dubbed “EagleNet”, serves as our university portal to provide targeted announcements, links and access to Banner Self-Service functionality for all students, faculty and staff based upon an individual’s affiliation with the institution. EagleNet allows individual users (active students, faculty, and staff) the opportunity to store, use or share (within the authenticated environment) up to 100MB of files via the built-in “My Site” functionality.

At UMW, SharePoint (or EagleNet), is configured with ‘sites’ for all administrative departments, providing a collaboration space for faculty, staff and students. As such, all documents uploaded to any SharePoint site default to ‘open’ privileges to be read-accessible by all other EagleNet users. Site owners must use caution to appropriately set permissions to limit access to documents or files. Given SharePoint’s collaborative nature, it is not classified as a sensitive system. Therefore, the storage of highly sensitive data files in SharePoint is a violation of the university’s Electronic Storage of Highly Sensitive Data Policy.

SharePoint also provides a platform, upon request, for collaborative document management/sharing for departments or additional faculty/staff groups, or project teams, in a secure, authenticated environment.

The IT division is currently working to establish internal structure and governance to ensure that growth, user access provisioning and space utilization is well-managed as adoption of SharePoint evolves within the UMW community.

“Will training be provided?”

IT is evaluating how to best restore technology related training for faculty and staff, and to include some new training offerings, like SharePoint. SharePoint specific training offerings should start to appear in the early Spring semester. Our current staffing level prevents us from offering formal training on a recurring basis today, but we will evaluate departmental or group requests on a case-by-case basis.

The following links provides some online training regarding fundamental SharePoint topics like working within document libraries, for those looking to learn more about SharePoint:

http://sptraining.sharepointsite.net/default.aspx

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/training/sharepoint-server-2007-training-courses-HA010235858.aspx

“When can we use SharePoint?” or “When will SharePoint be live?”

SharePoint is currently available for all active students, faculty and staff with a valid NetID and password. The default Eaglenet site displays content, links, news and targeted student announcements based upon your affiliation with the University.

All users have access to personal “My Site” space, and can establish an online profile and make use of that space to share or simply store files, notes, pictures and more. Users have the ability to adjust the access levels associated with their profile and My Sites, enabling broader or more limited access to information based upon their preferences. My Sites are limited to 100MB of storage per user, and are not accessible to the public or users without a valid NetID and password.

Beyond personal spaces available to users, we are working to ensure that default Administrative sites are provisioned for appropriate access and use by members of the designated departments. Additional collaboration or project spaces will be evaluated and created on an as-requested basis.

“Why am I continually prompted to re-authenticate when opening a document from SharePoint, even after I have logged in?”

The current authentication mechanism used (basic authentication) was implemented to provide a similar user experience for all users, regardless of platform (Windows, Mac), browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari) or location (on or off campus). This was also implemented to ease the experience of initial authentication to the EagleNet platform for all users – students, faculty, and staff – by simply requiring the use of your netID and password and not a more complicated mechanism.

While this authentication mechanism offers easy access to the overall platform, it can create a less convenient experience for those users wishing to actively work with and edit Microsoft Office documents located on the server. Because there is no overall “trust” established with each office application and machine, security protocol requires that a user re-establish their identity when accessing a new document.

In an effort to improve the working experience for users, there are plans in place to implement Windows Integrated Authentication within SharePoint and our other Windows-based applications at UMW. Windows Integrated Authentication can provide a more streamlined experience – specifically for users who are working on Windows-based UMW systems associated with the domain, and who have already logged into the network. This authentication model is being tested and more information will be made available as we draw nearer to an implementation, currently targeted for December of 2010.

“What if I have other problems, issues or questions about SharePoint?”

Problems related specifically to SharePoint can be reported via email to Portal_Admin@umw.edu. We will work to respond to your issue or question as soon as a resource is available, and are interested in working with our pilot user groups in creating a better user experience for all users. Other issues or technical questions unrelated to SharePoint should continue to be directed to the UMW Help Desk at 2255 or helpdesk@umw.edu