Universities and Colleges
Information Systems Association
www.ucisa.ac.uk
UCISA CASE STUDY
Tel: +44 (0)1865 283425 Fax: +44 (0)1865 283426
Email: [email protected]
SharePoint for
communicating across the
institution
Background
The University of Huddersfield’s aim when implementing SharePoint in 2011 was a fairly modest
one: to provide a collaborative workspace for staff from disparate business areas to work together on
projects.
Alan Radley, Head of Computing Services, explains, “Our colleagues across the university were getting
tired of sending email attachments around and then not being able to find them. Mapped drives
have their place of course, but typically documents were stored in a way that was not intuitive and
not easily searchable, and so we considered the alternatives.”
“Computing Services set up a small pilot with the university’s Research and Enterprise Service to see
how SharePoint could be applied to managing research projects. Even before the pilot had ended
we were getting enquiries from other departments, who could see the benefit of being able to store
meeting agenda and papers in one place, as well as using some of the other functions such as task
lists. ”
In September 2012, SharePoint 2010 was rolled out to staff branded as UniShare. Involvement of
internal champions from different schools and business areas was a key part of the launch. “We
asked for nominations from across the campus, but instead of just seeking out senior staff to
communicate our aims, we wanted people who, regardless of their position, were enthusiastic about
what SharePoint could do and could really help us to publicise the benefits of UniShare,” says Alan.
Since then several schools and departments, such as the School of Education and Professional
Development, the School of Human and Health Sciences, and HR, have elected to set up their own
UniShare home pages and subsequent subsites which interact with main university wide UniShare
sites used for interdisciplinary or multiservice projects.
SharePoint plus
Following the success of UniShare, the institution’s plans for SharePoint became more ambitious, and
a steering group was set up to oversee future direction. “The take up for UniShare was very good and,
having implemented SharePoint, we wanted to capitalise on its potential. In particular, staff were
telling us that they liked the alerts and the discussion boards, and we realised that we could apply
some of these functions to improve general communication across the campus,” says Alan.
The SharePoint steering group made the decision to migrate the University of Huddersfield’s staff
portal to SharePoint with the aim of creating a more dynamic, interactive gateway for staff. This was
C ISG Case Study: Sharepoint for communicating across the institution
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Universities and Colleges
Information Systems Association
www.ucisa.ac.uk
UCISA CASE STUDY
Tel: +44 (0)1865 283425 Fax: +44 (0)1865 283426
Email: [email protected]
phased in over Summer 2013 and renamed Staff Hub. As the staff hub would automatically appear
upon login, it was important to stagger the implementation to ensure the servers presenting the
portal were not getting overloaded while everyone logged in each morning.
All staff were asked to undertake a one time registration process, so that an encrypted version of
passwords could be created, allowing these to be passed to other systems for single sign on purposes.
Alongside this, the registration allowed staff to receive tailored content based on their login/job role.
Staff Hub was launched in September 2013. Recent data reveals that 80% of all staff are using
it as their primary access route to other academic and business systems within the institution.
“It’s been successful, I think because we’ve made things more lively by having things like a virtual
market place where staff can sell personal items,” says Alan, “but a major element is the use of
identity management so that people receive information that is pertinent to their role and can gain
access to corporate systems such as student records, finance and timetables through the interface.
This tailored approach means that staff get updates and alerts from the wider university that are
of genuine interest to them, and consequently they are more likely to use the Staff Hub as a one
stop shop. Also, because it is browser based it is far easier to use on mobile devices, and this has
contributed to its popularity, I think.”
Future plans
The success of the UniShare and Staff Hub projects led the steering committee to create a SharePoint
road map to evaluate and plan the implementation of other services.
The next service to be migrated onto SharePoint will be the student portal, which is currently
delivered through the Luminis platform. If this is successful, this will save the University £30,000
a year alone in software subscriptions, and it will allow the portal team to consolidate skills and
provide a greater staffing capacity for SharePoint development. It is anticipated that the student
portal will be available for September 2014.
Additionally, the University is committed to evaluating SharePoint as a replacement for their Wisdom
electronic document and records management system. The institution is also running a pilot looking
at using SharePoint My Sites for student eportfolios. At a future point, Computing Services will
consider the suggestion that SharePoint could be used for the VLE.
Alan concludes, “We started off using SharePoint in a very simple way. It has quickly become integral
to the university. We are working more effectively because communication across the institution is
easier. As a result there is a greater sense that our organisation is community with shared goals, not
just a set of silos working independently of each other.”
Lessons learned
“Governance and administration needs to be put in place early on to stop site sprawl, and proper
design of site collections, and the structure within them, is required. We have also had a few
issues with the use of desktop operating systems, browsers, and Office version configuration.
The product is much bigger than anyone realised which means supporting it can consume a lot
of staffing resource as people want the system to do different things depending on their job role.
Until recently, staff in Computing Services were supporting SharePoint on a good will basis, but
we are converting the savings that will be made from migrating Wisdom and Luminis into 2 FTE
SharePoint developers.”
C ISG Case Study: Sharepoint for communicating across the institution
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Universities and Colleges
Information Systems Association
www.ucisa.ac.uk
UCISA CASE STUDY
Tel: +44 (0)1865 283425 Fax: +44 (0)1865 283426
Email: [email protected]
How does SharePoint interface with the other business systems within the
University?
Via the Staff Hub, users can gain access to all the major corporate systems via single sign on.
Examples are student records, finance, VLE, timetabling, email. Currently none of the information
in these systems is presented via SharePoint but it is anticipated that using the intelligence built
on a person’s identity we will harvest pertinent information from those systems and present a
series of dashboards using the SharePoint interface.
Investment and ongoing support
••
Initial purchase of SharePoint software and virtual server/storage space
••
Setup of resilient SharePoint environment with the help of external consultancy
••
Investment in external training courses for key staff
••
Developing training materials for staff
••
Recruitment of two SharePoint developers (initially on 18 month contracts)
••
Creation of a support model and structure – first line, champions, technical back end,
developers
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