What is SharePoint? SharePoint is designed for collaboration. It allows IFAS employees, no matter where they are located, to work together as teams. It is WEB based and works with shared work areas. The work areas are located on a server on campus.

How does SharePoint work? SharePoint allows you to set up work areas. Within the work area you can have document libraries, picture libraries, calendars, blogs, announcements, tasks etc. all meant to help you collaborate and work together.

What SharePoint Work areas do I have access to? Unless you are specifically denied access to a work area you can view almost any work area on SharePoint. You have administration rights (can create, delete and modify) on your unit workspace, so if you are in the Bay County office you have full admin rights by default to the Bay workspace. As an administrator you can create a new workspace under the Bay workspace. As a workspace creator you can specify who has rights to your workspace and who does not.

Can someone who is not part of IFAS join the workspace? At this point no, but I have been reassured multiple times that the ability to give access to outside collaborators is coming soon.

What advantages does SharePoint give me?

1. The workspaces on the SharePoint server allow you to collaborate and share documents, PowerPoints, pictures etc. This can save us from having duplicate copies and having multiple people doing the same work.

2. Unlike email and the campus shared file servers there is no limit on file sizes, which means you can share and work on files no matter how large they are.

3. SharePoint is fast. Because it is considered local to your machine. So you can move files easily from and to your computer to work on them.

4. SharePoint will allow only one person at a time to have a file open in edit mode, which means there is only one version of the file and one person can't unintentionaly overwrite the work of another person. It also saves previous versions so you can back changes out easily.

5. SharePoint integrates with Microsoft Office 2007 allowing you to save to SharePoint directly and to link to SharePoint calendars directly from your own Outlook.

6.  The Blog and RSS features of SharePoint allow you to keep up to date on the work being done on projects by your workgroup. It is another tool that saves you having to constantly email and phone others to see what has been done.

7. You can set up tasks and assign them to different members of the group so everyone knows what they should be doing and what they don't need to worry about doing.

Since SharePoint is WEB based will it replace our current WEB pages? No! SharePoint is meant to be a collaboration tool for groups who work together. It is not meant to be a WEB page and does not replace the need for WEB Pages meant for the public.