MS SharePoint in higher education environment
August 03, 2018
MS SharePoint in higher education environment
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with MS SharePoint
We are using MS SharePoint in two main areas at a higher ed institution:
1- We implement student portal on MS SharePoint. A student can log in to his portal to view calendar, library, upcoming events, grades ( through integration with Banner), cafeteria, residence hall. Students can also customize and publish their own profile page which is used for class collaboration.
2- As staff, we use MS SharePoint for procurement workflows. We can add/modify a purchase request which is customized to go through an approval workflow through IT, Finance and Procurement. It provides email notifications and highly customizable.
We have SharePoint servers running on a VMware cluster.
1- We implement student portal on MS SharePoint. A student can log in to his portal to view calendar, library, upcoming events, grades ( through integration with Banner), cafeteria, residence hall. Students can also customize and publish their own profile page which is used for class collaboration.
2- As staff, we use MS SharePoint for procurement workflows. We can add/modify a purchase request which is customized to go through an approval workflow through IT, Finance and Procurement. It provides email notifications and highly customizable.
We have SharePoint servers running on a VMware cluster.
- It is highly customizable. It can be customized to support most business processes in HR, procurement, and supply chain.
- It integrates with a single-sign-on system in place, like Active Directory or Tivoli LDAP.
- It costs way less than Oracle solutions, with special offers for higher education.
- It's supported on VMWare and HyperV.
- Runs on SQL databases which are not the best in terms of reliability and security.
- Runs on Windows servers which requires updates and restarts.
- the server farm needs to include at least 4 VMs with 24GB RAM each to handle traffic from 2000 users simultaneously.
- Most solutions were developed in-house which was a major cost saving solution
- Document management and versioning improved collaboration and increased productivity
Alternative solutions would solve a single aspect of our needs as an enterprise, whereas SharePoint provided more than 4 solutions. Having said this, developers and DBAs who are Microsoft certified were more than enough to work with SharePoint, whereas having more application diversity requires a wide variety of technical backgrounds and knowledge. Not to mention that a large variety of vendors will add more integration burden for IT and increase complexity for end-users.