[lita-l] Using Sharepoint as a CMS/public-facing site

[Ryan Hess]

Hi Alison,

We are expected to move to SharePoint as well early next year and I¹ve been
blogging about our preparations thus far, which has led to many emails from
other institutions that are having SharePoint brought to them by their IT
departments. So it seems like this is emerging as a trend. What I¹m also
picking up is that people who have used SharePoint loath SharePoint for some
of the reasons you cite, compatibility issues, etc. My own concerns rest in
two areas:

1. How much of a community of practice is there with SharePoint in
libraries, from which we can draw for advice, ideas, solutions. This is
definitely true with Wordpress and Drupal, but from what I can tell, it is
very early days for SharePoint as a library CMS.
2. Interoperability and standards. We all know how well Microsoft plays with
others and how they tend to develop their own standards.

Still there is at least one success story out there. Sandia National
Laboratories (a special research library) has a public-facing SharePoint
site, which they presented at Internet Librarian. Danielle Pollock was the
presenter.

I would also offer up DePaul¹s (www.depaul.edu) main homepage as an example
of what a public-facing SharePoint site can look like. The project team here
did a very good job in terms of design and I have to say I was impressed
(and soothed) by what I saw.

I¹ve worked a little bit with Drupal and can say that the CMS world is
definitely a quirky one for people used to hand-coding and working within
Dreamweaver. And with Drupal, at least, it definitely starts to feel
³patchy² in that to get the system to do everything you want, sometimes
feels like more work than if you just built it from scratch.

I¹m also building back-up pages in LibGuides these days (our current CMS is
unsupported and not stable) and am actually quite surprised at what you can
do with a little creative thinking. And I would recommend looking into that
option as well. It¹s actually not that difficult to create a
regular-looking, fully functional site that looks nothing like LibGuides¹
boxiness.

Good luck and do report back to the list on how it all pans out.


M Ryan Hess
Web Services Coordinator
DePaul University
JTR 120, DePaul University, Lincoln Park Campus, 2350 N Kenmore Ave.,
Chicago IL 60614
office: 773-325-7829 | cell:  650-224-7279 |  fax: 773-325-2297  |
mhess8 at depaul.edu 
On 12/8/11 8:46 AM, "Pruntel,Alison" <Alison.Pruntel at fauquiercounty.gov>
wrote:

> **Apologies in advance for cross-posting**
>  
> Our county is considering the use of Microsoft Sharepoint for our
> public-facing site; all county departments will be expected to use this as our
> CMS. As we already find using it as our intranet laborious/inefficient, am
> hoping for feedback from other libraries using Sharepoint for this purpose
> (public site, CMS) and pros/cons. I realize there has been great success using
> Joomla, Drupal, WordPress, etc., but the decision-making entity is keen on
> Sharepoint. Would love links to successful local government/library ³for the
> public² sites using Sharepoint.
>  
> Also, if you considered Sharepoint and went with something else, can you send
> me your ³Wow factors² for choosing something other than Sharepoint. (Note:
> When given a list of reasons for going with tools other than Sharepoint, a key
> decision-maker asked for ³Wow² factors -- no elaboration given -- that would
> make him consider something other than Sharepoint).
>  
> Thanks for considering,
>  
>  
> Alison Pruntel 
> Electronic Resources Librarian
> Fauquier County Public Library
> 11 Winchester Street
> Warrenton, VA 20186
> 540-422-8515 
> alison dot pruntel at fauquiercounty dot gov
> FCPL Web Site: http://library.fauquiercounty.gov
> <http://library.fauquiercounty.gov>
> My Blog: http://fcpleresources.blogspot.com
> <http://fcpleresources.blogspot.com>
>  
> 




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2011-12-08
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