Introducing CIT’s SharePoint Service

Does your team need a central location for easy and effective collaboration? SharePoint is a Web service that provides an organized hierarchy for information sharing and document collaboration, allowing for easy and efficient team collaboration on common projects including documents, tasks, events, and meetings.

The Center for Information Technology (CIT) is pleased to announce that SharePoint services will be offered in the 4th quarter FY2007. This CIT collaboration service offering is designed to provide agile provisioning of team sites for information sharing and team productivity, using Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services (WSS).

SharePoint services collaboration

SharePoint sites offer collaboration space that makes sharing ideas and contributing content easier for teams. Teams can utilize the meeting workspace, which includes a place to store agendas and minutes, objectives, attendees’ contact information, and other meeting related documents. Additionally, SharePoint sites offer the following collaboration benefits for document management: document check-in and check-out, version control, and content approval.

•	Check-in and check-out: Provides users with exclusive rights to a document. When a document is checked out, only the user can make changes and save the document. This allows multiple users to collaborate on the document without overlap in work.
•	Version control: This helps users track changes, merge versions, and rollback versions if necessary.
•	Content approval: Content approval can be configured so that users are required to obtain approval on content before posting documents.

SharePoint services usability

In order to make setting up your SharePoint site easier, CIT has created custom NIH templates with a standard NIH header and footer so that customers can choose which template best fits their needs. The template options are tailored for team sites, document sites, meeting sites, content sites, and discussion sites.

The latest SharePoint version also offers additional compatibility for users. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is compatible with multiple browsers, and is compatible and integrated with Microsoft Office 2003 for Windows, as well as being compatible with Microsoft Office 2004 for Macintosh.

SharePoint integration with Microsoft Office provides additional customer convenience and ease of use. SharePoint features are accessed through a browser and through Office programs that users are already familiar with, making it a very easy product to use. The additional benefits from the integration include: Microsoft Outlook integration, Document Workspaces, Task Panes, and InfoPath workflow integration.

•	Microsoft Outlook: Users can create meeting workspaces directly from Microsoft Outlook. Alerts can notify users, by email, when information on SharePoint changes.
•	Document Workspaces: Users can create document workspaces directly from Microsoft Word.
•	Task Panes: Users can access Task Lists, Link and Contact Lists through Office 2003 task panes.
•	InfoPath: SharePoint Services are integrated with Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007. InfoPath 2007 allows users to design and publish interactive, user-friendly form templates.

SharePoint services security

To customize and increase security, Site Administrators can assign levels of permissions to users that define their level of access to a SharePoint site. The user groups can be assigned to the following roles or users can create custom roles if these roles are not sufficient.

•	Reader: A Reader has read-only access to the site.
•	Contributor: A Contributor can add content to the existing document libraries and lists.
•	Web Designer: A Web Designer can create the libraries and lists, as well as customize pages in the site.
•	Administrator: The Site Administrator has full control over the SharePoint site.

SharePoint security is hierarchical, distributed, and granular:

•	Hierarchical: Security is hierarchical in that permission can be granted at a root site and inherited several levels down if desired.
•	Distributed: Site Administrators can create cross-site groups so users can have access to multiple sites.
•	Granular: Users can be given permission to specific documents, or entire site collections.

SharePoint is integrated with Active Directory and NIH Login, allowing the use of the same account that is used to access other NIH resources. Finally, access to SharePoint sites can be granted to external collaborators if the Site Administrator chooses to do so.

CIT’s Windows SharePoint standard offering

CIT’s SharePoint Service will be offered in the 4th quarter of this fiscal year. Customer SharePoint site collections will be established within the new Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 environment.

CIT has built a fully redundant, resilient, and well designed environment for the production offering. This includes F5 Load balancing and automatic failover, 24x7 site monitoring SQL 2005 database replication, as well as document level backup and restore, and options for managing site growth.

Each customer must designate a Site Administrator who will be given administrative access to their project’s site. As part of the offering, CIT will provide the Site Administrator with information and training on how to oversee the SharePoint site. CIT will conduct training sessions twice yearly to ensure Site Administrators have a solid background in both the SharePoint product and their site responsibilities.

How to get more information

If you are interested in SharePoint services, please contact the NIH Help Desk either by phone at 301-496-HELP (301-496-4357), 866-319-4357 (toll free), or 301-496-8294 (TTY) or by email at ITHelpDesk@nih.gov.