An odd comparison: OU Campus vs. SharePoint?

[V. Bush]

Greetings. We find ourselves in the interesting position that our campus has already purchased OU Campus to meet the needs of several other departments on campus, and from reading the postings here it sounds like it was a good decision and should help those departments manage their websites well. 

 

However, in our department, we've been looking at using SharePoint to manage our website, but our reasoning is apparently quite different: 

 

Our department hosts a lot of events on campus and provides a variety of training sessions that cover myriad uses of technology in education as well as sessions on good pedagogy. To that end, we have multiple trainers who work together to develop our materials and sessions, and we're having problems in managing our calendars, planning our projects, and then pushing our resources out to our web site. 

 

In our analysis of SharePoint, it seems that SharePoint would allow us to easily set up private workspaces that would help us with workflows and document management and make collaboration and approval tracking far, FAR easier. We could set up our schedule in events privately and plan out each semester. Then, we we are ready to make materials public, we can easily push them over to a public website. Moving the calendar items over is a piece of cake if we attach the SharePoint calendar to someone's Outlook. It sounds a great solution to our problem. 

 

So my question is: Does OU Campus provide any of these abilities? From my review of the software (and it has been minimal, just looking over the company website and videos), we can get some of this. Web pages can be sent to a reviewer before they are authorized for release, but it doesn't seem like other file types (pdfs, Word documents, Excel docs, etc) can also be tagged for review. I understand that OU's calendar tool is a separate purchase, and I don't think our campus opted to buy that part. 

 

I would appreciate any comments people have about these two web solutions. Right now, I'm leaning towards just using SharePoint, but I value the comments and experience of others. 

[Jeremy Rex]

From your own analysis of your needs, it sounds like Sharepoint could be a good solution for part (or all) of your solution. We have clients who are using both OU Campus and Sharepoint.  Getting the best from both products could be your answer. Give us a call and we can discuss options.  The calendar module is included in your license, so we should include its use as a part of the discussion.

[Justin Gatewood]

Our campus has both. (OU Campus since late '06, SharePoint implementation still underway)...

 

SharePoint will serve the purpose of being the campus portal, providing rich collaboration features, as well as being a platform upon which complex workflow and event management can be setup (with third party tools).  The Outlook and MS Office integration (for Windows users) is exceptionally useful, and overall, the SharePoint environment fits into its own niche as a collaboration/communication/document/workflow management system.

 

OU Campus is a web content management system, which means it is not trying to be a collaboration/communication/document/workflow management system, rather its function is to allow distributed management of website content to non-technical end users within various departments around your campus.

 

For example, SharePoint does have a web content function within its framework, but it is sorely lacking in its ability to connect to and provide simple web content management for a wide variety of differently hosted/setup web servers' content.

 

I will have SharePoint setup on our campus to be the portal environment for our students and employees only, which will allow us to deliver confidential information to authenticated users within a controlled web environment, whereas I have OU Campus setup to allow users within administrative, academic and technical departments across campus to edit and manage the content on all of their public-facing websites (some hosted in our datacenter, others hosted off-campus at Network Solutions, etc.).

 

Feel free to contact me with any questions about how our campus has clearly defined the roles of these two very different (yet critical) web systems.

 

Justin Gatewood

Webmaster

Victor Valley College

[phone], ext. 2697

[e-mail]

[V. Bush]

Justin, you wrote: 

For example, SharePoint does have a web content function within its framework, but it is sorely lacking in its ability to connect to and provide simple web content management for a wide variety of differently hosted/setup web servers' content.

Could you clarify this a bit, please? If I can do what I need to do within SharePoint and I can provide the materials and content I want to the web, then I don't necessarily care about having differently hosted/setup web servers. (I can see how that would be a concern if you have an already established web server.) If SharePoint can address the collaboration and workflow issues we have, we are willing to make the jump to SharePoint.