Scalable, Cost-Effective SharePoint School Solution
 A
huge amount of information flows through a school, not only
from teachers to students and vice versa but in all directions
between students, administrators and other staff. Controlling
and managing all this information is a daunting task, but
in SharePoint it can be handled well.
During a recent series of remote control workshop sessions
with the SharePoint admin at a chain of US sports schools,
I have made some good progress. Below is a summary of what
we have achieved within a rather low budget.
Base of sites
For permission reasons, we decided to divide the information
into sites. We set up one site for each school location
and also some sites that were shared among all schools.
In each site, we created SharePoint groups for students
at the location, for staff and for administrators who should
see everything.
We also created various document libraries, with default
Enterprise Keywords sets. Thus, users will be able to tag
their information simply by uploading it to the applicable
document library.
Two sites, with different editors, are intended for reading
by everyone. The Enterprise site has announcements from
the company management, policy documents and a graphical
site map. The main content of the Development site is a
video list and an Exercise Plans library, and I will share
some details about both of them.
Videos
Teachers and trainers in these schools often create videos
to illustrate a drill, move or technique, and there are
literally thousands of them. Managers had tried to organize
the videos in folders, but the shortcomings of folders soon
became obvious to everyone involved. The same video could
be used to illustrate several different techniques, and
having the same video in many folders is wrong in many ways.
Instead of using folders, we built lists with a series of
managed metadata columns. The metadata will make it easy
to find exactly the right video for a specific subject.
To make it easier to tag each video with metadata, the edit
and display form of the list was customized to embed the
video.
Microsoft 365 has a video app called Stream. It would have
been useful, but it demands a more expensive SharePoint
license than the one this organization is subscribing to.
Therefore, it was decided that the actual video files should
be placed on a 3rd party video host.
PowerPoint library
The Exercise Plans library contains PowerPoint files, and
a template is used for new files. This template allows for
several layouts. One of them shows an embedded video and
its description. Another layout has a background picture
of the sports arena, where the trainer can draw movements
and patterns.
Contacts
Each location site has a Contacts list, where users can
drag and drop their contacts using Outlook. We have also
put some work into a mobile friendly contact search page
in the Enterprise site. It allows users to search for contacts
and click-to-call the phone numbers of the found contact.
The search results are permission trimmed, so that each
person only can see the contacts shared with him/her.
The school chain had a limited budget but huge needs, so
it was a real challenge to find the right solution. We went
through several iterations and ideas and ended up with a
cost effective, scalable and very useful solution.
Peter Kalmström
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