Improving Services for Students with Sharepoint

Diane Montgomery and Colin Farrow

Background

What do students do?• Email

• Library services

• VLE

• Student Records System

• Printing

• Filestore

• Desktop apps

• Subject specific apps

What do staff do?• Research• Teaching• Administration

Common Student Desktop

Wide range of existing software

e.g. Moodle, T4, Documentum

Common Staff Desktop

Features the business want

• Easier access to Email, Calendars, Moodle, Student Records System, Document Management

• Collaboration tools for shared workspace/web sites for peer working and tools for blogs, wikis, surveys, etc.

• A personalised MySite

• Personalised access to Library books/search information

• RSS feeds

• Single sign-on to desktop, portal and services

• News, Announcements, Alerts targeted at specific audiences e.g. by Faculty, Class, Staff group

• Anywhere access to Filestore services

Features IT want

• Platform and browser agnostic

• Management functions, flexibility, security and reliability

• Coherent offering gathering up existing services

• Create new web applications

• Students and staff first priority.. then external collaborators and other audiences?

• Single sign on Identity Management and the Glasgow University ID

• Next set of value add features: presence, workflow forms, integration lob applications

Why SharePoint?

Expected £ outlay

Fit

Promised functionality

Challenges

Managementaspirations

Vendor product

offerings

Actual

product

deliverables

Articulatedbusiness

requirements

Sharepoint

• Collaboration

• Portals and Personalisation

• Search

• Content management

• Business Processes and Forms

• Business Intelligence

MyGlasgow

• Single Sign On

• Team Collaboration Sites

• MySites

Single Sign On – What is available?

• SSO CAS PubCookie Shibboleth

• Authentication Windows - basic, NTLM, ... Forms - SQL, LDAP, ... web SSO - ADFS ISA

Single Sign On - Sharepoint

• Sharepoint SSO provider a service providing credentials for applications used in webpart code to pull data from other

systems into Sharepoint

• pluggable SSO provider create and deploy custom code to access identity

management system for credentials and write code to use these credentials to surface

data in web parts

Single Sign On - Applications

• Legacy Applications student records library services print credits

• browser based

• no web service API

• difficult or expensive to modify

Single Sign On – our solution

MySite

Resources

Open ...

SSO application

SessionDB

Identity Vault

Team Collaboration Sites

• web sites

• document libraries

• surveys

• blogs

• wikis

• forum

• organisational unit

• Research

• Teaching

• Services

• Clubs and Societies

MySite

• user personal pages

• private and shared space

• web parts Exchange e-mail Moodle VLE WebSurf Student Records Library books/search/catalogue Print Credits calendar & timetable Mahara personal portfolio news/alerts/announcements

Browsers

• heterogeneous environment

• IE, FF, Safari, ...

• “MOSS 2007 supports several commonly used Web browsers. However, certain browsers might cause some functionality to be downgraded, limited, or available only through alternative steps. In some cases, functionality might be unavailable for non-critical administrative tasks.”

• limited to IE and FF in SP2010

Server Farm

• web front ends

• application servers – search, index

• SQL active passive cluster

• in two sites for DR

Storage

• MySites – 256Mb per user

• Team Sites – 100Gb per site collection

• 80% fill factor

• 120% bloat factor

• mapping database files to drive spindles

• RAID

• mirror

• transaction logs

• backup

• restore and recovery

$harepoint – the bottom line

• server farm hardware

• licences CALs, OS, MOSS, SQL, Internet

Connector, terminal services, Visual Studio, DPM

• storage

• backup and DR

• terminal server

• training

What next?

• roll out and launch

• sit back and relax ...

• ... monitor and modify

• only the start of a process ...

• ... custom applications Sharepoint 2010 Federated Access Management

• Questions?

Contact Information

Colin Farrow c.farrow@it.gla.ac.uk

Diane Montgomery d.montgomery@it.gla.ac.uk