New ShareDM service ─ Replacement of Lotus Notes Document Library

What is ShareDM ?

The SharePoint for Document Management (ShareDM) is a new platform provided by ICTO for University staff to store and share official documents and files within Intranet, and it is implemented based on the product of Microsoft SharePoint 2013.

The MS SharePoint 2013 is an advanced web-collaboration platform to provide an integrated suite of server capabilities including comprehensive content management, enterprise search, and information-sharing facilitation, which has been widely deployed to the educational institutions in both nearby and overseas.

SharePoint supports a delegated administration model which enable the site administrators of departments to take full control of management in their departmental sites, they can create additional sub-sites, maintain user and group permission together with our Active Directory.  SharePoint also features powerful integration with Microsoft Office, permitting users to edit documents in Word or Excel and to save them to SharePoint directly through web browsers.

Highlighted Features

The new ShareDM service offers several advanced features, including:

FULLY WEB-ENABLED & USER FRIENDLY:

• Fully web access platform
• Familiar working environment as in MS Office
• Support mobile devices
• Drag and Drop for uploading documents
• Support most common document formats: Word, Excel, PDF, PowerPoint, etc.

POWERFUL SEARCHING:

• Provide a powerful search function for user to search information within the whole site or individual library
• The search result will include the list library content or even office documents content

OFFICE WEB APPLICATIONS:

• Users can view or modify the Word, Excel documents on any computers without MS Office pre-installation.

VERSIONING:

• SharePoint can provide versioning control
• The document owner can retrieve different document versions or rollback the document to different versions

SELF MANAGEMENT:

• Departments can define your user group within SharePoint for access documents without the assistance from ICTO
• Departments can define the access right of sites, library directly
• Departments can create their own document library to store different categories of documents

Current Progress

To ensure a smooth launch of the new platform, ICTO had invited more than 40 colleagues from most of the administrative departments (including AAO, ADO, CDO, CMO, CO, FO, HRO, HSEO, OSA, RDAO, RTO, SAO & UCO), as the Departmental Site Administrators of ShareDM.  A one-day formal training course (“Microsoft SharePoint 2013 for the Site Owner/Power User) had been arranged for all the site administrators in July, in order to build up the basic knowledge and skills to perform the administrative tasks in the new platform.

In addition to the training course, individual department-level review sessions and hands-on workshops had also been provided to the site administrators to improve their understandings and experiences.  After attending the training course and workshops, the site administrators for several departments (ICTO, CO, ADO & CMO) have already built up the initial site structures that are well suit their operational practice and actual needs, which are ready to be used by their general users.

Currently, ICTO colleagues are working closely with the site administrators for the remaining departments to design their own site structures, and arrange the general user training session department by department.

During the deployment of the new service, with the assistance from site administrators, we are also migrating the generic documents databases from Lotus Notes to ShareDM.

Next Step

After the service deployment and database migration proves complete for all the administrative departments, the sites administrators from Academic Units/RCs will be invited to join the ShareDM deployment project, by the 4^th quarter in 2015.