Collaboration basics for everyone

While Sharepoint has been a hot application for almost a decade now, there are still many organizations that are wondering what Sharepoint's capabilities are. Where I can I start learning about Sharepoint, what is MOSS, what is WSS, what is portal, what is webpart, what is master pages, what is a site collection, what is collaboration....

Certainly not the only way, but here is an introduction that I saw worked for many. The basic premise is how can I translate what I use today to Sharepoint's capailities with the goal of combining these tools later on to promote collaboration. After all it is what Sharepoint touts and it is what its foundation of many components are built on.

File Share folders translated to Sharepoint Document Libraries

Meeting minutes, project documents, product development artifacts, vision statements, SOW in Word, Excel, Visio, powerpoint, jpg, pdf's or files in general are stored in file share folders organizaed by folder name and file name. In Sharepoint, these same documents are stored in libraries or referenced from a library (in case they are stored in other repositories). The advantage of Document Libraries will be realized in utilitizing many powerful features of Sharepoint. Just as simple as meta tags and views or as complex as workflow.

Excel Spreadsheet translated to Sharepoint Lists

Defect tracking used to track bug lists, Inventory of assets, Project portfolio, Team roster in excel spreadsheet can be entered as Lists in Sharepoint. Similar to libraries, the advantage of Lists will be realized in utilizing many powerful features of SharePoint. One feature I like is the creation of views and rendered in various site collections. Another feature is the roll up feature targeted to respective audience.

Email correspondence translated to Discussion Threads

This is one of the best features of Sharepoint that I really like. With the difficulty of email management, the threaded discussion is a savior. It keeps the topics organized and stakeholders focused. While this is a nice feature of Sharepoint, it requires a lot of behavioral change. The incentive is to help everyone manage their emails better. It does not eliminate email, it brings sanity in emails by receiving quality correspondence.

The underlying big benefit of Sharepoint on artifacts mentioned above is all the presentation can be viewed over the web, hence one is not limited to a desktop program or to a designated file share repository. For more information, check this out http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointtechnology/HA011199881033.aspx