SharePoint In Education Demo Project Review Part 2

A about 4 weeks ago there became a Content Pack available to show some of the possibilities of SharePoint 2010 in an educational content.

You can download the project demo pack from codeplex. I installed the content packs on the SharePoint 2010 IW Demo VHD since I think that it was pretty much designed to be that way.

The demo comes with a bunch of Content Packs that you can install and includes the following:

• University Public Internet Site
• University Intranet
• K-12 Extranet
• K-12 Intranet
• K-12 Public Internet Site
• A whole bunch of BI Tools as well

I think that it’s a great demo that would work really well showing educators a real life example and structure that can be applied to an entire district. It strong in some areas (particularly BI and WCM) and weak on others (virtual classrooms) but could form a great starting point for a district to discover SharePoint.

To check out the reviews of the University Public Site, K-12 Public Sites and University Intranet have a look at Part 1 located here.

Contoso Schools District Intranet

The District Intranet is an example of creating a secure environment that can act as a hub for a school district. Whilst the branding and IA is pretty standard is does come with some neat features to demonstrate:

• District Announcements and Headlines: This is a great way to show a district an extremely powerful way to disseminate information centrally

• District Dashboard: Great example of leverage Performance Point and Excel Services to create some fantastic interactive reporting tools on a district level. Lots of examples and interactivity to demonstrate here.

• Principal Dashboard: Once again more BI facilities here with a student centric school based approach.

• K-12 Teacher Dashboard: Once again more BI facilities here with a classroom based scoring system.

• Teacher Resources Wiki: An example of some of the wiki functionality available in SharePoint 2010

• In Service Request Form: Finally another one of my favorite features in SP2010. In this example we have a form a workflow. So many uses in education from student submissions, internal district financial processes and even external forms.

Contoso Parent and Teacher Extranet K-12

The concept of engaging parents in their child’s education has been a consistent theme throughout my work with educators. What better way to break down the barriers of communication with parents than with a secure online presence for communication.

The Parent Extranet has a number of interesting features worth pointing out:

• Online rendering of Office Documents using Office Web Applications show that all students and parents can view information even without the Office client installed on their machines

• Student Resources show how external information (from existing school systems perhaps) can be leveraged in SharePoint 2010 and viewed online

There is also a integration piece with Live@edu which I haven’t implemented but will allow integration with live accounts and the extranet. I plan on looking at this in the future and updating the blog, otherwise see what I think of Live@edu in this blog post.

Contoso University Student Portal

The Contoso University Student Portal is meant to be a self service area for students and does a really good job in showing how various information assets can be combined used Business Connectivity Services in the one area.

I think this is a really powerful aspect of SharePoint 2010 that appeals to the education sector because there are so many legacy systems out there. The power of SharePoint is that now we can display the data within the platform, concentrate on delivering maximum value to our users, and then at a latter stage look at replacing legacy systems.

So lets take a look:

• Student Petition Form allows a student to submit an online form that will then be put through a workflow to track any submissions.

• Credit Summary is an example of leveraging BCS to expose external data from within SharePoint, this time from a student grading system

So that a quick run through of the demo. Awesome job by the creators of this and I really think this will be invaluable to a lot of school districts as they try to determine how SharePoint 2010 can help them.

Tags: education

Category: Case Studies, How To