Two Platforms for Collaboration
Collaboration in SharePoint usually takes place through one of two types of platforms: sites or workspaces.

• Sites - There are two types of sites in SharePoint that are most commonly used, both of which are designed for long-term use:
  • Team Sites are where teams store and display information, coordinate activities, and collaborate on projects.
  • Personal Sites are used by individuals to share public information, organize daily activities, share information about themselves with co-workers, and store private documents.
• Workspaces - There are also two types of workspaces in SharePoint that are most commonly used, both of which are typically created on an ad-hoc basis for short-term use:
  • Meeting Workspaces integrate SharePoint with Outlook and are great for managing meetings. Meeting workspaces can be used to post meeting agendas and information, track action items, and store documents and other files associated with the meeting. When the meeting request is sent out in Outlook, the attendees receive a link to the workspace. During the meeting attendees can access the workspace themselves through their web browser.
  • Document Workspaces are used to help groups of users collaborate on one or more documents, and are created through an Office application or web browser (in the Office application you select “shared workspace,” and a task pane opens asking you to name the workspace and select the members). Once a document workspace is created any member can open, check out, and edit the associated documents from the SharePoint server.

Many Ways to Collaborate
SharePoint makes it easy for anyone to create sites for use on your Intranet (with no coding required) and then include their choice of a wide range of applications for communicating and collaborating with others. Some of the more popular options include:

• Document Collaboration – Individual files can be dragged and dropped from the desktop to a SharePoint site; multiple files can be easily uploaded to the site. Once there, documents can be checked out, updated, and then checked back in by authorized team members. In addition, users can create document workspaces in which they post and edit documents. SharePoint supports multiple document types, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, pdf, HTML, and more.
• Task Management and Coordination – Through its integration with Outlook, SharePoint provides the ability to assign specific tasks to specific team members. The team member then has the option of updating the task through the task management application or from a web browser to show progress or completion.
• Blogs – Blogs can be used by a single user or a team to create informal postings about immediate or interesting information. Blogs are popular ways to provide team members with project updates, disseminate information about issues that have arisen and how they were fixed, and more.
• Wikis – Wikis are generally set up as a place to go for information. Departments or teams can use wikis as a site to which they post explanations of their department, team, or project.
• Discussion Forums – SharePoint can be used to set up discussion forums on which team members can hold newsgroup-style discussions on relevant topics.
• Events – Company or department events can be posted to your site, where they will be seen in a list format.
• Calendars – Calendars can be used to post team events, including meetings, social events, and all-day events. Calendars can also be used to track team milestones, such as deadlines or product release dates, which are not specific to a time interval.
• Announcements – Announcements can be used to post messages or news on your site, and share status updates.
• RSS Feeds – This feature provides the ability to make website content available to subscribers through news, blogs, lists, libraries, search query, and more.

Many companies are seeing the benefits – especially in terms of increased productivity – of SharePoint’s collaboration capabilities. If you’d like to talk to a SharePoint expert to explore what this information portal can do for your organization, please don’t hesitate to give us a call.

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