Microsoft Share Point help?

ledvedderman

I'm interviewing for a job next week where I would be the administrator of getting a knowledge based help desk up and running for a state agency. I've found out that the program of choice for implementing the help desk is Microsoft Share Point. Luckily for me, none of the others interviewing know anything about Share Point, so we're all on par with eachother there.

Does anyone have any basic knowledge that would give me a good idea as to how it is used and from there I could come up with plans on how I think it would benefit the agency?

polaris

i would think the MS site would have the relevant info but i'll say how it is utilized for my company:

1. Information portal site.
2. Each department can post relevant pieces of information that other departments might find handy.
3. Company and industry information can be posted as well.
4. You can also have profiles of employees so that if you have a question - you can quickly find out who the right person is.

if you need more help - let me know the industry and i can help make up stuff

ledvedderman

polaris wrote:

i would think the MS site would have the relevant info but i'll say how it is utilized for my company:

1. Information portal site.
2. Each department can post relevant pieces of information that other departments might find handy.
3. Company and industry information can be posted as well.
4. You can also have profiles of employees so that if you have a question - you can quickly find out who the right person is.

if you need more help - let me know the industry and i can help make up stuff

Awesome man. I'm on my way to check that out.

It's for the State Board of Elections. Basically, what they're looking for is that there is a problem where someone calls the Board of Elections and talks to 3 people and somehow gets four different answers. We're wanting to log every call that comes in, give the correct answer the first time, and log it for future phone calls so we can just look up the response that was correct.

Also there will be some implementation requirements as to how you will get this project off the ground, train the employees, and then studying call data to ensure that phone calls are returned in a proper time frame and delegating the phone call responses to the different divisions around the office.

polaris

ledvedderman wrote:

Awesome man. I'm on my way to check that out.

It's for the State Board of Elections. Basically, what they're looking for is that there is a problem where someone calls the Board of Elections and talks to 3 people and somehow gets four different answers. We're wanting to log every call that comes in, give the correct answer the first time, and log it for future phone calls so we can just look up the response that was correct.

Also there will be some implementation requirements as to how you will get this project off the ground, train the employees, and then studying call data to ensure that phone calls are returned in a proper time frame and delegating the phone call responses to the different divisions around the office.

right ... then it's sort of like any help desk - the support agent just surfs their knowledge base for answers ...

same thing here i guess - you would classify calls into various categories and have appropriate answers along with potential follow up questions associated with those questions - that way everyone answers the same ...

it's a big project tho - you need to have experienced project managers who can keep the project on time and budget ... it is definitely not going to come without its challenges ...

ledvedderman

That's exactly it. They're just wanting to get your typical run of the mill Help Desk up and running. I have the project managing skills, some decent tech skills, but Share Point and knowledge base tools are still fairly new to me.

polaris

it's basically an information portal - it has it's limitations although the latest version is much better ...

good luck

ledvedderman

Awesome. Thanks for your help polaris

markymark550

I don't know what version of SharePoint you will use, but here's a feature list for version 2. I'm sure that version 3 includes those features and probably adds some more.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsserver/sharepoint/bb848084.aspx

I don't develop with SharePoint, but here's some of my understandings:
-Like polaris said, it's used as an information portal
-it's very good as a repository for documents, which is part of why it's easy to search using SharePoint
-on the development side, user accounts and user security are supposed to be very easy to implement
-it's supposed to be easily extendable (as numbers of users and applications grow, there isn't a negative side effect on performance)

South of Seattle

Were using the new SP at our office. You can also set up a forum on it so employees and can post and share ideas. Also you can implement an office communicator that blends several IM clients into one.