I don’t particularly want to implement personal sites at this stage as it’s not what we are trying to achieve with our intranet. Also, the scalability of SPS seems fairly irrelevant – our single-server Sharepoint on SQL Server install should be plenty beefy for the foreseeable future. It looks like Class Server can be installed into WSS, so that shouldn’t be an issue either.

From the information I’ve trawled through on Microsoft’s site and elsewhere, it seems that the extra features in SPS boil down to:

• Audiences – targeting items of content on a page at specific groups of people. This could mean that a particular news item is only visible to staff, with pupils seeing the same page minus that item.
• Personalisation – letting users tweak/turn off some web parts on some pages (for themselves only). We would probably have to disable that feature to remove an avenue for confusion.
• Areas (topics) – this is very poorly described in the Microsoft material (Damnit Microsoft, use some screenshots!). From what I can gather it allows you to have a hierarchy of WSS “site collections“, which appear to be hierarchies of sites anyway. Perhaps they are saying that subsites within a site collection have no navigation system and “Areas” fill that need. If that is the case, it’s a pretty poor omission from WSS.

  I shall quote a chunk from the Microsoft Web-based Training (which I can’t link to because of their wacky site design).
  
  
  

  In SharePoint Portal Server, areas serve two purposes. First, they provide a navigational structure or map of the portal site and related content. Second, they provide a centralized structure for information browsing. Areas direct readers to the information they seek through an organized hierarchy of topics.

  Within each area you can create site collections; essentially a collection of Web sites in Windows SharePoint Services. A site collection has the same owner and shares administrative settings. Each site collection has a top-level Web site. This top-level Web site can have multiple subsites, and each subsite can have multiple subsites, down as many levels as your users need. Since sites are nested in a hierarchy within the site collection, it can be challenging to manage them all.

  This hierarchy allows your users to have a main working site for the entire team, plus individual working sites or shared sites for side projects. Top-level Web sites and subsites allow different levels of control over the features and settings for sites.
  

  
  

• Improved search – search through file shares, external websites and numerous other things that can already be searched more effectively by other means. I don’t see much mileage in that one. I suspect it might overcome the problem that searches in WSS are only local to the Sharepoint site that you are searching in (i.e. they don’t search subsites), but that isn’t stated explicitly.
• Scalability

I feel that there is a great deal of the confusion between what features are available on WSS and what is SPS-only. This is made worse by Microsoft themselves using the term “Sharepoint portal” when they are seemingly talking about WSS sites. The Class Server FAQ illustrates my point. Possibly their own staff can’t quite discern the difference either.

A few quick notes comparing Sharepoint to a plain ol’ fileserver when used as the main storage location for shared (non-personal) files in school:

Pros (pro-Sharepoint) Improved collaboration Content can have metadata attached easily to make it more searchable It’s easier to publish content for access outside school if it’s already being served up by an internal webserver. It looks prettier. (Not to be underestimated) People are (I suspect) more likely to organise files in a systematic way if they belong to an intranet site than if they are only stored in a shared directory. It may be possible to generate statistics of which files and document libraries are most used and which are never accessed. This is pretty much a non-starter with file auditing in Windows. Cons (anti-Sharepoint) Administration of permissions is nowhere near as simple/powerful as it is within the native Windows interface Backups are carried out at the database level, so it’s an all-or-nothing approach. This means that when you run out of backup room/time, you can’t simply choose not to back less important areas up (no that’s not good practice anyway). It also means that restores are a lot more complex. No advanced NTFS features are available (volume shadow copy, encrypted filesystem, compressed files). You only miss them when they’re gone! Sharepoint-aware anti-virus products must be used to spot viruses in files stored in the Sharepoint database. That means extra expense and reduced choice of vendors. It’s always going to be much slower navigating through a Sharepoint site to get to the files you want than navigating a folder hierarchy in Windows. Some old, naff software may not support saving to a URL via WebDAV. Unfortunately old, naff software is the bedrock of UK education.

This post is subject to change as ideas pop into my bonce (or other people suggest them).

That is all. 

Until recently, the official Microsoft “community” for Class Server was an MSN group with restricted access. My application for membership was turned down with no reason given. Way to go. After a certain amount of haranguing, Microsoft have now set up a public newsgroup (google’s version here) for community support, but there isn’t a great deal of activity even now and many questions don’t get any response at all. The majority of the support documents are still hosted on classserver.msn.com (why?) and some are a bit, uhm, version 3: Class Server Troubleshooting Guide as linked to by the current Microsoft Support site.

In version 4, Microsoft have turned Class Server into an addon for Sharepoint (available via “web parts”). I’ll have to get them working together nicely before I can decide if I like that, but at the moment I feel it’ll be an improvement. Unfortunately, it won’t save you any time during the “provisioning”(enrolment) process, because Class Server will still need to know which pupils are in which classes. This is no mean feat when you have to drag your data from the clutches of SIMS.net (UK education peeps: shudder now). Rumours that Harrison Ford will be searching for the fabled SIMS.net database documentation in the fourth Indiana Jones movie are apparently unfounded. The provisioning process is now performed with the commandline “CSProvision” tool after studying the 30-page provisioning guide. Fun. I don’t mean to sound like too much of a crybaby, but I suspect that a more readable layout is possible.

The data munging battle continues regardless, with the following aims:

• kids, staff and their respective classes entered in a reasonable time (next year: before term begins)
• enrolment data entered in a repeatable (i.e. well-documented) way
• enrolment data entered with minimal manual manipulation
• class names entered in a way that is useful to staff and pupils (i.e. they can recognise their own classes)
• a working method for rolling the pupils over into their next year without losing their assignments etc. (it’s not much use creating a portfolio of work during year 10, then archiving it at the start of year 11)
• a simple way to archive/delete data from year 11/13 pupils at the end of the school year (this one seems fairly easy)