Guest Blog by FiveSix Consulting's Tamara Austerlade: SharePoint in Higher Education

Higher education is different. It has a culture that recognizes as positives what many companies would find dysfunctional. Consensus-based decision making, lack of standardization, and a penchant for analysis over action encourages collaboration and discovery, but can make it difficult to be effective.  Throw in byzantine funding models and political intrigue that made Henry Kissinger "long for the simplicity of the Middle East", and you begin to get a sense for the complexity of the environment.

These factors make deploying SharePoint within institutions of higher learning uniquely challenging as well. Starting with where one might go for help. Many of the popular blogs and books about SharePoint make assumptions about the technical infrastructure and organizational structure that just don't apply in higher education. Or they don't adequately address the topics that are of critical importance, such as accessibility, cross-browser/OS support, or service charge-back models.

It is with this need in mind that Bamboo Solutions and FiveSix Consulting are proposing a series of blog posts and a new discussion forum focused on SharePoint in higher education. The goal is to build a repository of concrete, actionable advice on how to acquire the support, perform the planning, configure the tools, and manage the implementation so that SharePoint is a success at your institution. We hope the forum will be a place where higher education professionals will congregate to discuss a range of issues, be they SharePoint-related or not.

We know you are out there, higher education professionals! We'd love to hear from you...

• What is the one thing about trying to implement SharePoint that you just can't get figured out?
• If you could sit down with a few colleagues and talk shop, what would you bring up?
• Are there things that have worked well at your institution that you could share with others?
• What business process would you most like to automate?
• Does collaboration really happen in higher education?

Join us in the SharePoint in Higher Education forum, and let's get started.