Planning for the Future: Which Product?

Brian Bolt, OIT Operational Director for the University Enterprise Roadmap, writes about the basis for selecting Microsoft SharePoint as the foundational technology for the Unified Web Experience at Boise State University:

In Information Technology, it’s common for a technologist to make recommendations for an application or service.  It is becoming more difficult to remember the days when technologists were closer to technology than end users. However, technologists today are no more connected than anyone else.

In an organization, technological uniqueness is counterbalanced by technology acquisition and support costs. Data centers populated by a myriad of hardware vendors require more personnel with non-overlapping skillsets, which increases costs and reduces the overall reliability of systems.

The Office of Information Technology’s Technical Operations department has standardized on a single common server hardware platform, as well as a single common storage platform.  By investing our financial and staffing resources into supporting and maintaining single platforms, our support knowledge is focused on optimizing system uptime and responsiveness of a single constant rather than multiple variables.

This strategy follows Max Davis-Johnson’s “Touchstone’s for IT Simplification” under The Concept of One: Align Information Technology staff to reduce duplication of effort and services.

Most application consumers don’t know OIT decided to standardize on a single common platform, and as we move up the technology stack from hardware to software, decisions made in the operations areas support applications that ultimately deliver learning, content, and business functions to your computer, tablet, or smartphone. It is imperative we get the hardware infrastructure correct so applications are available whenever and wherever they are needed.

However, the ability to access an application is very different than the ability to efficiently use that application; choosing the correct application is extremely important, and can be evaluated in many different ways. Software inherently has tangible and intangible costs, and paying to acquire software sometimes offsets the costs required to support and run the software. Striking a balance is extremely important, but so is weighing the anticipated longevity and maturity of a particular platform.

A Case for Microsoft SharePoint

The first version of Microsoft SharePoint was released in 2001. Since then, the application has grown in breadth and depth, growing beyond a simple “team portal” to include external data connections, integration with other Microsoft applications, enterprise content management, and graphic data representation, all the while providing high-availability and scalability.

SharePoint’s breadth and depth encompass four key areas found within the University Roadmap. The first is the Unified Web Experience. SharePoint’s rich features and reliability are more than capable of delivering the intended Unified Web Experience, providing a foundational environment for deploying a common interface, and creating a single point of access to information and important Boise State enterprise applications such as Blackboard, PeopleSoft, and Google Apps.

In future posts, I’ll talk about the other three areas where the Roadmap and Microsoft SharePoint intersect: Project Management, Data Warehouse and Business Intelligence.

Reposted from roadmap.boisestate.edu