The Catholic Education Office of Canberra and Goulburn deployed a SP 2007 trial at the beginning 2011 to evaluate it as a corporate information portal.

“It was so successful it snowballed,” said Online Services Officer, Juliette Major. The Archdiocese is responsible for 55 schools, where some Principals are now using SharePoint TeamSites to coordinate meeting agendas and discuss issues before they need to journey to face to face meetings.

HP TRIM is still the corporate EDRMS for staff in the CEO head office in Canberra. Remote staff do not access TRIM, instead accessing documents through a SharePoint portal. SharePoint also provides the CEO’s public facing Web site. More than 2200 teachers have access to Intranet, but there are currently no plans to extend this to parents and students.

Each school is able to publish their own Intranet in SharePoint with document views, folders, calendars, etc. Several schools have taken on their own Intranet sites as part of a trial to replace corporate information being stored in a Learning Management System.

“The uptake from Principals has been excellent,” said Major, “although we gave them no other   option to get information. We used to supply information through a Learning Management system called “myinternet” but 14 months ago the CEO issued a directive that all information would be delivered through SharePoint as the LMS was being phased out.”

The major challenges identified with the new platform have been the familiar ones: SharePoint sprawl, governance, records management and user adoption.

Governance challenges are being overcome.

“Because our site was initially delivered as a trial site, and within 3-4 months we decided to use it as a production site, there was a bit of toing and froing over who looked after what section. The success of the Intranet as a communication portal was unexpected so we hadn’t put enough thought into governance issues before it became popular.

"However, we are starting to make inroads into that. The use of SP 2007 has been a tremendous learning experience and we are much better placed now to deliver a SharePoint 2010 solution to our schools later this year”