Matthew Knott

On Tuesday, I met with my counterparts in Neath Port Talbot council, to discuss our SharePoint portals, shared experiences, challenges and hopes.

One of the pre-requisites was to look at whether collaboration was a viable option, I think it is, but rather that inter-authority collaboration, is there a bigger picture waiting to be painted?

On Tuesday, I went a little further down the M4 to Baglan, to get my first Glimpse of Neath Port Talbot councils SharePoint portal for schools in the authority. They're in a similar situation to us, in terms of the clients they're serving, and have created a very attractive product.

One of the purposes of the visit was to establish whether or not collaboration between myself and the NPT developers would be mutually beneficial. Some authorities have what they call developers but what I call SharePoint Designer Monkeys, and cannot really recipricate any sharing of information, hence making the actual collaboration rather one sided. NPT though have created a beautiful site, and it appears really well written, with some custom webparts created.

So, How Do We Do This?

After the meeting I've been thinking about what is the best method for collaborating with them, and what do I want to collaborate on? The medium for collaboration is probably the most important, at a high level, here's what I see as the options:

• Regular face-to-face meetings
• Conference Calls / Video Conference
• Online Collaboration Method

Face-to-face

For me, face-to-face isn't ideal. It's the nature of our work that problems and eureka moments don't happen at regular intervals, so some meetings there would invariably be nothing to discuss. Plus you have travel costs, arranging a room, preparing an agenda, all things that unnecessarily burden you, collaboration should be impulsive, and based around a topic or issue, not a date.

Conference calls

I think development collaboration needs to be more visual, plus you often need to consider the question or topic at length, maybe do some research. I can see the calls just resulting in lots of actions to take away rather than actual progress.

Online Collaboration

I left online collaboration until last, as I probably have the most to write about it, and it's the method I think will work best, but it has a number of pre-requisites.

It must me secure, as some of the discussions are about products in development and the conversations need to be confidential at this stage. 

Blogging / Wordpress

This was my first idea. The approach I envisaged was that I or they encounter a problem, or have a really good idea, and then just blog about it. That post acts as the start point, and the rest is handled through the comments system. Using this method, we keep the collaboration in one place, with a search option and the ability to create add-on modules as required.

Forums

A simpler method than blogging, the only problem is I worry that it's easier to lose focus on the topic as it has less prominence. On the flip side, responses are more managed and displayed better than through a comments system.

Other?

I really cannot think of another way beyond a bespoke collaboration tool. Suggestions are most welcome.

Anyway, thinking about all this bought me to another thought, is there a bigger picture here?

There Is A Bigger Picture...

Putting concerns about security to one side, lets consider what is really important in all of this? Why are we collaborating? The answer is to build better educational tools and facilities for use in school by teachers and students. It's about building better methods for parental engagement.

There are, no doubt, schools and education establishments out there who don't have SharePoint developers, but they need SharePoint webparts. They have a need or an idea, but no way of realising it without approaching an external entity, and sometimes they have no idea who to approach. If there was an online community of SharePoint developers focussed on development for Education, then one or several solutions could be produced, open source, and shared with the community. This way, profit, intellectual property, and commercial viability are all irrelevant, and what you get is a product that is shared amongst the community, and can be improved as part of that community.

So many companies have a monopoly on educational webparts and charge an absolute fortune for them. Not just webparts, there's the expert knowledge of what makes an effective learning platform. There are so many different configurations a school or authority could go for based on their requirements, the community could provide a sort of collaborative consultancy.

It would take some barrier breaking to make it a reality, I'm fairly sure my employer would initially be wary of me investing time in something that is going to be given away. But to develop a solution outright, I would counter-argue that the solution suggested is a good idea, something we could benefit from, and at the end, give back to the community and let the community improve upon it. Additionally, the process is reciprocative, if there is something we'd love to have on our portal, but are lacking the resources to create, then put a specification to the community and see who comes back with what.

I think that this would best be served by a bespoke solution, that I'd have to propose and see what people think, but if anyone reading this has any initial thoughts I would love to hear them.