Comments on: Microsoft SharePoint in Law Firms

By: Wendy Reynolds

Wendy Reynolds — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 14:03:00 +0000

Having participated in two Sharepoint portal projects, I can’t say enough about the flexibility of the product. I seems that, if you are willing to learn the vocabulary of Sharepoint and spend some time getting to know the back end, you can literally do anything you want.
That said, it is incredibly tempting to do *everything*. Mistake! Mistake! The literature is full of “Sharepoint gone wrong” horror stories. Some observations:
- Governance is important. Each project/product should have a clear goal and audience, and deviation should be discouraged.
- For your first project, use Sharepoint “out of the box”. Customization is tempting, but can be a killer (and won’t make you any friends with your IT department). You can do a remarkable amount of great work with the product as it is. Get good at that first.
- Don’t reproduce your shared drives inside Sharepoint. Shared drives become a nightmare when anyone can create a folder, nobody is responsible for records management in there, and junk accumulates. The same thing can happen in Sharepoint if there is no control.

By: Ted Tjaden

Ted Tjaden — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 22:10:12 +0000

Hi Sue:

Thanks for your comment. I haven’t heard too much about SharePoint for an academic law library.

As you may know, SharePoint can be used for deploying or creating external websites. However, I suspect many academic law libraries might be subject to their central university web management policies, etc.

For internal information management, there could be lots of useful applications using SharePoint: internal research and writing guides, wikis to create and publish manuals/guides, tracking faculty requests for research materials, integrating (assuming this is possible) with BlackBoard or other electronic classroom/teaching sites, and so on.

If you assume a law school professor/library/law student total head count of say 700 people, you are close in size to a mid-sized law firm, although there would perhaps be less need for internal communication in a law school setting than in a law firm.

One benefit of SharePoint I forgot to mention in my post is the easier implementation of automated document workflow, something which might have less application in academia.

However, I would defer to someone else’e comments, if any.

By: Sue Connor

Sue Connor — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 16:27:33 +0000

I’ve heard an awful lot about SharePoint recently, but usually only in reference to law firms. Does anyone think this resource would be useful in an academic law library? I don’t know enough about it to know whether or not it would be useful in that environment.

Thanks.