The Seattle Opera is making the switch from an outdated internal file share system to SharePoint. A team from Office.com is helping the organization transition to a better way of working. Watch the Opera’s progress in “Office Intervention: We Need SharePoint!" Part 1 and Part 2, and read on to track their progress.
In this article
The Twilight of the H: drive
At Seattle Opera, the only struggle more dramatic than the onstage confrontation between Siegfried and the Dragon Fafner has been the hidden grappling of the company’s heroic IT professionals with the hideous tangle of information management systems in the administrative offices — until, that is, the intrepid warriors in the service of Clarity and Efficiency came upon the technology with which they could at last drive down and conquer their cruelly wasteful and obstructive foe.
(The name of that technology? Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007)
Employee held captive by chaos
For many years, the Opera’s unruly masses of electronic information have been stored on — and frequently held captive by— the “H: drive”, a vast, ancient, tottering server crammed with calendars, documents, records, lists, spreadsheets, and nobody knew what else, all massed together into a welter of details both current and obsolete. In all too many cases, only one member of the entire staff aware of the location of any specific document.
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Calendars that defy the space-time continuum
A major performance arts company stands or falls organizationally on its ability to manage and communicate schedules. Both creative and administrative staff are constantly juggling, reconciling, distributing, and renegotiating dozens of deeply overlapping calendars — and historically, all this work has had to be handled in clumsy, inefficient, and frankly exhausting ways, with no single central point of coordination and access. Different departments at the Seattle Opera maintain an array of different calendars tracking artists, equipment, performances, rehearsals, lessons. Some of these calendars live in Microsoft Excel, or in other programs. Worse yet, some live on the "H: drive." A calendar that you cannot see is not a calendar that gets you where you need to be.
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Documents lost in the inbox or replicating out of control
An opera is perhaps the mostly highly collaborative of all performances. It can take scores or even hundreds of people to mount a single production: singers, dancers, chorus members, designers, technicians, stage crew, orchestra members, the conductor, and the director. With all of that collaboration going on, the various parties are constantly exchanging notes and sketches, suggestions and plans, requests and the responses to those requests. It’s precisely the sort of situation that cries out for a state-of-the-art collaboration solution — but the Opera’s standard method for sharing a document has all too often been just to attach it to e-mail and hope for the best.
And as everyone in the truly modern office knows, sharing documents by attaching them to e-mail is the first step on the slippery downward path that leads all too soon into the terrifying Swamp of Multiple Versions. The document goes round and round, spawning replicas of itself as it goes, each replica potentially altered by each further recipient and sender — till, in the end, there may be dozens or even hundreds of partial clones, not one of them precisely identical to any of its ill-gotten siblings.
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IT staff besieged by requests for access
Then, too, the administration of permissions on the H: drive had become a task of Byzantine intricacy — and in a large organization like the Opera, it is of the first importance that each player, while able to get hold of all of the data that they need, should have access to none that they do not. (The day that the international diva sees the costumer’s note to her director expatiating upon the diva’s rapidly expanding waistline is going to be a bad day for many more than the three people most directly involved.)
All in all, then, the information management situation at the Opera was a perfect context for daily hardship and annoyance, with a potential for disasters of truly Wagnerian proportions.
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The dawn of the SharePoint era at the Seattle Opera
Thankfully, there is a way out of this terrifying situation. At Seattle Opera, even as I write these words, the heroic IT staffers are taking decisive steps to free themselves and all of their hard-working colleagues from the dusty coils of the past.
And their solution?
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, naturally.
What is Office SharePoint Server 2007, and how can it help the Seattle Opera? If you're not familiar with SharePoint Server, you might want to check out some of the following resources, which provide a basic introduction to the capabilities of SharePoint Server.
If you're eager to get on with the story and find out about some of the ways the Seattle Opera might overcome their specific obstacles, read on.
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Conquer document chaos
With SharePoint, documents can be stored in a central location, where they can be easily found or shared.
Documents can be checked out to be reviewed or edited, then checked back in again, so that there’s always only one current version of the document, no matter how many people are collaborating on it. And you can track versions of the document, if you want to keep a record of the changes that have been made to it.
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Manage schedules, projects, and information
Again: With SharePoint, schedule information can be shared easily, so that overlaps and potential conflicts are instantly visible. And because all of the schedules are centrally maintained and easily accessible, nobody has to be confused, at any hour of the working day, about where he or she is supposed to be — and nobody will be due in two places at once.
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Manage people and sites
Also, SharePoint provides permissions management, so that each player has access to all of those resources (and only those resources) that they need to fulfill their role.
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Train your SharePoint champions
Finally — as the people at Seattle Opera are enthusiastically learning day by day — Microsoft also provides a large selection of articles, videos, and trainings, all of which help make customization and rollout of SharePoint Server a smooth and comfortable process. The user assistance professionals at Office Online are working closely with the Opera to ensure that their SharePoint installation is optimized both for the needs of the organization as a whole and for the ease and convenience of each individual player, and that all of the help that anyone will need is in place whenever and wherever they need it.
So: Watch the videos linked here, about how Microsoft and SharePoint have been assisting the heroes at Seattle Opera to make good their escape from the dragonish tyranny of the H: drive — and then get in touch with your Microsoft sales representative, to get your own liberation underway today.
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