SharePoint Team Services for Doc Management?

Subject: SharePoint Team Services for Doc Management?
From: raverpup <phil_gochenour -at- earthlink -dot- net>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
Date: Thu, 18 Aug 2005 11:38:42 -0700 (GMT-07:00)


I'm working on developing a documentation library for the in-house application development group of an educational institution, and would like to hear about people's experiences with SharePoint Team Services.

Here's the situation: it's a small development group, about ten people, and the number of development projects is somewhere between 6-12 a year. Until very recently, documents were kept on a shared drive, but there was no organization aside from department/project name. In those folders were all kinds of documents, often without dates or authors.

My assignment has been to develop standard document sets for the SDLC, and to come up with a folder taxonomy for projects. One of the main issues I've seen is a lack of any version control or even consistent document property information.

I would like to institute something like Plone as full-bore CVS, because I think having an actual document routing and approval system would help with some of our security and just general document management issues. However, this is a full-on MS shop, and SharePoint Team Services is already available for free as part of the MS server set-up. There is the typical resistance, esp. on the part of the server admins, to bring in anything that they don't know or don't have experience managing.

The difficulty I've encountered is the granularity of security over documents and folders. With SP TS, it seems that you can only control access at the document library level, and not at the level of folders within the actual library. This is a concern because the folder taxonomy is set up in such a way that client-facing collaborative docs are kept exclusively in one folder, while all the internal develpment team documents are stored in other folders. One of the managers has repeatedly expressed a desire to limit client access to specific folders and documents, but this doesn't seem possible.

One solution I've come up with is to create a top-level site that contains archived documents for completed projects, then have subsites for current projects. If I understand correctly, if all department managers are given Admin rights for the top-level site, then they can create subsites for projects and manage the permissions for those project subsites as necessary. This would prevent the problem of a client from one department going in and looking at the documents for another department's project. It doesn't keep them from peeking in the other folders associated with their project, though.

I've looked at the SharePoint Portal with the Microsoft Content Manger Server as an option, but I think it's total overkill for our needs, and the price is prohibitive. It seems like SharePoint Portal 2001 would have been perfect for our needs, but the CMS functionality was largely done away with in favor of making it more of a website publishing tool.

Does anyone have any experience with SharePoint Team Services, in general or in regard to a similar situation? Any recommendations about how to set this thing up or manage it?

Phil

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