About SharePoint

Many people have expressed the need for an effective means of storing and collaborating on shared documents across departments or divisions within the School.

SharePoint will supersede the Public Folder system which has been in operation for many years but has now reached its useful limit in terms of technology and capacity.

SharePoint will provide a much more powerful means with which to work together. Rather than saving documents on multiple shared network drives or on personal drives and then people having to email them back and forth, it’s easier to place it all in one centrally-managed repository.

SharePoint is a collaborative work tool that enables colleagues to work together on current and active projects or tasks. This applies to work within small close-knit teams, or more widely to cover work that it shared across a department, division, or across the LSE.

The primary goal is for SharePoint to become the central location for all things shared. Typical uses may include: collaborative working on a research report; storage of documents relating to a cross-departmental project; a location to work on meeting agendas or distribute minutes; or simply a means to upload drafts to enable colleagues to have their input.

There is no formal limit to the number of sites a department, division, or team may request. You may, for example, work on different projects and each project will need a new site. However, each site will need to have a nominated site owner and they will have to undergo site owner training.

SharePoint teamsites is first and foremost a tool designed to enable a ‘live’ collaborative work environment rather than a means of long-term storage of documents. 

SharePoint has limited storage capacity on a primary SharePoint site and this quota applies to and includes all the subsites created underneath the primary site. Requests for more space can be made via the IT Service Desk. Alternatively, see Records Management for guidance on archiving documents.

Although SharePoint has many functions, we urge users to consider that other purpose-built systems may already be in place that have been designed to cater for specific needs.

For instance, we don’t recommend using it as a location to host course work or training materials when Moodle already exists for that reason. Depending on the intended use, you may find that other systems suit your purposes better.