How do you sharepoint?
Abbie and I have been called into service leading a Disciple I Class. Abbie has been leading Disciple classes for a couple of years now, and I took a Disciple I class with my wife a couple of years ago. We are adding some technology to the gig though.
First off we've established a site using Windows Sharepoint Services. After toying with a variety of templates we finally decided on a meeting site. After some content development, we did some minor customization of the site. Normally customizing web sites involves FrontPage, a Web Developer and more. We found, after an afternoon of online chat and tweaking that the site had come together with little effort, and no customized code.
I had noticed when I took a class a couple of years ago that was missing was the opportunity to review content or have discussions during the week between Tuesday night classes. This is where WSS really excels!!! It is built with exactly this type of situation. Abbie can share her notes (as the leader of the class) we can have discussions online, We can post documents and links so that the value of the class is not left there in the classroom.
So to make it more productive, Abbie's Sprinmt card will get a workout in the classroom. Part of what we'll be doing is running some of the content up to the site online as we work and learn. Our church has the tools onsite, however we have not even begun to touch the capablities of our systems. Hopefully through our industriousness, we'll be able to pry open some of that toolkit for more of the congregation. The church operates like most medium sized businesses. Wntire groups doing their own thing sometimes within an IT framework, othertimes, not so much. Exploiting Sharepoint as a content portal for staff as well as congregants is such an obvious choice, it's frustrating that, as an organization, we have not done more with it.
Here's to the future, here's to sharing. And that's my point...