SharePoint

Alongside our work in bringing these stories to you and our colleagues back home at Christian Aid, Steven also burned the midnight oil working at our Dushanbe office whenever there was a spare moment…

With over 500 staff and 600+ grassroots partners in some of the poorest countries, we have to take great care in how we communicate and share information around the world. After all, it's no use having a great project in one country if that knowledge cannot be shared elsewhere.

So one of the things I'm responsible for is the introduction of Microsoft SharePoint at Christian Aid - it's a way to collaborate and share information between staff, wherever in the world they happen to be.

You can read the story of why we decided to go with SharePoint here.  But I'm often asked in NGO circles why we chose big bad old Microsoft rather than a 'good' open source route. Taking a moment to stand on my soap box, here's why...

As a charity we have a duty of care to the people who give us donations.  That duty is to maximise our 'profit' - the difference between costs and income - so that we're able to create the biggest impact in countries like Tajikistan.

Using a Microsoft product means that we are buying into a system that requires no bespoke development from us and, more importantly, does not require rare and expensive open source guru's to maintain it.  We can configure the software quickly - the SharePoint go live took four months from a standing start - and avoid the lengthy development cycles of open source. What's more, our staff get to work with a familiar interface… so the training burden is low.

We've got this all working in the UK; so my challenge for this trip would be to see exactly how well SharePoint worked from Dushanbe and if I could squeeze the tests in amongst everything else.

The first opportunity to have a look at things was during Eid.   Sat amongst the squawking PC’s (every time the power dips, which is often, the voltage regulator boxes screech like a bird) I got to play PC engineer – getting rid of viruses and updating windows so that the IT guys in London would trust a VPN connection from one of the machines.  It was a frustrating experience as the updates took over 8 hours to complete.

We never did get to test the VPN as the internet service provider couldn’t change the configuration settings in time (despite us paying an extortionate monthly fee for 512k access), but I did manage to get the staff connected through our eGap system and also prove SharePoint through Citrix.   Each of the methods has its disadvantages and I’d much rather be using the Cisco VPN - so we’ll be testing that remotely very soon.

The important thing was that I was able to train our staff in Dushanbe how to use SharePoint and they’re now able to share files and collaborate on line with colleagues in London.  Not bad for our first international pilot and I have a checklist of changes ready for when we hit the next international office (likely to be Nairobi).

For now, we’re close to having – for the first time ever - all Christian Aid staff able to view and contribute to the same information; be they here in head office, in a church building, out in a developing country, or on an international flight.   

We think that’s pretty amazing.

Postscript:  Our SharePoint deployment is part of something called the Common Knowledge Programme and was reviewed recently in Enterprise Information Magazine.  Email me for a copy of the article.