Hi David,
Firstly, I agree with you that this looks to be a rather narrowly scoped
piece of work.  It is the kind of study that we haven't funded to date
and it's something that we didn't fund without a certain amount of
internal angst!  On that basis, I think it is worth me trying to explain
where we are coming from with it.

You should note that this study comes out of our new Research Programme

http://www.eduserv.org.uk/research/

rather than the previous Eduserv Foundation (which has now been wrapped
up except in the sense that we are continuing to support projects that
we previously funded under the Foundation).  Our previously announced
ITT for a study looking at the way Web content is managed by HEIs
(currently being undertaken by SIRC)

http://www.eduserv.org.uk/research/studies/wcm2009

came from the same place.

The change from a Foundation to a Research Programme brought with it a
subtle, but significant, change of emphasis.  Eduserv is a non-profit IT
services company.  We have a charitable mission to "realise the benefits
of ICT for learners and researchers", something we believe we do most
effectively thru the services we deliver, e.g. those provided for the
education community (particularly HE).  Because of that, we felt we
would get better 'value' from our research funding (more bang-per-buck
if you like) if we tried to align it more closely with the kinds of
services we offer.  That is what we are trying to do thru the new
Research Programme.

Our services to HE currently include OpenAthens and Chest, though we
have a desire to improve our Web hosting/development offer within the
sector as well (something we currently sell primarily into the public
sector).  For info... we are also in the final stages of developing a
new data centre in Swindon and we hope to use that as the basis for new
services to the HE sector in the future.

As a service provider, we sense a significant (and growing) interest in
the use of MS SharePoint as the basis for the provision of a fairly wide
range of solutions.  This is particularly true in the public sector,
where we also operate, but also in HE (for example, the HEA are just in
the process of initiating a SharePoint project).  Please note, I'm not
saying this is necessarily good thing - my personal view is that it is
not (though my personal view on all this is largely irrelevant!).

We tried to broaden the scope of the ITT in line with the kind of
"groupware" suggestion you make below but ultimately we felt that in
doing so it was hard to capture the breadth of things that people are
trying to do in SharePoint without ending up with something quite fuzzy
and unfocused.  On that basis, we reluctantly narrowed in on a specific
technology - something we are not used to doing.

Let me be quite clear.  We are not looking for a study that says MS
SharePoint is the answer to everything (or indeed anything).  Nor, that
it is the answer to nothing.  We are looking to understand what people
in HE are doing with SharePoint, what they think works well, what they
think is broken, why they have considered but rejected it and so on.

In that sense, it is a piece of market research... pure and simple.
However, we believed (perhaps wrongly?) that the community would also be
interested in this topic, which is why the findings of the work will be
made openly available under a CC licence.  The intention is to help both
us and the community make better long term deployment decisions and,
rightly or wrongly, we felt that decisions about one particular piece of
software, i.e. SharePoint, was a significant enough part of that in this
particular case to make the study worthwhile.

Hope that helps?

Note, I'm very happy to continue to hear if people think we have gone
badly wrong on this because it will help us to spend our money more
wisely (i.e. more effectively for the benefit of both us and the
community) in the future.

Best,

Andy
 
________________________________

Andy Powell
Research Programme Director
Eduserv  
 
[log in to unmask] 
01225 474319 / 07989 476710
www.eduserv.org.uk
efoundations.typepad.com
twitter.com/andypowe11
________________________________

 
Eduserv Symposium 2009 - Evolution or revolution: The future of identity
and access management for research
 

-----Original Message-----
From: Managing institutional Web services
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of David R. Newman
Sent: 15 May 2009 20:07
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Eduserv ITT: Investigation into the uptake and use of
Microsoft SharePoint by Higher Education Institutions

Ed Barker wrote:
> APOLOGIES FOR CROSS-POSTING
> 
> Eduserv ITT: Investigation into the uptake and use of Microsoft
SharePoint
> by Higher Education Institutions

What a remarkably narrow research scope. It would be interesting to find
out what groupware HEI institutions are using to support particular
functions (co-ordinating international research projects, helping
students work together in group projects, joint report editing, keeping
track of expenses, ...). But just one product from one supplier?

It is almost as bad as a draft ICT for learning strategy  I have seen
that identifies the pedagogical needs to support active and
constructivist learning, using Web 2.0 interaction, then uses that to
justify changing to Sharepoint's document-centric view, rather than
Moodle, Zoho or dozens of other Web 2.0 leaders.

-- 
Dr. David R. Newman, Queen's University Management
School, Belfast BT7 1NN, Northern Ireland (UK)
Tel. +44 28 9097 3643 FAX: +44 28 9097 5156
mailto:[log in to unmask]
http://www.qub.ac.uk/mgt/