Ask Slashdot: How To Share a SharePoint Site? 151
New submitter grzzld writes "I am a systems analyst for a County in New York. Last year I made a SharePoint site that manages grants and it was well received. So much so that it won a NACo award. Since then, there have been several requests from other municipalities from around the country who would like to get this SharePoint site. The county is trying to figure out how to protect ourselves from people making money from it and having people hold us liable if it they use it and something goes awry. I am afraid that ultimately nothing will be done and the site will not be shared since at the end of the day it is much easier to not do anything and just say no. I proposed that we license it under an Open Source agreement but I am not versed enough in the differences between all of them. It is also unclear to me if I could do this since the nature of the 'program' is a SharePoint site. It seemed like CodePlex would be a good place to put this since it is Microsoft centric and it an open source initiative. I just want to contribute my work to others who may find it useful. The county just wants to make sure they can't be held liable and have somebody turn my work around and make a buck. How can I release this to the world and make sure the county's concerns are addressed?"
Can you say "lawyer"? (Score:1, Informative)
The county wants to make sure no one can make a profit off of this, AND they want to make sure no one can sue them?
1) GET
2) A
3) LAWYER
Surely the county must have one or two floating around who can do this. This is not an IT function. Sheesh! Learn where your boundaries are, boy.
This one? (Score:4, Informative)
Online Grants Management System
Suffolk County, New York
Population: 1,493,350 (2010)
Program Year: 2011
Abstract:
In Suffolk County, NY, the development of grant applications as well as the coordination of successfully funded grants across was determined to be an inefficient system.. Individual staff and programmatic units each kept their own separate monitoring and tracking systems that recorded different levels and phases of grants. In some instances, there were gaps in the collection of information. An interdisciplinary group convened to discuss the problem and to plan for improvements. The planning group brainstormed and used additional quality improvement strategies in order to develop the Grants management System (GMS). GMS has developed as a centralized tracking and coordination system that tracks grants through very phase: the evaluation of whether to apply for a Request for proposal (RFP), application submission, grant award, acceptance of the award by the county, development and finalization of contracts, inventory management, monitoring of expenditures, claiming, revenue receipting, grants reporting, grants purchases, etc. Feedback from SCDHS staff indicated a high level of satisfaction with GMS, improved knowledge and skills, improved management and implementation of grants. Due to the improved efficiencies of GMS, the SCDHS was able to reduce the grants staff by 2 Full Time Equivalents (FTE), with significant cost savings.
By "Site" what are we talking? (Score:4, Informative)
The site schema? Custom web-parts? Masterpages? Data? Everything?
You could create a site definition that contained as much or as little or as much as your site as you wanted; wrap it up in a Visual Studio solution/WSP and then people could deploy an instance of your site with all of the above pre-previsioned. At that point it's just a SharePoint extension so would be no different to open-sourcing an Office extension. Even better, site templates are largely just XML files so it's even less "complicated" than custom-code - it's all just parsed by the core product.
Re:Public Domain (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Why can't anyone make a buck? (Score:2, Informative)
For some strange reason, many reasonable and successful adults still have a playground mentality when it comes to sharing the ball, even when it's someone else's ball. The only difference is that the fights happen inside the courtroom instead of behind the equipment shed.