We heard back from a number of users on campus who tried out SharePoint after reading our initial announcement about it back in April.
Here are some important things we have learned:
1.) Staff members seemed to like the idea of being able to set up a team site in SharePoint as a place where their committee members could easily share and collaborate on documents rather than e-mailing large attachments.
2.) Faculty members showed interest in generating team sites for different research groups they are involved with. They wanted to be able to give access to colleagues off campus. We are working on this and will let the campus community know as soon as a procedure is in place. For now, only people on the sunysb.edu domain will be able to access SharePoint sites at Stony Brook.
3.) Logging in - you must know your NetID and NetID password in order to log in to a SharePoint site. You find your NetID and NetID password in SOLAR under NetID Maintenance. Stony Brook employees who work on East Campus (UHMC) may not be as familiar with the NetID and may have to establish a NetID password in SOLAR which will take 15 minutes. Once this takes effect, you type the SharePoint Web address into your browser’s address bar. You will be asked to authenticate in the following way:
Username: SUNYSB.EDU\NetID
Password: NetID Password
Where "NetID" is your NetID and "NetID Password" is your NetID Password.
* Make sure you are using a backslash ( \ ) between SUNYSB.EDU and your NetID
4.) When site managers are granting other people access to their sites by creating lists of users and groups from the Active Directory, they need to be cognizant that they are selecting the person’s name that is attached to the sunysb domain. Hospital employees, for example, are listed in the active directory twice with both their UHMC account and their SUNYSB account. Be sure to select the one that reads /sunysb if your team or committee involves SB Hospital employees. Your users need to be signed in to the sunysb.edu domain in order to access a Stony Brook SharePoint site.
5.) It is best to use Internet Explorer as your browser when trying to access a SharePoint site.
6.) Web browsers such as Mozilla Firefox, Safari, and Opera are able to access SharePoint Web pages, but will not be able to use drag-and-drop for Web parts, explorer view, or the rich text editor. Safari (for Windows) users must have version 3.1 or higher in order to log in to SharePoint sites.
7.) Internet Explorer users - To avoid having to authenticate numerous times, add your SharePoint sites to your local intranet zone in Internet Explorer. Here’s how you do it:
Step 1: Open Internet Explorer and go to Tools > Internet Options
Step 2: Click on the Security tab
Step 3: Select the Local Intranet zone icon and then click the Sites button
Step 4: Click the Advanced button when you come to this screen
Step 5: Remove any Web address that may already be located in the “Add this website to the zone” field.
Step 6: Enter https://mysite.stonybrook.edu and click Add.
Step 7: Enter https://teams.stonybrook.edu and click Add.
Step 8: Enter https://web.stonybrook.edu and click Add.
Step 9: Enter https://courses.stonybrook.edu and click Add.
Step 10: Click Close.
Step 11: Click OK.
Step 12: Click OK.
8.) Firefox users can find out how to avoid having to authenticate numerous times in SharePoint by accessing this document.
9.) Everyone on campus automatically has a MySite (100 MB of space on the SharePoint server). You can begin experimenting in SharePoint immediately with your MySite. To log in, type https://mysite.stonybrook.edu. Here is the way Microsoft explains MySite.
10.) Read Microsoft’s instructions and tutorials to help new users get started.
These are just a few things we’ve learned so far. We will continue to share our findings with you. If you want to request a SharePoint team site, visit the SharePoint Information Site.
