Platform Overview
The Fountain uses the modern SharePoint in Microsoft 365 service. The main page is the focal point of the platform, bringing in content from all the different divisional pages. The main page uses managed metadata and categories to pull in news and events to different sections of the page.
The system is a bunch of independently managed pages that are all nested and connected to the main page using metadata.
About Divisional Pages
Think of a division’s page as a place to share information important to employees in your division or department. For example, the site for Academic Affairs offers a quick glance at upcoming faculty deadlines and has a specific spot for grant opportunities. That information is important to faculty, but it probably isn’t something an employee in Building Services needs.
Identifying the audience for each piece of content is key. If the content you’re sharing is something you want all employees to know about, you’ll want to use the managed metadata or category tags to push that content up to the main site. If it’s just for your division, you’ll use metadata tags to organize your site.
There are features in some content pieces that allow them to be focused and visible only to those in a group the content librarian(s) identify. For example, IT Solutions uses internal tools specific to only ITS staff. A link to that tool can be created and visible only to users in the “IT Solutions staff” group.
All employees automatically have access to all divisional sites. Users can choose to follow sites to ensure they get served content from and get alerts on content posted in those pages. Users are encouraged to check the main hub and any divisional hubs they are interested in or affiliated with daily.
Please note: If you are using Teams already, you’ve technically already been using SharePoint. Microsoft automatically creates a SharePoint site for any Team. If you use the waffle in Microsoft 365 to navigate to SharePoint, you’ll see all these sites. You are welcome to use these Teams sites for your teams’ individual needs. But these sites are not hub sites, and they do not connect to The Fountain and are not made in the modern version of SharePoint. (They are the classic SharePoint version).