Understanding 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. [Again, more info on metadata is below.]
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. [See AUDIENCE TARGETING)
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).
Governance
The Fountain launched in August 2023 with four divisional pages: Academic Affairs, Human Resources, IT Solutions, and the President’s Site. In Phase II, we brought on divisional pages for the five colleges. Phase III brought on all the remaining divisions on campus. Only the main divisions (Academic Affairs, DEI, IT Solutions, Student Success & Engagement, Student Affairs & Enrollment Management, University Advancement, Finance & Facilities, Administrative Services), Human Resources, President’s Office, and the colleges have divisional pages.
Each division will need to assign the role of content librarian to one or two people. The content librarians are responsible for curating the content on the divisional page. All requests to get information on The Fountain from their division will go through them for review and publishing. In order to keep consistency on the site, divisions must keep the number of content librarians to a minimum, and all content librarians must be trained.
Each division can choose how to arrange and use their site. Some divisions may find it useful to create site pages for their individual departments, but oversight of those pages belongs to the division’s content librarian(s).