This article explains the purpose and structure of divisional pages on The Fountain, Minnesota State University, Mankato’s internal SharePoint landing page for faculty and staff. It covers how divisions manage content, use metadata to organize and share information, and assign content librarians to maintain consistency across the platform.
Governance
History
The Fountain launched in August 2023 with four divisional pages: Academic Affairs, Human Resources, IT Solutions, and Office of the President. 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.
Content Librarians
Each division will assign the role of content librarian to one or two people. The content librarians are trained individuals who 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 page. Some divisions may find it useful to create pages for their individual departments, but oversight of those pages belongs to the division’s content librarian(s). Only one page is allowed for each division, department, or office.
Content on The Fountain should feature current, relevant information, be updated regularly, and link to detailed resources hosted elsewhere. It should not store full documents, long-term or static content, or include news and events not directly related to employees.
About Divisional Pages
What Are 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.
Each division, department, or office is limited to one page only. All employees automatically have access to all divisional pages, but only content librarians can manage content on those pages. Users can choose to follow pages to ensure they get served content from and get alerts on content posted in those pages. Users are encouraged to check the main page and any divisional pages they are interested in or affiliated with daily.
Understanding the Audience and Content
It's important to understand the audience and types of content that are appropriate for The Fountain. This platform's primary audience is current faculty and staff and it serves as a front door to campus news, events, and resources—not a place to store documents or long-form content.
Metadata and Category Tags
If the content you’re sharing is something you want all employees to know about, use the managed metadata or category tags to push that content up to the main site. If it’s just for your division, use just metadata tags to organize your page.
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.
Note: SharePoint on Teams
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 do not connect to The Fountain and are not made in the modern version of SharePoint (they are the classic SharePoint version).