This is important to understand as it will affect how you work with your information, and who has access to it.
To understand the functionality that is available, you should ask the following questions to your IT department so that you understand the limitations of the deployed technology, and if possible make requests to IT for any changes that support your requirements:
- Can I work remotely, and what does it involve?
In general, the more security that is applied, the more difficult collaboration becomes as it is not convenient to log in and get on with your work or integrate to Office applications. As an end user, there is not much that you can do about this, but it is important to be aware of these limitations.
If remote access requires VPN or fob security keys then the ease of collaboration is reduced and user experience is reduced because there are additional authentication steps.
- What SharePoint edition does the company have: Foundation, Standard, or Enterprise?
This will affect the web functionality that can be applied to your business processes.
- What version of Office has been deployed to my computer?
Some of the SharePoint 2010 functionality will work with Office 2003/2007.
- Has SharePoint been deployed throughout the organization? If not, which departments have access to it?
Office 2010 now has a co-authoring ability so multiple people can edit a document at once. This will influence who can work with your information.
- Can non-employees have access to the SharePoint environment?
This will influence how you collaborate with non-company employees.
- Has the My Sites feature been enabled?
The My Site feature is a personal site, similar to a MySpace page, that can be customized and custom content created. With SharePoint 2007, often companies turn this feature off as they feel this will be a distraction to a user's work day or an IT maintenance overhead. With this release, companies want a greater focus on the social elements of the technology.