English 421Y: Technical Writing Online

For my second research blog I had found more information about SharePoint. The Microsoft Office website has a lot of demo videos for users to browse through to help them with any trouble they might have. This would definitely help train employees as well as get a feel on how to use Microsoft SharePoint. I watched a few of the “getting started” videos and felt that they were helpful. The voice in the video sounded nice to the ear as well as helpful. He talked slowly so that the actions on screen could match up with the user at home trying to duplicate the results. I feel that it will be a good reference to have when dealing with either troubleshooting some areas or just looking up new features to add to the white paper.

Another piece of information I found was SharePoint being compared to another similar program called Dot Net Nuke. They turned out to be very similar but I did notice a few things. For one Dot Net Nuke is free. Of course the disadvantage to this would be that there is not a strong Microsoft community for backup when things get rough. Also, SharePoint uses Active Directory, another Microsoft program, which many companies use to give its users permission on the system. I would say that this is a must because using software from the same vendor prevents compatibility issues. This information would be useful when comparing it to other services out there. The information would be useful to the marketing department as they could advertise it to the consumer by saying, “There are other programs out there but let me show you a fair comparison of the two.”