Wing to rollout SharePoint in coming weeks Published Oct. 20, 2008 By Corey Dahl 21st Space Wing Public Affairs PETERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Colo. -- Imagine never having to e-mail a giant PowerPoint presentation to your entire squadron again. Or being able to share an Excel spreadsheet with hundreds of people, at the click of a mouse. Or having your own personal intranet site, where you can network and interact with people throughout Air Force Space Command. Sound too good to be true? It's not. Starting Nov. 17, the 21st Space Wing will begin rolling out SharePoint, a new collaborative, intranet tool that will allow users to do all of the activities above - and more. "SharePoint is basically a way for us to share information at a much faster pace, and it's a much more user-friendly tool (than any of our current communication tools)," said Chief Master Sgt. Michael Parris, superintendent of the 21st Communications Squadron. SharePoint will essentially act as one giant command-wide server, where users can post spreadsheets, presentations, flyers and other documents and then send out a link to share them with others. Documents can also be updated and changed in real time, so personnel can collaborate easily on projects without having to constantly e-mail back and forth with each other. SharePoint will also allow users to create personalized "My Sites." The professional sites will allow users to post and share pictures, documents and information with others, which can help build and maintain networking and mentoring relationships. The convenience of SharePoint will mean the eventual phasing out of all smaller, local drives being used in the wing right now, Chief Parris said. There is no set date yet for when this will happen, but 21st Space Wing personnel should expect a gradual migration of their local drives to the SharePoint sites and servers in the near future. "SharePoint prevents us from having to talk across multiple systems," Chief Parris said. "With this, everyone can talk at once, using one place." The switch to SharePoint should go fairly smoothly, Chief Parris said. AFSPC headquarters rolled it out at the beginning of October, and so far, there have been very few hiccups, he said. To make sure it goes just as well for the 21st Space Wing, SharePoint classes will be given to site owners and managers down to the squadron level. End users will also receive computer based training to help them get acquainted with the new system. The 21st Communications Squadron also plans to send out flyers, posters and tri-folds in the coming weeks to help educate everyone here about SharePoint. "The bottom line here is that we want all end users to have a very positive experience with SharePoint," he said.