I’m a volunteer member of the IT Committee for the nation’s largest Girl Scout council. Located in southeast Texas, the Girl Scouts of San Jacinto Council (GSSJC) organization serves more than 70,000 girls and 19,000 adult volunteers – a total of almost 90,000. The organization is expected to reach a membership of 100,000 within the next few years.

As you can imagine, an organization of this size has a lot of communication needs. For instance, girl members and their troop leaders and parents need to share information about projects and activities. The council staff members need to communicate with each other and to the volunteers about services, events and other things. The council provides information to the general public to recruit new members and volunteers and conduct fund raising. The list of who needs to communicate what to whom is almost endless.

The GSSJC IT Committee is investigating Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) to see if this product can be the council’s communication platform now and well into the future. The Dallas Microsoft Technology Center (MTC) recently hosted a group of us from GSSJC to discuss our requirements and how MOSS might be able to address them.

I’ll admit, after reading John Fontana’s article "Microsoft SharePoint taking business by storm," I was hopeful about MOSS 2007 living up to its new reputation of being the next must-have technology. While it’s still too early to tell – we haven’t put our hands on it yet – we all came out of the two-day session with the belief that MOSS will do just about everything we need it to do, and then some. Putting my analyst hat on, I’d say that if MOSS can satisfy the needs of this Girl Scout council, it will likely be a good platform for many mid- to large-size companies as well.

Let me give you an idea of what GSSJC is asking this platform to do. Maybe you’ll recognize some of your own needs here.

Like a corporation, the 90,000 members of the council are organized into groups that have specific communication needs, such as user forums for group discussions and workspace areas for shared files. Where a corporation has workgroups, departments, divisions and business units, a Girl Scout council has troops, service units, areas and regions. So for instance, the 4,000 troops within GSSJC represent a need for 4,000 separate Web sites and user forums hosted by MOSS.

Linda Musthaler is a principal analyst with Essential Solutions Corporation.