Notes from 52nd International STC Conference
Seattle, Washington, May 8-12, 2005

Effective Intranet Site Development with SharePoint Services

Robert Ballinger
Sakson & Taylor

Session Description: This presentation showed how by adding a "usability layer" to SharePoint Team Services, the presenter and his team created intranet sites that foster team collaboration and creativity, anchor product development workflow, and provide guidelines for external partners. It showed how to build a web of navigable pages on top of SharePoint and make its rich feature set profitable.

• Overview:
   
• The corporate intranet
• Windows SharePoint Services
• Windows SharePoint Services demo
• Design considerations
• Functional considerations
• Corporate intranet: what we want
   
• Share and locate information easily and consistently
• Foster collaboration and creativity/li>
• Provide opportunities for growth
• Corporate intranet: unfortunate outcomes
   
• Unreliable information
• Bad design/no design
• Utter chaos?
• The goal is user success:
   
• Usability-oriented design
• Intuitive information architecture
• Focus on knowledge management
• What is SharePoint?
   
• Windows server technology
• Integrates with Office 2003 and FrontPage 2003
• Runs in Internet Explorer
• Benefits of SharePoint:
   
• Deploys and scales easily
• Puts NT security in the hands of the user
• Centralizes file-sharing and collaboration
• Limitations of SharePoint:
   
• Windows-, Office-, and Explorer-centric
• Requires up-to-date systems
• IT support is advised
• Demo: presenter toured a basic site, including the home page and web parts, as well as lists and libraries.
• Functions available:
   
• Doc storage, sorting, and search
• Version control, approvals, and alerts
• Events, announcements, and task lists
• Make your site a database with list lookups
   
• Link list lookups let you relate sets of information
• Filtering many documents using list values lets you create a site with consistent information
• Think single source!
• Shared Documents "Lookup" columns fetch data from lists.
• The SharePoint home page is a web page that can hold a bunch of web parts. It has a search box and a navigation bar.
• If you open the site in FrontPage, you can make a template, build more pages, and link the pages together.
• Design considerations: Good web design, like any good design, starts with careful thinking and planning.
• In using SharePoint, prepare yourself for:
   
• Powerful features
• Nearly unlimited design potential
• Organic growth (requires flexible architecture)
• Avoid org chart information architecture if you can.
   
• Try to organize the site by function or project.
• What the web design team does is very important to users.
• Provide alternate paths to information.
• Embrace "Intranet Chaos" theory.
   
• Restrictive sites fail.
• Self-service sites grow and attract more users.
• Make your site safe to explore.
• Add inline documentation.
• Proactively head off the really "left field" ideas.
   
• Publish design standards.
• Offer informal sessions to convey tips and best practices.
• Encourage consistency for a good user experience.
• Make cool graphics available to users.
• Functional considerations: seeding adoption.
• Put a solid team together.
   
• Designate backup admins and site managers.
• Make sure they know as much as you do.
• Define best practices and goals as a group.
• Foster workflow.
   
• Design around workflow if you can.
• Take advantage of approval and alert functionality.
• Consider Office 2003 integration features.
• Make sure users have access to documentation.
   
• Inline documentation where interaction is required.
• Add your own online help.
• Cross-reference product help.
• It is possible to design in SharePoint to create the database and functionalities and then impose a whole new design look on top of it, rather than using the standardized SharePoint home page.