The Power of SharePoint with a Customized, User-Focused Interface

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I MAGINE T HE P OSSIBILITIES T HE P OWER OF S HARE P OINT WITH A C USTOMIZED , U SER 0 F OCUSED I NTERFACE SharePoint in the Real World SharePoint in the Real World 2 W ELCOME This article represents the first installment in a series aimed at exploring Microsoft 9s SharePoint Products and Technologies (a term used to encompass both Windows SharePoint Services and SharePoint Portal Server) in real world scenarios. SharePoint is one of the fastest growing products in Microsoft 9s history 3 and one that only gets more important as time goes on. In 2005, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer stated: SharePoint is the number one product at this point in the history of Microsoft.

We expect $400 million revenue from that product line - faster than any other product in Microsoft's history. i In addition, at the 2005 Professional Developer 9s Conference, Steven Sinofsky (Executive Vice President for the Office Division) stated: [Windows SharePoint Services] is at the core of every Microsoft collaboration and information-sharing web initiative With this kind of attention, a lot of people are asking what all of the ... more. less.

buzz is about. To help meet some of this need and to help organizations understand the benefits of SharePoint, in this and subsequent articles, we 9ll explore many different facets of the products, including: Benefits and Drawbacks Features and Capabilities Getting Started Preparing for the Future Customization Integration with Other Systems If you have specific questions or would like to discuss how SharePoint can help your organization be more productive, save time and money and manage all of your organization 9s content, please contact Paul Knight at pknight@anexinet.com or David Mann at dmann@anexinet.com. I NTRODUCTION SharePoint was initially introduced as a product by Microsoft in 2001 as SharePoint Team Services and SharePoint Portal Server . Since that time, the products have morphed once (the current 2003 release) and is on the verge of another significant upgrade (as part of Office 2007). SharePoint in the Real World 3 Anexinet 9s engineers have been working with the products since the first pre-beta days (known then as Tahoe) and with even earlier semi-related incarnations 3 namely 1997 9s Team Manager . Most recently, we have been involved with the Office 2007 release of SharePoint (and the entire Office System) since the pre-Alpha phase as part of Microsoft 9s invitation-only Technology Adopter Program (TAP). This inside access to Microsoft 9s developers and Program Managers allows us to know the products earlier and better than anyone else in our market. It allows us to write, speak, train and publish books on the new releases while others are still installing the products for the first time. This article is the first in our SharePoint in the Real World series. In this article, we 9ll explore a highly customized SharePoint 2003 environment we developed for a client. The goal of this project was to deliver the power and flexibility of SharePoint to the client but in a more user-friendly and accessible way. O UT OF THE B OX There are two ways of looking at SharePoint: 1. As a canned, fully packaged product 2. As a framework to build upon Initially when an individual or an organization begins to look at SharePoint, they take the first approach 3 they install SharePoint and try to wrap their business processes and business needs into the technology. While this is good, and many product installations have delivered significant value it is also backwards and somewhat limiting. A better approach is to, without going overboard, customize the technology to support your business needs. Let the business needs drive the implementation, not the technology. Out of the box, SharePoint presents a user interface that is unintuitive, often misleading and not very user friendly. Nonetheless, with some training and some adaptation, companies can make it work. An example of a default SharePoint installation is shown in Figure 1. SharePoint in the Real World 4 Figure 1. SharePoint out of the box While this is cokay d it is far from ideal. The second approach 3 looking at SharePoint as a framework to build upon 3 offers far more power and flexibility. It continues to support the SharePoint engine , that is all of the moving parts under the covers that make SharePoint a great platform for publishing, collaboration, information management, dashboards, content aggregation, etc; but by discarding the restrictions placed upon you by the default user interface, it opens your SharePoint environment up to meet the needs of your business and your end users in ways not possible with the first approach. This second approach is in line with Microsoft 9s stated goal of utilizing SharePoint as a platform to build upon and not just an application to install. The key goal of the Anexinet Portals & Collaboration Team (PCT) is to deliver a solution that meets your needs 3 saving your employees and your organization time, money and aggravation. It is important, however, to avoid delivering a solution that is so highly customized that it precludes future upgrades, makes support and enhancements more difficult or makes your installation so non-standard that you might as well not even call it cSharePoint d anymore. Our approach is to build upon the strengths of the product, operate within the high-level framework it lays out but still meet or exceed your needs and expectations. To that end, we developed our processes to work with SharePoint rather than against it. We have invested hundreds of hours in streamlining the product, developing customized modules and building a framework that we call the Anexinet Collaboration Framework. This set of code, best practices, documentation and training material 3 delivered fully documented to our clients 3 is what allows us to take you one step beyond the ordinary. SharePoint in the Real World 5 O NE S TEP B EYOND As mentioned before, the SharePoint user interface is cokay d. It is far from ideal, but it does the job. Rather than settle for this, companies can choose to increase the value of their SharePoint installation by customizing the user interface. A well planned customization will build upon SharePoint 9s strengths while playing down its weaknesses. It will deliver an interface that is at once supremely functional, but at the same time intuitive, pleasing to the eye and easy to use. This will allow you to get the most out of SharePoint. Figure 2 shows a highly customized SharePoint installation. Notice that the information presented is still pretty standard SharePoint content 3 Announcements, Links, Calendars, etc. In the background, we 9ll see that the SharePoint application is still managing all of this content, all we 9ve done is put a more usable, intuitive, eye-catching face in front of it. Figure 2. A more intuitive, user friendly and appealing user interface on top of the SharePoint engine. Figure 3 shows the SharePoint content management application 3 also customized though not as heavily 3 and the interface used to manage content. Notice that the content management pages still look and feel like they belong to the rest of the site but that the regular SharePoint content management functionality and interface is still in use. NOTE: The screenshots shown here are just ONE example of what is possible. The nature of the Anexinet Collaboration Framework is such that it allows us to deliver nearly any interface with equal ease. We can match an existing look and feel, work with in-house design personnel to develop a customized interface or bring our own design professionals in to build the interface that works for your SharePoint in the Real World 6 Figure 3 . The SharePoint content management pages are also customized to fit in with the rest of the site. Figures 4 shows how something as seemingly straightforward as Dashboards and Key Performance Indicators can be made more appealing with a little customization. SharePoint in the Real World 7 Figure 4. Dashboards can be integrated directly into the portal. Figures 5 and 6 show an Employee Directory 3 made more appealing with the addition of graphics and an improved user interface. Because SharePoint is managing the Employee Profile information, pulling it directly from Active Directly via out-of-the-box functionality, there is no additional content management overhead. SharePoint in the Real World 8 Figure 5. Rich graphics combined with SharePoint functionality to deliver an eye-catching Employee Directory. Figure 6. Another visually appealing view of the Employee Directory. SharePoint in the Real World 9 Individual departments can have their own public and private areas. Public areas (shown in Figure 7) for content published to the entire company and private areas for heavy duty collaboration, secured information sharing and other native SharePoint capabilities. There no need to sacrifice power and flexibility for a good interface. Figure 7. A departmental Homepage, showing custom content and simple navigation to other areas of interest. Even regular document management can be more appealing with some customization. Figure 8 shows a simple customized view of a standard SharePoint Document Library. SharePoint in the Real World 10 Figure 8. A more appealing interface to basic document management and document lists. S TANDARDS One important fact to note is that all of the customization work shown on the preceding pages made use of standard SharePoint constructs: Web Parts Lists Document Libraries CSS JavaScript Site Definitions Any developer familiar with SharePoint can step into this environment and quickly understand how and what was done. This is important because typically a highly customized environment presents significant problems with regard to support and upgradability. In this case, however, everything is documented, easy to understand and once you lift the covers, built with standard constructs. F UTURE 0 P ROOF With SharePoint 2007 (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server and Windows SharePoint Server v3) looming on the horizon, it is important to note that our approach always takes future upgrades into account. We know what is coming in the next release 3 we 9ve been working with it for over a year 3 so we make sure to take that into account as we architect and design each and every solution we implement. This approach takes on many facets: Customizing the UI in such a way that migrating to 2007 9s Master Pages is as streamlined as possible Architecting a solution so that features deprecated in the 2007 release are either not used or not heavily relied upon now Designing with the end user in mind 3 reducing as much as possible the amount of re- learning that content managers and other users will be forced to undergo Avoiding custom code that will not translate well to the 2007 release (unless absolutely necessary) or else writing code in a modular, easily transferred manner The default interface for SharePoint 2007 is significantly different from the 2003 release. Figure 9 shows an example of the new interface. Many of the issues resolved by the Anexinet SharePoint in the Real World 11 Collaboration Framework are fixed by default in the 2007 release. In many ways, the approach Microsoft took in delivering this new version drove many of the architectural decisions we made in producing our Framework. Figure 9. SharePoint 2007 sports a nifty new look. C ONCLUSION SharePoint offers organizations significant capabilities right out of the box. With some planning and forethought, however, the payback can be increased exponentially. Users don 9t need to suffer through a portal interface built for the benefit of the developers or administrators any more. Everyone can benefit from the power of SharePoint combined with a user-centric, visually appealing design. Just imagine the possibilities& i Reuters (http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=domesticNews&storyID=6816430)

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