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How do I Teach Them SharePoint?

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One of the broad subjects that was suggested for us to write about was “what keeps you up at night?” Well, truth be told, nothing keeps me up at night; I tend to sleep like a baby. That doesn’t mean, however, that I don’t have concerns about our SharePoint deployment. One of those concerns has to do with our customers and business partners who work off of our Internet facing server. How do I teach these people about SharePoint and how do I keep them up to date?

I read all the time about how popular SharePoint is, how many gazillion copies have been sold and how everyone from exotic car manufacturers to brain surgeons are using SharePoint in their businesses. On the other hand, I have spoken to every one of our partners as I have set up their sites, and very few have said they are familiar with SharePoint. That tells me that I cannot rely on them to do the right thing at the right time; I have to make the site intuitive. I have to tell you, I’m not sure SharePoint was designed to be intuitive. I know that I can customize SharePoint to look like anything I want, but I do not want to spend that much time customizing a product that I purchased for its awesome out-of-the-box capabilities.

SharePoint works because it is consistent, not because it’s sexy or particularly easy to use. In fact, as we have rolled it out, the biggest complaint that I get from my in-house users is that it’s not intuitive. Usually, what lies under the hood of that complaint is the fact that navigation is not intuitive. After we upgraded to SharePoint 2007, we began a concerted effort to improve navigation through better use of well-placed links, and better organized sites. We also worked to make better use of the top and side navigation aids and to use them consistently; and we educated people about the curious two-tied breadcrumb trail. Meanwhile, a groundswell effort was competing with me as employees were telling their coworkers to simply use My Links. Fellow blogger Michael Doyle has already blogged here about My Links, so I will just add that I will be following his suggestions, but I wish Microsoft had just left them in. The addition of the Ribbon in SharePoint 2010 will make sites easier to use, once people find them, but I think we will still be looking for “easy to use” when they start hyping the next version of SharePoint.

For our remote users, we are planning to milk what we can from consistency. We are rebuilding our policyholder sites this year, and we are removing rather than adding design options; every site will have the same simple structure. We are using a model that works well for large customers, and also works for smaller ones. While this might mean that no one gets an optimized site, everyone can read the same User Guide, follow the same directions and get help from the same Help page.

Comments

Submitted by Vanessa Williams September 21, 2010 - 9:51 AM

I struggle quite a bit with this issue. I think the term "out-of-the-box" isn't very helpful. If I really designed solutions that only used "OOB" functionality, then they probably wouldn't be very useful. Tools like SharePoint Designer are part of the platform for a reason. There's a reason the Ribbon can be customized. There's a reason the list view web part was overhauled into the XSLT List View Web Part.

I have found that customizations that work with SharePoint, instead of against it, can add real value. Finally in SharePoint 2010 we're starting to get a set of tools that help with creating and deploying reusable customized/configured solutions.

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Submitted by Daniel Antion September 21, 2010 - 3:06 PM

Thanks for the comment Vanessa. I agree it is getting better, but I still struggle with customization. You might enjoy a guest post on my other SharePoint blog. This was written early in 2010 by Owen Baern (his bio is on that site). He makes a case against too much customization. The URL is http://www.sharepointstories.com/2010/01/problems-sharepoint-solved.html

The customization we got tangled up in had to do with site structure, not so much the look and feel. We gave customers options to organize their content to fit their organization. We quickly ran into two problems. First, it is really our content and we know how it should be organized. Second, without a good understanding of SharePoint, the end users were not well equipped to make the best choices. I am on my way to a meeting, and a mea culpa moment.

The other reason I worry about customization, is that this isn't a single solution. We are providing access to technical vendors, law firms, our members, our customers and others in different areas on our Internet facing site. Internally, we have people who cross all of those lines and I don't want them to see a different interface when dealing with members than they do when dealing with customers (at least they tell me I don't want that)

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