Share. Point Intranet: How We Did It, Part 4: Team Site Extreme Makeover. Greetings from beautiful Switzerland! Just three weeks after the Olympic Games, I’m back in Europe for a series of Share. Point meetings and events, then in Chicago for Share. Point Fest, delivering my Governance Master Class on Tuesday, September 2. This is my last full- day Share. Point governance workshop in the Midwest in 2. I’ll also deliver several sessions in the main event, and sign my Share. Point 2. 01. 0 Training Kit at the Ave. Point booth, with a limited number of free copies provided by Ave. Point. If you missed previous articles in the series, check them out to get some context and understanding of the environment, the desired outcomes, and our “requirements.”. Now I'll focus on what I did to try to meet our “usability” requirement. Solutions I built had to be instantly usable, with no user training, as we had close to 4. Share. Point—especially Share. Here in my SharePoint intranet series, I continue documenting “How We Did It”—how I built the SharePoint intranet to support NBC Olympics. This week--usability. How to find the site template of an existing SharePoint site? There are many ways to find the site definition being used for a site, Here are some: 1. Use SharePoint Manager to find SharePoint site template. Summary: Plan and implement host-named site collections in SharePoint 2013 and learn how path-based site collections might affect your environment. Point 2. 01. 0—and zero opportunity to deliver training. As it is for many organizations, collaboration was a critical workload—in fact the most important workload that Share. Point supported. To make team sites and collaboration as usable as possible, I focused on several things. And as we do, if you’re familiar with Share. Point 2. 01. 3, see how many similarities you can spot—things that I baked in to Share. Point 2. 01. 0 to make it more usable, that are now implemented out- of- box in Share. Point 2. 01. 3. The “baseline” team site landing page is shown in Figure 1 below. Figure 1: The baseline team site landing page (click image for larger size)I’d like to point out several features of the baseline team site.
I’m not a fan of branding Share. Point, especially at the team site level, but even at much or all of the “intranet” level as well. My experience is that branding makes it difficult to upgrade and adopt new solutions that “plug in” to Share. Point. Most of my clients are quite large, and they have communications and web content and intranet teams who believe their job is to brand everything and maintain corporate identity, even on internal web properties. I think that, in most scenarios, that’s a complete waste of resources. Especially now that the world is moving to web applications and services. The question I ask customers who want to over- brand Share. Point is: “So, have you finished branding Word, Excel and Power. Point? I assume you’ve added your logo to the ribbon, changed the location of the task panes, and modified the color schemes of dialog boxes?”That snarky question is basically to point out that not everything warrants branding. An app is an app, not a statement of corporate identity. Put those talented designers and communications experts onto workloads that require their help: the public web site and an extranet (perhaps). You’ll notice the large NBC Olympics logo in the upper right. That's simply an image inserted into the rightmost panel of the layout. It’s content, not frame branding. Putting it on the far right ensured that users with narrower screens would still have plenty of functional real estate. I treated the header of the page as the primary “portal” navigation. The one “branding” change I made to the team site was change the site icon—the logo in the upper left corner. This is a property of the site collection. I also changed the behavior of the icon, so that clicking it navigates the user not to the top of the site collection, but rather to the home page of the intranet itself (http: //oly. This required one change to the master page. I’ll discuss how I deployed that single “branding” change in a later article—it was not with a “Share. Point Solutions Package.” The breadcrumb in the header provides an out- of- box navigation from the site collection “down” to the current location. So if a user wanted to navigate to the top of the site collection, they could click the first link in the breadcrumb—something that users seemed to figure out themselves (discoverability/usability). A “context” was a logical construct related to what users were thinking about or trying to do, and generally a context equated to a site collection in the Share. Point logical architecture. If users wanted to go to the top of the site collection, they could click first “tab” in the global navigation bar. After that, the tabs of the global navigation were used to get users to most- useful content, typically (but not always) subsites of the site collection, but also links to specific lists, libraries, or pages. I used the Quick Launch to provide more detailed navigation, which could vary within a sub- context (i. I made sure that all resources that “typical” users would need appeared in the Quick Launch. The only people who would need to go to “All Site Content” would be people with specific needs to administer hidden content and functionality, for which they would have received explicit instructions to “click the ALL SITE CONTENT link.”My experience was that these small changes made a world of difference in aligning how Share. Point actually behaved with what users naturally expected from navigation. This is definitely do- able, and I wish I had done so from a “purist” perspective, because I don’t like exposing functionality that I’m not preparing users to use correctly, or managing on the back end. But my experience is that users just ignore these two buttons—for whatever reason (they are pretty enough buttons!)—so I just didn’t worry about it. Exorcise Share. Point Geek Terminology. Notice the Quick Launch in Figure 1. No more “Libraries, Lists, and Discussions.” The first two of those standard team site Quick Launch headings mean nothing to the typical user. After quite some experimentation, I landed on Content and Apps as the standard two headings. Every team site had two libraries by default: Files and Media. I wanted users to “fall into” the default behavior of storing any kind of file in the Files library. I’ve found that the default name, Shared Documents, makes some users restrict their thinking to sharing documents (Word and maybe PDFs) but not thinking about sharing Microsoft Visio diagrams, Power. Point presentations, or Excel workbooks. Also, the URL for the default library is http: //site../Shared%2. Documents which is ugly, versus http: //site../Files. Small thing, but easy to remedy. I wanted users to default to saving pictures, music, and videos to an Asset library which provides enhanced media management and viewing, so I had a separate library for “Media.”Almost everything else is an “app.” Users . The vast majority have smartphones or Apple i. Pads with app stores, Facebook apps, or have some other experience with the idea that functionality is plugged in with apps. Even discussions—when I added them to a team site—went under Apps. A couple of points about this approach: ? Great minds think alike, I’d like to think. But I find a distinction between “content” and “apps.” The line is blurry, to be sure—some apps are very content centric. So you have to make a call about what is an app versus what is content. I’m still experimenting with defining the difference, but for now let me say this: If it’s a library, if it’s mostly simple content interactions (add, view, modify, delete the document), and it’s broadly used within a context, it’s content. If it’s more about the process, then it’s an app. So a form submission process would probably be an app. Yes, the line is blurry. Think like a user, not like a developer. The next logical step is to create an app- store- like experience, where, when users want to add functionality to their site, they “request” it. That allows the enterprise to deploy customized solutions and to monitor what is getting added—and, later, used—throughout the Share. Point environment. Almost everything you see on the team site in Figure 1 is deployed using a provisioned request procedure. Someone (e. g., a business owner) can request a site. A script runs that deploys the site, adds the functionality, tweaks the UI, etc. I’ll be describing the provisioning engine very soon (in the September timeframe). The bottom line is that it is less than five minutes of my effort to deploy a site completely. I could have reduced that to zero, but in this scenario the effort wasn’t worth the payoff. In an enterprise where Share. Point would have a life of longer than a few months, I would have! Provide In- line, In- context Help. This is a really key element of creating a usable, low- support Share. Point implementation: It starts with knowing what your users will do with Share. Point. Now notice I didn’t say might do with Share. Point. You should have a solid understanding of the desired outcomes and functionality wish- lists of your business users. You should have a goal in mind. If you don’t, you’re implementing Share. Point too early. And if your answer is “My users will collaborate with Share. Point” then that’s too broad. You should also provide guidance and priorities for what collaboration means. After you’ve established what will be important to your users, you can start deploying solutions with built- in, “in- line” help. Take a look at Figure 2, which is a slightly more specific team site. On this site, the team needed a customized Issues list, which I created. I knew they’d have two basic needs: to manage security and to customize the list. So, on the team site home page, I created instructions and links that made those tasks easy. Figure 2: A slightly more specific team site (click image for larger size)And, in Figure 3, you’ll see another example of in- context help for a document library. By the way, yes, on this site I used the term “Document Library.” (Long story. Pretend you don’t see that.) What’s most important here is the fact that I knew that users would need to do three things: view, add, or work with multiple documents. I added a content viewer Web Part to the main library form—straight from the ribbon—that had instructions for those tasks. Such a customization could easily be deployed as a Share. A Case Study : : UXmatters. Ready, Set, Share. Point! It made sense for us to consider using Share. Point as a replacement for our existing intranet. Some usability problems we’d had with our intranet included the following: Users gravitated toward applications that were easiest to edit, like our wiki and custom- built Project Pages application. They either avoided maintaining their department’s HTML pages altogether or asked our very small intranet team to edit the pages for them. Users weren’t sure which application to use to share and collaborate on their documents and developed preferences that weren’t always in their best interests. Users couldn’t find the documents and pages they needed, because. Our search engine frequently timed out. We had an obsolete navigational model that made browsing via links difficult. There wasn’t a consistent information architecture. Our primary goals for migrating our corporate intranet to Share. Point includedself- sufficient users who could build their own Web pages without programming experienceimproved findabilityimproved collaboration. Our Plan for Early- Adopter Departments. We started with the rough idea that we would move people to Share. Point department by department, moving those who were open to the idea of being guinea pigs for this new technology project first. After taking a few training courses, our small team had a basic idea of what we wanted to accomplish and had come up with the concept of a Share. Point Liaison—a person whose job it was to help a department move to Share. Point. We decided to tackle IT first, which included three departments: Business Applications, Systems Services, and IT Shared Services, learn from that, then decide how to proceed with future department migrations. My Early Experiences as a Share. Point Liaison. I was the Share. Point Liaison for Systems Services’ company- facing site—shown in Figure 1. This is the page everyone in the company would come to when they had trouble with their computer or needed to purchase software. I started with this user- centered design (UCD) process in mind: Assess the usability of the existing site through Web statistics, surveys, and interviews. Translate the themes from the usability assessment into design goals. Brainstorm on design concepts. Create possible design solutions. Do iterative usability testing—on paper prototypes and early Share. Point prototypes—and refine our designs as necessary. This project took about five months. Feedback about the site was positive, but I also got some pushback from the intranet manager about how long the project had taken. The UCD process is always too easy to blame, but there were actually several factors involved in slowing the progress of the project: Our project team had limited access to resources from the System Services department. The project team wasn’t well versed in Share. Point or UCD. We had little interaction with the executive sponsor along the way. We paid more attention to content from countries outside the U. S. These sites immediately received strong negative feedback from users, so I was called in to investigate. After conducting some user interviews, the most notable problems I discovered with the Business Applications sites were as follows: There wasn’t a clear distinction between the two sites. No one could figure out which of these sites contained the things they cared about—that is, the Site Hierarchy, shown in Figure 2, was unclear. Generally, each Share. Point site has a navigation bar on the left, which lists all of the sites under it in a Site Hierarchy. We had removed the navigation bar from Systems Services’ company- facing site, because we felt it would be distracting for users to be confronted with the department’s internal workings, when all they wanted was help. However, on the Business Applications site, a confusing mix of things was visible in the Site Hierarchy, including names of applications, names of teams within the department, and initiatives they were working on. After the team implemented my recommendations, the sites were better targeted to satisfy their intended audiences’ information needs, and each site used a navigational model that was primarily based on applications, which essentially map to teams. Figure 2—Business Applications’ Site Hierarchy in Share. Point. Between my Business Applications experience and the fact that Systems Services were not enthusiastic about revamping their site—having just done so four years earlier—it occurred to me that departments need more knowledge about information architecture and how to make their information architectures maintainable and scalable over time. Without this, we would never meet our goal of improving findability. In fact, moving to Share. Point had the potential to make things worse, because many people had become used to the way things were, and we were about to change all that. High- Level Vision for Share. Point’s Information Architecture. The intranet manager and executive managers had a preconceived vision about what the sites’ overall information architecture would be, which centered around these points: The top three levels of the intranet’s information architecture should be based on organizational structures—for example, Division Name > Department Name > Team Name. Within a team’s site, the team had complete control over how they would organize their sub- sites in the Site Hierarchy and, for the most part, their Web pages. Figure 3 shows the five- stage process we came up with for migrating departments to Share. Point. Figure 3—Our process for Share. Point rollouts. Now, let’s look at the stages in this process in more detail. Initiation. The initiation stage includes a preliminary orientation for the project team to familiarize them with Share. Point technology, emerging best practices, and the migration process itself. We use Share. Point sites for migration projects, so teams get used to using Share. Point. We recognized that we can create only a draft project plan at this stage. Until we get deeper into the evaluation, there is really no good way of knowing how big a project is going to be or where or how we could scale it down. We use the initiation stage to focus and scope projects realistically, based on company and department goals. Share. Point offers a boatload of potentially useful features, but along with that opportunity comes the danger that people may sink rather than swim if they’re exposed to all of its capabilities at once. Therefore, it is always important to scope Phase 1 of a migration project appropriately, implementing the capabilities a department has today, plus just a few improvements. Then start looking at Phase 2. Leadership from executive sponsors can help keep a project focused. Evaluation. The goals of the Share. Point implementation team that was responsible for moving departments to Share. Point were often different from the goals of the departments themselves. Calling everyone’s goals out explicitly during the evaluation stage helps ensure everyone is on the same page. We created checkpoints at which we could talk with executive sponsors about how things were going—especially those who weren’t directly involved in the day- to- day activities of the migration. We asked some of the difficult questions at this stage—such as, How does a department want people to communicate and work together? How do they want to present and organize information? How do they want to maintain that information over time? Even if people have already considered these issues, use the evaluation stage to refine initial thoughts. To facilitate our evaluation process, we created a guided, self- service version of our information architecture design process, complete with Microsoft Word document templates. Figure 4 shows part of one of these templates. Figure 4—Current Information Architecture Evaluation Template. This template, along with the one we created for documenting the department’s new information architecture later in the process, helped departments to rationalize and communicate their sites’ new structures to others, ensuring both their long- term scalability and department- wide understanding. Design. Once an evaluation is complete, it’s important to clean house—that is, decide what to keep, archive, or delete—and get a realistic picture of what you need to do. Cleaning up is a huge, early design- stage step that helps inform the new design. It’s important to avoid just dumping your existing content into a new tool—especially if your organization doesn’t have clear policies about archiving data. Consider having a Cleanup Day, when people sign up for time slots during which they’ll look through specific directories and purge the junk. It’s important to continue asking the difficult questions and refining your thoughts at this stage. Beyond looking at how departments will organize things going forward, remember to think about governance, especially if you’re taking the time to set it up properly. Governance includes communication and training plans for the new structure, as well as, possibly, its enforcement. You need to decide what to do when things don’t fit neatly—that is, when and how to change the structure and who has the authority to do so. Governance will help reduce the need for major overhauls in the future, because things won’t get as out of control over time. Implementation. We determined that the support the Share. Point Liaison and implementation team offered would continue only until a department’s staff was working primarily in Share. Point. There are likely many projects, for Phase 2 or beyond, that a department could handle on its own.
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