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fomster
Posts:2
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| 11/08/2007 9:31 AM |
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We are evaluating SharePoint 2007 as an enterprise knowledge and content management system. Is anyone else in a similar situation, and would like to share some lessons learned?
General Topics:
- Information Architecture (seemless integration or frustrating navigation?)
- Standards and interface design best practices (Anything published?)
- User profile definition (...developers as users...)
- Governance (Sure you can do anything, but do we want people to...? OR, web wild west all over again?)
- Customization (My Sites...good idea or corporate grafitti?)
- Cost (Are we paying for licenses that other platforms provide for free?)
- Surveys (How does the Sharepoint tool compare to Vovici/WebSurveyor, SurveyMonkey, etc?)
- Intranet (Is SharePoint a replacement, bolt-on, or resource hog?) |
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hill59
Posts:1
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| 11/08/2007 4:08 PM |
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I have been using SharePoint for about six months now. I will tell you what I think so far.
Navigation can be frustrating. Finding what you are looking for difficult. Our CIO uses a message board for ideas and feedback. When there is a message thread started and you expand the details of the message, the whole thread collapses when hit the back button. Otherwise sites can be structured to be navigated in a fairly straight forward manner.
Governance is not a problem.
Customization is not a big option here. Just the standard themes that comes with the software.
Surveys work fine.
It can be a resource hog as in storage space. We have a multitude of sites that are out there and rarely get used.
We use it as a project portal. Project teams keep everyone informed through the use of a site. Works ok for that. Not good as an artifact repository though. Can't go back and retrieve old version of documents. |
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bmerrikin
Posts:2
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| 01/25/2008 9:33 AM |
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I used an earlier version of SharePoint to setup a competitive information repository as well as a repository for sales information (to keep our on-the-road sales team connected with internal resources that they need). It worked well, but one lesson I learned the hard way was not to store your documents in a "folder" structure (where you create actual subfolders in the SharePoint directory to store your documents), but to instead store them all in the same folder and use categories and filters to display them on the site. The reason is that folders are too static and if you ever decide to change the way you store your documents, any links you use to those folders will be broken. Also, in a folder based storage system, your views are determined by the folder structure. So, if your users want your content displayed in a different way, you may have move the documents into other folders - thereby killing any links you or your users have created to those documents. Categories and filters are much more flexible. With categories and filters you always store your documents in a single folder, but you have flexibility in the way you can display the content on the site. If you ever modify the "views" on the site, links to the actual documents will not be broken. Using categories and filters also allows you to create multiple views for the same content (giving your users options on how they can view/find information). If you use folders, you only have one option of displaying your content; which is the way your folders are layed out. Learning how to filter views is a little tricky, but once you have it down it's easy. Note: With views, there is also an option to display your content in a "folder structure". Just note that this is not the same as storing in your files in actual folders and sub-folders. This option will make it look as though your documents are stored in sub folders, but it's really a "virtual folder" system. I believe SharePoint takes your categories and makes them look like folders to the users. But the files themselves actually reside in a single folder. The other lesson I learned is to have a keyword search box somewhere. No matter how well and flexible you layout the content, there will always be users who cannot find what they need - or don't want to spend time looking. And guess who they'll come running to? I got tired of being the "can you find this document for me" guy. That stopped when we added a keyword search option.
Brian |
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kdrathod
Posts:1
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| 03/20/2008 3:01 PM |
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Hi,
Im working as a consultant for a professional services firm and they are evaluating sharepoint as the platform for their enterprise information portal.
The challenges that I've seen and believe many large organisations face now are around providing better content management and collaboration. Whilst Sharepoint 2007 has been massively disruptive the reality is there are very few alternatives that are more appealing. Sharepoint integrates well with the applications almost all large organisations use day in and day out - Office.
As far as my experiences go Sharepoint seems to be taking the lead as the 'usable' front end to enterprise systems. When pitted against the likes of SAPNetweaver - MOSS 2007 almost always wins out due the formers lack of collaborative features, and attention to a flexible and familiar user interface.
Its worth noting however that Sharepoint isnt great for heavyweight document management - although it seems to cope with WCM quite well. Many organisations may find that the content management capability of MOSS2007 is adequate however.
Standards and interface design really depend on what you are trying to acheive - as othes have mentioned, the templates and themes provided often wont be suitable for your requirements out of the box. In my experience some custom development is always required - to acheive a good fit a heavily customised interface on top of sharepoint is usually they way.
In terms of governance, i'd say having this bottomed out beforehand is the best answer, be clear on uses, roles and responsibilities before any rollout. Sharepoint does have the ability to set quotas to avoid a proliferation of sites.
Let me know if you want to discuss further. |
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mmdeaton
Posts:7
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| 03/27/2008 7:40 PM |
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I have worked with Sharepoint at several companies, and while Sharepoint itself has some limitations, the sites you build are more dependent on how well you design them, including having a full understanding of how people want to use them, what they want to use them for, and what you may need to do to help design novices be successful in using the tools Sharepoint offers. The biggest challenge is in linking across sites in a large intranet, extranet, or other SP installation. Sharepoint, like any other Web product, is only a tool; it cannot do the research, planning, and design work required to have a successful outcome.
It is not a content management system; it is a collaboration system and works best at the project, department, or small group level. There is limited workflow capability, but you do not get features like scheduled publication or expiration dates for all document and list types.
Sharepoint comes with page templates, but you do not have to use these. Or you can use parts of them and not other parts. If you have development resources, they can create custom Web parts, custom templates, and widgets that can overcome some of Sharepoints limitations.
Sharepoint also offers minimal version control, and you can go back and retrieve old versions but you have to make sure you set it up to save all versions or a reasonable number of versions in the beginning.
Sharepoint works very well in a Microsoft Office environment to allow people to share documents and all kinds of files easily and to allow collaboration and avoid having multiple versions of a document floating around. It takes some training, however, to get people to understand how to work in this environment. And you need to have clear policies about when people can set up sites, workspaces, and other workspaces within Sharepoint or you will have a rats nest.
Mary Deaton |
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lrsachs
Posts:1
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| 04/10/2008 12:32 PM |
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I've used SharePoint 2007 with a few clients and here's my perspective as an IA. I work in a consulting capacity for enterprise clients, but my heart lies in good, crisp design.
Positives - We were able to deploy an intranet from the ground up for a mid-size financial services client in a little over 2 months. Given my experience with content management, being able to provide that to a client in a short amount of time is a major plus. It wasn't that hard to train users on it and once they are actually editing and owning their own intranet, it really changes the attitude of the users. This company is a .NET shop so it blended really well with their authentication, security, server architecture platform. The control of users and permissions is well thought out, making governance easy. It's also structured to be relatively foolproof; you can restore old changes quickly or delete content just as fast. The out-of-the-box web parts and lists made the design very simple, but for the purpose (quick, we need an intranet) it worked.
Negatives - The idea of having a website that offers little customization (or customization with great effort) can really turn off a lot of IAs, designers, clients, etc. Because of the history of SharePoint (from IIS to WSS, MCMS...the acronyms go on) the structure, web services, ASP code and so on create a fiairly unique environment if you're not familiar with MSFT's .NET vision. In other words, they've renamed things and wound up making some simple things complicated. You'll encounter terms like "web parts" and find it can be many things: a box of copy on a page or an entire form. Site collection, sites and subsites are other terms that may not mean what you think they mean. And then you'll find out SharePoint is really just a collection of lists, XML, .NET forms, etc.; it's not a website. Probably the biggest concern I have is the problem with pure customization. There are a modest number of out-of-the-box features that most users will just say, "Who needs design...just throw this up in SharePoint." |
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awarton
Posts:1
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| 07/15/2008 11:00 AM |
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On the topic of usability & design, the challenge is how to deliver effective business intelligence solutions to your key decision makers in a format they will readily adopt and exploit. Many folks are not aware that Microsoft's BI platform, Performance Point, can be a key data service for SharePoint. (PerformancePoint is the successor to the scorecard capabilities of Microsoft Office Business Scorecard Manager and the monitoring and analytic capabilities of recently acquired ProClarity). If you are in the Washington, DC area & especially if you are a government person, you should check out this seminar on Wednesday 7/16 - buy-in and usability will be among the topics discussed. Register here:
http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/EventDetail.aspx?culture=en-US&EventID=1032377224 |
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