I don't disagree with the complaints about Sharepoint's usability. It's clunky and obviously cobbled together without an understanding of its real users, their skills, and their needs. But I've been in two companies that got overwhelming feedback from their customer base that Windows Sharepoint Services (WSS) was what they wanted, so that's what we used.
We did something different with WSS, though -- we didn't use it as a content management or collaboration tool, we simply used it as a portal. Instead of building a custom portal that natively works with the MS stack (which WSS does do well) and has the behaviors that users expect (drag & drop, semi-easy configurability of the portlets), we created a custom template that essentially wrapped WSS around our existing web application. There were security issues (how to handle SSO from WSS through to our app), installation/configuration issues (non-trivial), and the developers had to learn how to create and customize web parts. But we were a software shop and had a lot of that knowledge in-house already. The UI issues centered around the flexibility of WSS. We had to come up with a neutral look for our app so that it would fit within whatever theme the end user selected. Where there were multiple implementation options for a control, we used WSS terminology and behaviors to make the interface more unified. We provided a navigation web part so that our users didn't have to depend on the native navigation capabilities of WSS (which suck, and are also customizable -- which could lead to our clients accidentally deleting links to important functionality). On the other hand, a huge bonus was being able to use regular WSS web parts to deliver charts, logos, customized help text, links to document templates, and a ton of other things that our customers were asking us to put inside our forms and pages. Instead of having to overload a simple form with a chart that was requested by only one customer, we could walk that customer through adding the chart into a web part on the page -- and voila -- they have a custom implementation with little effort on our part. As painful as some of the learning process was, and as truly awful as some of the WSS UI is, our customers loved that they could fit it into an existing portal and make it their own. -Sarah . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=24692 ________________________________________________________________ *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
