I would criticise some elements of the user interface design. Embedding external links in the top navigation bar is not a great idea (first 5 links are for within the web site, from TEAMUSA.ORG onwards are links to external web sites – different font and background colour but not obvious). The Latest News would be easier on the eye to scan if there were a thumbnail for each (instead of author which is not necessary on the home page) and a bit more space between each news item. And there are three different search boxes on the page. Would be great to see an update post-Olympics to identify which one was used the most… But I’m being picky. It’s a brave move to publish such a visible web site on beta software and the site demonstrates how much easier it is to make SharePoint 2010 not look like SharePoint. Congratulations to all involved.

For more information: Visit the USOC web site | Microsoft press release

http://www.sharepointsharon.com/blog/2008/07/sharepoint-for-web-sites-or-not.htm
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Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is marketed across 6 solution segments: collaboration; portals; search; content management; business intelligence and business processes. One question I often get asked by customers is whether or not to use SharePoint for building public web sites. As with most things I.T.-related, the answer is ‘it depends’.

Reasons to use SharePoint for building public web sites:

1. You need a web content management system
2. You have a SharePoint strategy
3. You bought the licences

SharePoint is not about designing great visual and interactive web site experiences. For that, consider using the Expression suite or other similar tools. SharePoint is about web content management: separating creating content from site design and management; enabling people to author/edit and publish content using just a web browser; applying workflow and version control to manage publishing of content and manage design changes to templates, pages and elements (such as images) within pages

If you’ve bought into using SharePoint as a platform for information management internally within your organisation, then it makes sense to consider using it externally as well. Users will already be familiar with how it all works and what the user interface looks like

If you’ve paid for SharePoint Server 2007, you’d be daft to go and use something else unless you have a specific reason to not use SharePoint. Even if the something else is free, you’re just adding in another technology and complicating your environment. Make sure you can justify that extra effort.

There are always two sides to every coin, so what are the reasons to not use SharePoint for building public web sites. If you answered No to the three reasons to use it, the writing is on the wall. There are a couple of additional scenarios I can think of:

1. You want AAA accessibility compliance
2. You want to build a Web 2.0 site

Accessibility compliance and SharePoint were not designed to be in the same room together. SharePoint uses an awful lot of tables to control layout of pages. A big no-no if you are aiming for top level accessibility compliance. If you are just after A compliance, the Accessibility toolkit for SharePoint will fix a few gotchas (like labels) and you should be sorted. If you want AA compliance, it is going to take a bit more effort. If you want AAA compliance, you are writing your templates from scratch, replacing most built-in styles and eliminating the use of web parts.

If you are planning to create a Web 2.0-style site, encouraging participation with forums, blogs and wikis, the templates and features that come out of the box with SharePoint will probably be found wanting. They are great for getting started internally and ideal for organisations who have never before used such tools as part of everyday business practices. But the bar is a set a little bit higher for public-facing web sites. People are used to the likes of Wikipedia, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and countless other Web 2.0 applications. You have to aim high if you want to build something similar.

If you are planning to use SharePoint for building public web sites, here are some additional free tools to enhance what it can do:

• Community Kit for SharePoint – published on Codeplex. Offers enhanced wikis, blogs and templates for community-driven web sites
• SharePoint Forums Web Part – published on Codeplex. An improved version of the Discussion web part for forums and discussion boards
• Accessibility Kit for SharePoint – published on Codeplex. Guidance and modifications to achieve accessibility compliance
• Silverlight Blueprint for SharePoint – Microsoft software+services – integrate rich media capabilities within SharePoint

For more links and information, see SharePoint for WCM in the library.

Technorati tags: SharePoint; SharePoint 2007; MOSS 2007

*I may be repeating myself, but I’m bored with the MOSS acronym and am back to just using ‘SharePoint’. I’ll try and make the distinction between Windows SharePoint Services and SharePoint Server 2007 when necessary. And in this case, it’s necessary. I’m talking about using the full Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for WCM. You can build WCM sites on just Windows SharePoint Services, but it’s harder and requires a lot more configuration and development.

This first post is about planning. Whilst it can be tempting to just dive into the technology, planning can help improve outcomes, reduce time to build and mimimse mistakes along the way. Done well, planning can also double up as documentation to support your web site.

Before we start, it’s worth making a distinction between WCM and web site design. If you just want to create funky-looking web sites, you’d probably go and use Expression tools or similar. WCM is really about two additional features within web sites: 1. Enabling end users to create pages, author and publish content using nothing more than a web-browser; 2. Integrated information lifecycle management, such as: workflow to manage publishing/expiration of content and controls to ensure consistent formatting of content. There’s nothing stopping you from creating a great web site design that happens to include WCM. But this post is about the WCM bit, and how to plan to build it using SharePoint…

Scenario:

We are going to create a simple web site for publishing content. It will enable users to create and edit pages within the site without requiring any specialist skills or tools, i.e. 10 minutes of training and a web browser is all they are getting.

Planning Steps:

To design the site, you will need to decide on the following:

• Site map
• Page layouts
• Field controls
• Content management
• User roles

Site map

The site map displays your site hierarchy (i.e. site/sub-site/sub-site etc.). Depending on how detailed you want to be, you can also include identifying pages within each site to create a full site map. The image below is a basic summary site map (i.e. sites and sub-sites only, pages not included)

The site map helps you to structure your web site and identify the number of levels to be created. It also helps to determine hierarchical navigation between sites.

Tip: Keep the number of levels within your hierarchy to a minimum (ideally 3 max). URL depth is often used as an indicator of relevance in search results. Sites buried deep in the hierarchy can become difficult to find from a hierarchical navigation perspective and also via web searches.

Page Layouts

Using wire frames to create page layouts will help identify the number of different page layouts that you need to design, the navigation structure of the page and the required field controls. If you don’t do this step, you will often end up duplicating work. Wire frames help identify common and recurring elements that can be re-used throughout your site.

Normally, each page would be presented separately with a report detailing its navigation elements, page layout and field controls. The image above is a basic summary for 3 page layouts – the home page for the site, the home page for the sub-site ‘Products’ and a product-specific page within sub-site ‘Products’ to show you the similarities and differences. The process would be repeated for all other sites and pages in the site map. At the end, you will have a list of required page layouts. Some areas of the web site may share the same page layout (for example, news articles and customer references) and some areas may have a page layout based on another (for example, you may later create a ‘beta’ products sub-site – at level 3, beneath products – and have a ‘beta product name’ page layout based on ‘product name’ but with additional field controls such as ‘planned release date’).

Creating page layouts can also show you dependencies between sites and pages. The ‘Products’ page is the home page for the Products sub-site. It contains a field control – Product-related news – that will display items from the News sub-site (the field control will automatically retrieve news items tagged as ‘product’).

If we were also covering web site design in this post, the next step from wire frames would be to create full mock-ups of the pages to show the precise look-and-feel and functionality to be achieved. These visuals would highlight required style sheets and branding (logos etc.) for the site.

Field Controls

Field controls are elements on the page that can contain content. Some field controls will be user editable (such as ‘title’ and ‘description’). Some fields will be non-editable because they are dynamically updated based on other content, such as displaying a summary of news articles on the site home page. Some fields will be visible to everyone (navigation and page content), some fields will not (review date, page owner). To complicate matters, SharePoint provides two types of field controls (also known as place holders). Standard field controls are embedded in a page layout. When a new web page is created, it contains an instance of each field control from its associated page layout. But a web page can also contain ‘web parts’. Web parts are displayed within web pages but their content is independent of the web page. If I get as far as writing Part 2, we’ll delve deeper into the SharePoint page architecture. For now, we are just looking at standard field controls, not web parts.

A field control matrix identifies what fields need to be created, their properties, and which page layouts will be using them. The image below shows a partially completed matrix for our sample site:

Content Management

The whole point of a WCM system is to manage content. Planning should include identifying any information lifecycle and workflow policies that need to be applied to web pages within the site. The image below shows a list of the content management processes that will be created for our sample site:

Each process would also have an associated visual workflow to identify events and associated actions.

User Roles

User roles are an easy-to-manage way to apply permissions and access rights to web pages. Create a matrix that highlights the different types of role to be created and where the roles will be applied throughout the site map. In our sample site, we are just having 4 simple roles that are applied throughout the site – Reader (Anonymous), Author (creates/edits pages and content), Approver (approves pages and content for publishing), and Admin (manages the overall site). All sub-sites will be inheriting the top-level site permissions.

As you work through each of the above steps, you may (should) find yourself revisiting earlier steps as new elements arise. For example, if you scan the images above, you’ll notice that the field control labels in the page layouts do not match the matrix. For this reason, it can be beneficial (time saving) to not do the visual designs until the end of the planning process – wireframes are quicker and easier to update.

So. that’s it. Planning is complete. The next stage is to build it in SharePoint…

Filed under: SharePoint – Web Content Management

Technorati tags: SharePoint; SharePoint 2007