Brian on Collaboration

The Portal Interface

There is no doubt a Portal brings more value to a business than Intranets of old. No longer a a simple venue for disseminating key corporate news and knowledge in a branded internal website, Portals have become the focal point for many knowledge workers. Key to this success is the orientation devices given to users: Does the User Interface assist users in getting what they need? Does the Information Design make sense to its users? Generally this is called the User Experience. In Portal product implementations, such as SharePoint (but this could apply to any product), one of the key challenges is implementing a great user experience (high usability) and ensuring corporate culture and branding needs are met, while not deviating too far from the base features of the product you're implementing.

Which brings us to our next big SharePoint question:

2) We don't like the out of the box SharePoint interface...can we change it?

The answer is: of course. SharePoint is a web based product and is built upon standards such as cascading style sheets. There are also a core set of templates responsible for driving the majority of the SharePoint User Experience: templates which can be modified to meet any design needs. The REAL question is: how far should you go? You would never think to completely change the user interface of a desktop product such as Word or Excel. Should you really change a Portal product?

As usual, there's no one correct answer. Every company's branding requirements differ. The ability to train employees versus the ability of employees learning things on their own also makes a difference. Deviate too far from the original intent of the product, and you could not only be working against the purpose of the solution, but also undertaking a costly and risky venture.

The key questions to ask are: What are your branding requirements? What is your budget for this type of undertaking? What resources do you have to maintain and enhance the User Experience over time? Do you have the ability to increase training to deal with less than ideal usability issues with the product you're dealing with, or do you have the time it would take to make the product easier to use?

Once you've answered these questions, you're ready to start working. Microsoft has a great white paper on this subject: Branding a SharePoint Portal Site.

The difference between SharePoint Portal and WSS

As a Microsoft Gold partner, the company I'm with (Habanero) has an affinity to Microsoft solutions. The key offering in the Collaboration space is Microsoft's Office System and specifically SharePoint. There are probably no less than 127,234 different advice sites on SharePoint, so I'm pretty keen not to reinvent the wheel, but over the next few days, I'll answer the most common questions we get.

1) What's the difference between SharePoint Portal Server and Windows SharePoint Services?

This is by far the biggest point of confusion for most people.

Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) is a technology built into Microsoft's Windows Server 2003. It's a service that allows you to create team sites to assist with smaller group collaboration with features such as document and form libraries (somewhat akin to a shared file system folder, but with check in/out, version control, integration with office, etc.), custom lists such as issue, task, contact and any other types of list you can think up (think of a list as a set of columns and rows), simple search-ability, discussion boards, image libraries (for storing photos and other images) and surveys. That all said, there are valid reasons to create team sites that the whole company might visit. It takes a good process to determine when to put something in a team site and when to put it in the portal. That's where we usually help out with our SharePoint Information Design process. The good news: WSS is free. The bad news...it's so good you'll quickly need...

SharePoint Portal Server (SPS) is server product offering (read: not free) that helps you organize all of those great team sites you built using WSS. It also has many more enterprise focused features such as enterprise search which can search your company file shares, external website or other repositories and user profiles: allowing you to create a very rich enterprise employee directory (including great integration with Active Directory). It also includes features such as "My Sites" which allow each employee in an organization to create their own personal private and public web-spaces and a great tool for publishing corporate news. Even though it's called a portal, that doesn't mean a company would only have one of them. In some cases companies need more than one for various reasons. The Microsoft Solution Accelerator for Intranets briefly talks about multi-portal scenarios.

There is a Microsoft document on this subject, but it's not the best in the world...but for reference it's available on Microsoft's site here.