Monthly Archives: June 2008

The Four C’s to Sell MOSS

You’ve been tasked with bringing some order to the chaos of your various organizations’ file shares, e-mail servers, and externally facing websites. After all the research and analysis you’ve done you’ve decided that MOSS 2007 is the optimal solution to solve the problem. The problem? Selling it to management. You can demo MOSS with all its fantastic features and Office integration, but your management needs some “bullet point” reasons why they should invest in MOSS.

In Essential SharePoint 2007* the authors lay out the “four C’s” of company portals that MOSS can satisfy. These can be used as a good starting point to sell them and bring MOSS into your organization.

Communication is a fantastic reason to bring MOSS into your organization’s processes. Many companies are plagued with disseminating important information both to internal and external individuals, and MOSS can aid in delivering timely, relevant, and accurate information to your target audience. Through the use of MOSS sites geared for news, announcement web parts, blogs, and audience targeting—MOSS can greatly help your organization accomplish this much-needed functionality.

Collaboration is the strong point of MOSS and also the easiest to sell. Your organization struggles from discerning which document is the most recent, and people in your organization realize that e-mailing around a document is not an effective way to collaborate. Here is a great time to talk about the workflow capabilities in MOSS. Demonstrate an approval workflow which engages the management instantly by showing them how the whole process can be automated, contained in one area, and management can see what’s holding up the workflow. Add onto this team sites with robust document management capability with an extensible security model, and you’re well on your way to convincing them.

Consolidation is probably the reason you were tasked to find a better solution than file shares. There is no way anymore to know where to get what and if it’s even accurate. With enterprise search you can ensure that your users can always find the document (with a good metadata structure/information architecture). You can also sell the Business Data Catalog (BDC) which can crawl those old file shares and bring them into the same search interface. You’ll also see eyebrows rise when you show them the business intelligence capabilities in MOSS such as Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) which will help your management make the best decision on the most up-to-date information.

Consistency is something that we all long for in our IT applications. Right now your public facing website, other marketing materials, and even standard company documentation can’t look the same for any length of time. With the use of master pages you can be sure that the interface changes you make will be reflected across your entire MOSS installation. Having problems keeping that PowerPoint template up to date? Creating a content type will ensure that your users will always have the latest version of the companies template.

These are four great selling points of MOSS to bring your management on board. When partnered with some simple demonstrations that will create a strong case for MOSS.

*Jamison, S., Cardarelli, M., & Hanley, S. (2007). Essential Sharepoint 2007. Reading: Addison-Wesley Professional.

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The Most Trivial Aspect of Designing Interfaces

I’ve been doing UI work for almost a decade.  I’ve seen a lot and been through many fads (although I won’t claim them if asked).  For a long time I thought the most important part of designing interfaces was the way it looked, and I was caught up in the next DHTML fad that would come across my RSS reader.  Well, thankfully I’ve grown and realized what’s really important, and I’ve come to realize that an interface’s appearance is not the most important thing.

Note: Please don’t think I’m saying that the way it looks is not as important, but is pales in comparison to our following discussion.

What? You Mean Users Come Here?

When I heard first of User Experience (UX) I had a hard time wrapping my arms around it.  I made it more difficult then it is supposed to be.  In short, UX is the discipline that aims to understand not only who your users are but what they are trying to accomplish with your application.  When you understand UX then you create an interface that facilities these user’s behaviors and desires.   I found this great definition of UX:

The term “user experience” refers to a concept that places the end-user at the focal point of design and development efforts, as opposed to the system, its applications or its aesthetic value alone. It’s based on the general concept of user-centered design. (Source)

I love this definition, because it illustrates that UX “places the end-user at the focal point” which is critical to your applications success.  When you neglect how your users will interact with your system then ultimately, and I guarantee this, it will be a failure. 

We’ve all been on sites that have left a sour taste in our mouth.  Maybe we are forced to use this sites, and when we use them we’d rather complain about them then actually use them.  Whether it’s an intranet or public-facing site we still have the same possibility for failure.  Often times schedules push the necessary time to understand UX to the back-burner in order to “get something out in front of the customer.”  Doesn’t that seem ridiculous?  We want to get something out for our customers so they can benefit from it, but we don’t do the careful assessment necessary to ensure that this happens?

Practical Steps to Facilitate UX Research

Here is a short list of items to remember when developing your next application to conjure UX research.

  1. Spend some meaningful time interviewing a wide-range of potential consumers to uncover what they would use your application for.
  2. If you’re replacing a legacy system then be sure to ask what about the current system frustrates them.
  3. Let your feedback from the consumers drive those tense decisions that often play out between the development team and management.
  4. Diagram workflow to understand all variations your users can get from your application.
  5. Usability testing will become invaluable to see how users actually use your system as opposed to a hypothetical discussion.
  6. Engage user feedback and understanding when developing your information architecture (labels, navigation, etc).

We are all users, and we all have strong opinions on how interfaces should look and function.  The only problem is when we start designing applications that cater to our personal or internal desires and not what aides our customer.  UX doesn’t have to be a burdensome process that puts your project behind schedule, and if done correctly you’ll see immediate and lasting positive effects from your effort.

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