Tag Archives: search

Default Header and Navigation on My Sites and Search Center

For reasons unbeknownst to me and other SharePoint practitioners the Microsoft team decided not to include the site collection navigation as well as the large header above it (contains site logo, title and description as well as the social buttons) in My Sites and the enterprise search center. I’m not going to go on about why I think this was a poor decision, but I wanted to provide you with master pages for both that establish consistency.

The process was simple. I just had to find the code that created the header and navigation and include it in the out-of-the-box master pages for My Sites and the search center (called mysite.master and minimal.master respectively). The search center will then look exactly like v4.master in the header region. The My Site master page has the custom bar above the ribbon, and you’ll notice the site collection title, site title and description are not in the header. The reason for that is that the mysite.master uses those placeholders elsewhere in the master page. For the sake of sticking with the out-of-the-box design I’ve kept the content placeholders where they were designated in mysite.master.

You can then add your custom CSS and JavaScript to the master page as well as any other changes you wish to do. It will at least give you a start on interface consistency between the three major aspects of the SharePoint interface. The ZIP file contains both master pages including a text file with the code I placed into each of the master pages for reference.

Download Master Pages

unbeknownst

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The SharePoint Grade Card

I have now had a much larger exposure to SharePoint’s product offering, and I feel in a much better and knowledgeable place to assess the strength and weaknesses of the technology. Like any product that attempts to serve a wide range of functionality there are going to be stronger and weaker areas. One thing the SP team at Microsoft does well is addressing shortfalls in the technology as it matures.

I’ll evaluate each of, what I deem to be, the major functions and tools of SharePoint. OK, let’s get started.

Windows SharePoint Services — A

Windows SharePoint Services or WSS is now in its third major iteration. It is the core that MOSS is built upon, and it is where the strength of SharePoint lies. From it’s incredible Office integration, task and document management, and web part personalization options WSS is what caught my eye and made me desire a career change.There are some minor headaches and pitfalls, but certainly not enough to warrant anything less than an “A” in this category.

Social Networking Capability — B–

Unfortunately, SP didn’t do what I would’ve liked to see in this category. They introduced “My Sites” in MOSS, but adding colleagues isn’t intuitive and the feature turns into a personal SharePoint site instead of a robust social networking tool for the enterprise.

Blogs and wikis were also introduced in WSS 3, and the inclusion of them is promising but the implementation is poor. The blog is feature-less allowing only categories and less than impressive personalization features. The wiki is super basic, and it leaves me confounded on how it seems so quickly implemented. A look at the benchmark, MediaWiki, will show the lack of robustness in the SP implementation.

Enterprise Search — B+

The MS work on their search in MOSS is surprisingly amazing. While many companies introduce search replacements for MOSS, often times they are trying to fix poorly architect edsearch solutions with the MS offering.

The search in SP offers many options for optimal information architecture including best bets, search logging/analysis, search scopes, and much more. It’s impressive to say the least. The crawler is also very, very effective with filters to spider other forms of content. They even introduced federated search to this offering, and it makes it all-the-more impressive.

The only reason this doesn’t get an “A” is the search results and placing search in the default interface isn’t worth the high grade although this can be edited by any capable designer.

Business Intelligence — C+

Default business intelligence in SP is less than stellar. Although key performance indicators (KPI) are in the offering it is simply a graphical display of business data. Corporations need far more robust diagramming and analysis tools for true business intelligence, and it has been a ripe area for other companies to pick up what is lacking in this feature.

Excel Services is an interesting addition to this as it allows the graphing and analysis of Excel data which is the most rudimentary of business database and business intelligence applications. I look forward to this being beefed up in the next version of SP.

Web Content Management — B

Web Content Management or WCM was one of my specialties in my last business that shares the name of this site. I chose WordPress as my tool of choice, but there are fantastic tools including Drupal, Dot Net Nuke, Graffiti CMS, and many others that do a fantastic job with each having their own strengths and weaknesses.

The SP offering of WCM has moved them from solely a intranet/extranet tool into the Internet realm. WCM is also done differently than or web CMS’. SP uses metadata in a single list to control what content is available to the page creator in SP Designer. Creating page layouts then becomes foundational to all SP WCM. Even though pages can be created and metadata is more focused on then other tools such as WordPress or Drupal it still leaves much to be desired.

The workflow of creating metadata to then be used on any form of WCM pages I find quite restricting, and it ultimately slows down the contributor who understands nothing about the WCM architecture. Inline editing of the content is also less than impressive. The rich text editor is shaky at best, and the constant need for modal windows hinders usability for the contributor. To edit the “backend” is only a list without a robust administration interface found in other popular CMS’.

SharePoint Designer and Interface — D

I’m putting both the default interface and SP Designer in the same category since they are so inter-related. The default interface is clunky, navigation is abundant but poorly implemented, and the “obviousness” of the SP interface is less than obvious. Also, in the interface the markup is absolutely horrendous. Typical of ASP.NET controls it outputs horrendous markup. This hinders accessibility, ease of branding, and even in the realm of SEO when using SP for public-facing sites. The markup reminds me of what MS is all-to-often ridiculed for lack of web standards awareness.

SP Designer is the approved tool to brand the SP interface. It’s built on the legacy of FrontPage, and it’s capability and interface is very reminiscent of FrontPage. However, seemingly they are learning from their rich IDE in Visual Studio and allowed it to influence the designer options and functionality. If it weren’t for the ability to open up the content database I would never, ever use the tool. It is expensive, bulky, and there are free editors that make SP Designer look amateur.

The ability to do XSLT in a GUI manner is an interesting perspective, and it makes such a difficult topic somewhat attainable by a non-XML/XSLT expert. Also, the workflow wizard is actually quite impressive. Although it has limitations I was able to create a rather complex workflow with logic rather painlessly.

Looking Forward

I’m hoping that these deficiencies will be address and strengths strengthened in the next version of SharePoint. I understand much of what I criticized is still “version 1.0,” and I expect it to mature. SharePoint is a powerful platform, and I expect it to continue to dominate the ECM market for years to come.

A Primer on Information Architecture: Introduction

Information Architecture (IA) is one of the most important and exciting concepts in designing applications, but it also one of the least understood by a majority of designers, programmers, business analysts, etc. Hopefully through the following overview of the major concepts and benefits you can immediately improve both the utility and finabitliy of information in your application. After all, content (information) is the most important thing to any application so doesn’t it deserve some foresight?

Defining Information Architecture (IA)

The Findability Flower

The Information Architecture Institute has the following definition to begin our study. They define IA as:

The structural design of shared information environments.
The art and science of organizing and labeling web sites, intranets, online communities and software to support usability and findability.
An emerging community of practice focused on bringing principles of design and architecture to the digital landscape.

Information architects, from this working definition, play an important role in not only ensuring the usability and utility of information but it also goes to the level of discovering the optimal way to do physical layouts inside applications. From beginning to end, IA has an important role our design work.

Relation to Other Disciplines

Findability truly is the center of all applications we design. If information is not findable, then the value-added proposition from our applications doesn’t amount to much. Information Architecture is an important component to achieving maximum findability in our applications, but it has a very symbiotic relationship to other disciples in designing interfaces.

Interaction designers/user experience gurus are very interested in how our applications are actually used by the end user and therefore take a keen interest in how we label, describe, and layout our information.
Usability experts love IA for ensuring that our applications actually have information structured in such a way that makes it both usable and provides utility for the user.\
Graphic designers need IA before ever applying CSS, DHTML, or any other element to add to the aesthetic and function of the interface.
Business Analysts/Executives are concerned with ensuring that the product they sell and/or information they provide is understood by the target market. They see a tight relationship between IA and an application’s return on investment (ROI).

The list can continue, but it’s very apparent that many different stakeholders have a keen interest in IA. Because of this, information architects straddle an important line between the business objectives, customer needs, and application designers. They truly serve as the “glue” that makes projects stand or fall.

Understanding Information-Seeking Behavior

Before we continue with the various aspects of IA we first need to clarify how users actually seek information. If we can’t understand this vital aspect than all our IA will amount to a waste in time and money.

Too many designers design interfaces on the premise that search takes a linear form. In other words, the user comes to our application, searches/browses in a simple manner, finds their information, and leaves. Truth is, seeking information is an involved process. Think of how we search for information on sites: Sometimes we attempt to navigate the site, other times we go straight to search, but usually it’s a combination of both. We need to keep this in perspective when designing our information architectures.

A Diagram of Typical Information Seeking Behavior

Here are some important articles outlining information seeking behavior.

The Design of Browsing and Berrypicking Techniques for the Online Search Interface — this article was created in 1989, but it remains a phenomenal introduction to information seeking behavior to which the author likens it to “berrypicking.”
Designing for Information Foragers: A Behavioral Model for Information Seeking on the World Wide Web — a great introduction to the concepts inside understanding information seeking behavior.
Information Seeking on the Web — a great overview of information seeking behavior as specific to web interfaces with its unique needs and concerns.
Information Seeking Behavior in New Searching Environments — search is an important aspect in understanding this topic, and this is a great primer on its complexities.

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