Continuing with my series of posts regarding the design of SharePoint sites, I continue by talking about the process of working with your teams to brainstorm and formulate the requirements for the site as well as the business processes to be addressed in the design.
From as early on as you can accomplish it, you should involve the IW’s (Information Workers), or the team members and users that will actually utilize the site. They, after all, are the users that will tell you whether the solution works and has value. So, work with your team members. Ask them what they need from the solution. Keep them in the loop throughout the design process. Ask for their input. Have them test the solution whether through a formal Pilot period or at some other interval.
Throughout the design process you will decide what SharePoint Apps (artifacts) you need to accomplish your teams collaboration needs. You will use some Apps out-of-the-box and some you will highly customize. You may even use the SharePoint App Store or purchase 3rd party Apps to accomplish your goals. Regardless, you should have a detailed list of the Apps required for your team. Those Apps are now part of your site and can be found in Site Contents. You could simply stop here and have your team navigate to Site Contents whenever you wanted to work with Lists or Libraries. You may even go one step further and place links to those Apps in the Quick Launch menu. But this is SharePoint. SharePoint is a web site that is made up of pages. Our next step is to design the purpose for these pages and then populate them with content using our Site Contents.
Each site, when provisioned, comes with at least one page. In the Team Site template, this is the Home page and is stored in the Site Pages Wiki Library. If you provision a site using the Project Site template, the Home page is a Web Part Page. Only Microsoft knows where that page is stored. Actually, it can be found, but I’ve only been able to find it using SharePoint Designer. I’m sure some of you designer-people would know just where it is located. We will talk later about Project Site template pages and how to create new ones. For now, just use the Team Site template. It’s much easier.
So, exactly what are Pages and what is their purpose? People misuse the term Page and interchange it with Site all the time. I think we can blame Facebook for that because they call Pages what we in SharePoint call Sites. A Site is a container and a scope of administration for artifacts (Apps) that any particular team builds to facilitate communication and collaboration among a team of people. You create as many sites as you need for as many teams as your have that need to engage with one another. There may be a Site for HR, IT, the DBO team, the Project A team. We even create sites based on some function like: an Onboarding Site, a Corporate Expense Report Management Site, a Reports Site, a Dashboard Site. Pages on other hand are a component of a Site. SharePoint is after all a web-based implementation. That means every single thing you see in SharePoint (in a browser) is a web page of some sort. Some pages you customize, and some you do not. Let’s focus on Pages for a second.
There are two types of pages that we customize to deliver relevant content to the users/teams. They are Wiki pages and Web-Part pages. We create Pages to deliver content to specific audiences. Each page will be planned out so that they contain content that is relevant to the audience that is viewing the page. I mentioned before that every site has a Home page. That page typically has content that is relevant to everyone on the team. Since that is where everyone lands by default when they open the site, that page should have something of value to everyone. This is typically where we place Apps (artifacts) that provide immediate ROI. Apps like the Newsfeed, Discussion Boards, Tasks, Team Calendars, and Announcements are placed on the Home page. It’s more like a dashboard of sorts. Take for example the CNN.com website. The home page is full of summary information. It contains snippets of all kinds of news. But the information on the home page is not detailed. If you want to know more about sports, you go to the Sports page. Or for entertainment news, you click on Entertainment. So you see, we have to put thought into what goes on the pages. For our SharePoint sites, we want a high rate of adoption so we have to think ahead and plan out how users will interact with our sites. We need to plan what goes on these pages.
Before I leave this blog post, I am listing below the most common Lists, Libraries, and other Apps that are common to Teams and Projects. I am also listing their most common use, you know, what functionality they provide to us. In my next blog post, I will talk about storyboarding and wire framing the pages and introduce you to the best practices for designing them. Fun stuff, Huh? Hang on….
| Team Apps | |
| Newsfeed | The Newsfeed/Microblog allows users to quickly broadcast information to a central location while enabling other users to create a public dialog by responding with comments. Important information and news can be shared quickly among peers while keeping conversations in context. |
| Discussion List/Board | Discussion boards provide forums for site participants to discuss topics with each other. Most site templates include the ability to create discussion boards, and many sites have a built-in discussion board called Team Discussion. As a site owner, you can customize discussion boards. |
| Calendar | Track events, meetings, milestones, etc. |
| Document Library | The core mechanism for managing the lifecycle of team documents (Word, Excel, etc.) Libraries have Workflow, Information management Policies, metadata, and Views for seeing documents in particular ways. Libraries provide the ability to manage Version History and are the storage location for documents for team collaboration whether one-at-a-time or through co-authoring. |
| Announcements | Use the Announcements list to post information you want team members to see as soon as they go to your SharePoint team Web site. By default, a view of the Announcements list, showing the five most recent announcements, appears on the home page of your team Web site. |
| Project Apps | |
| Tasks | The OOTB Tasks App in 2013 was greatly improved to provide some lightweight Project Management of project tasks. The ability to have parent/child task relationships, central aggregation and integration with Exchange/Outlook, a Timeline to showcase most important tasks from the list, and many different views for displaying tasks based on their status. |
| Issues Tracking | The Issue Tracking app can be used for customer service problems, helpdesk incidents, website updates, new tools releases, project management hurdles, or any scenario with a stream of ongoing issues. It is specifically designed to work with the Three-State Workflow to automate the process of tracking the issues from creating through completion. |
| Links | An App that allows you to create a repository of common Links used by users. This can be updated centrally so that users don’t have to maintain their own favorites in IE. |
| Document Library | The core mechanism for managing the lifecycle of team documents (Word, Excel, etc.) Libraries have Workflow, Information management Policies, metadata, and Views for seeing documents in particular ways. Libraries provide the ability to manage Version History and are the storage location for documents for team collaboration whether one-at-a-time or through co-authoring. |
| Newsfeed | The Newsfeed/Micro blog allows users to quickly broadcast information to a central location while enabling other users to create a public dialog by responding with comments. Important information and news can be shared quickly among peers while keeping conversations in context. |
| Discussion List/Board | Discussion boards provide forums for site participants to discuss topics with each other. Most site templates include the ability to create discussion boards, and many sites have a built-in discussion board called Team Discussion. As a site owner, you can customize discussion boards. |
| Announcements | Use the Announcements list to post information you want team members to see as soon as they go to your SharePoint team Web site. By default, a view of the Announcements list, showing the five most recent announcements, appears on the home page of your team Web site. |
| Custom Lists (Sprints, Vendors, Schedule) | Just like you build an Excel spreadsheet and a schema to help you manage data, you create Lists in SharePoint to match your business requirements to help you manage business processes. They are built from scratch using the Custom List App. |