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Kris Nyreen
I am a Principal Designer at Inetium and my primary focus is making SharePoint not look like SharePoint. This blog is dedicated to working with SharePoint from a designer's perspective. Contact Me.
Lori Neff
I am a UI Developer and Senior Consultant at Inetium. My objective is making SharePoint sites look like more than just... SharePointy. Contact Me.
Inetium offers a challenging, energetic environment where you can help build great solutions. Apply today.
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A Blog dedicated to concepts and practices around design and branding as it relates to SharePoint. |
11/12/2008
Calculating ROI
Make the Business Case
Site Design and Architecture
How to have a successful launch
Adoption by End-Users
There are all sorts of goodies and links and worksheets and videos. It's worth a look if you're starting fresh with SharePoint or trying add some new functionality, or trying to justify development/maintenance costs. 10/28/2008It's been a while since I've posted, so I apologize, but I've been having a lot of fun messing with Silverlight lately.
Things got a little less fun though when they released Silverlight 2. While I'm a fan of Silverlight, I'm not a fan of how they released it. Number one, they released it early. Now ordinarily that would be a fabulous thing. But it's not backward compatible. And they disabled the ability to download Silverlight 2 Beta 2. So if you've labored (like we did) to make a lovely Silverlight app in beta 2 and then get less than 24 hours notice that you need to upgrade... well it's a little frustrating.
Anyway, on to my other rants.
- They changed the Portable User Interface font. Which means that all text which used it (which is everything as a default) will look different and have different line space than before (more line space). Had to resize everything.
- It messed with my animation. I had a lovely image slideshow and it changed the positioning, throwing it off and making it "jog" at the end. And that is so not cool.
- Blend is slower than dirt. The storyboard interaction is ridiculous. Moving from one frame to the next takes 3-5 SECONDS.
- Removed Text wrapping (and other text elements) from HyperlinkButtons. So this forced me to add TextBlocks to all my HyperlinkButtons. This is a minor rant, but still.
- If you have a page that hosts several other user controls, you'll get an error in Blend if any of the user controls references "HtmlPage" in its Loaded event. Basically, what happens is the Blend UI actually calls that Loaded event, and since the Blend UI is obviously not an HtmlPage, it gets confused and throws an error.
So, I've finished my rant for the moment. I still believe Silverlight is excellent. But it needs to go to its room and think about what it did and not come out until it's ready to apologize. 10/10/2008 If you have been given the task to define the site map or information architecture for your SharePoint site, then you should consider card sorting. I recently helped a client through this process and have come away with some excellent results. What is card sorting and how will it help me? Card sorting is a method of defining user focused tasks and functionality and then grouping them into logical categories. These categories will start to give you an idea of what the navigation and flow of the site should start to look like. This method gets the end-user involved with the project and essentially allows you to design a navigation scheme that is much more user focused. Card sorting will help you to understand if the users want to navigate by process, subject, business group or type of information. It will also help you to see how similar or different the needs of each group of users are. How do I prepare for a card sorting exercise? You will need to prepare a list of functions that will eventually be divided into classifications. Some things to consider when selecting content for the cards are: - Use existing online content
- Use descriptions of business groups and processes
- Planned applications and processes
- Any potential future content
Once you have 30-100 of these items identified you can write them on a 3x5 index card. Make sure to mark each card with a letter/number combination so you can do some analysis when the exercise is complete. This article from Boxes and Arrows has some great information and templates to use for the analysis process. Next, you will need to invite people to perform this exercise. You can do this individually or by groups. After reading through several articles, it is highly recommended to have a group of people involved in each card sorting session. This allows them to collaborate and collectively come up with the best grouping for the functions. Once you have the groups of people defined, give them the stack of cards and ask them to group the cards. Once they have grouped all the cards, have them fill out a blank index card with the name for that group. To make your life a lot easier, there are some online tools that allow you to automate this whole process. This is an excellent option if you have remote users that you want to be involved. Here is one that I found that has a free service that allows you to have one session open for up to 10 users. You can find it at www.websort.net. (interesting note: the UI for the card sorting is done using flash.) Also, here is a list of other sites that go into more depth about card sorting: 8/26/2008I recently had an opportunity to do a podcast with Jeff Brand over at Microsoft. We talked about the new "devigner" role and what it means to be a designer on a Silverlight project. The podcast is around 45 minutes long. You can download the podcast here. This is my first podcast so go easy on me :) 8/8/2008
Here is a good article by Microsoft regarding optimization and performance techniques for a web content management site on SharePoint. This article assumes that because the site will be completely customized, some of the core files are not necessary such as core.js and core.css. This article shows how to load these files in the background so they display on the administration pages only.
It also has some best practices that you should follow when developing the Master Page. It is interesting however that it explains the importance of an XHTML compliant site and then goes on to say "Office SharePoint Server, by default, is not XHTML compliant". 8/1/2008
Here is a site that we built that uses Silverlight for the UI and interacts with SharePoint lists. This site was featured at the 2008 Worldwide Partner Conference. Tools that were used to build this site were Expression Blend, Expression Designer, Photoshop, and Visual Studio 2008. You can visit the site by going to: www.partnersalesresources.com
7/8/2008
It is possible to get a report on broken links in a SharePoint Collaboration portal. You can do this in a site based on a Publishing Portal as well, you simply need to activate the appropriate feature. To do this, go to your Site Collection Features and enable the "Office SharePoint Server Standard Site Collection Features" feature. Now create a new site and use the "Site Directory" template (under the Enterprise tab). In this new site, go to the Site Actions menu and you should see "Find Broken Links". Note that you will only see this in the Site Actions menu in the Site Directory site; the Site Actions menu in the parent site and every other site will not show "Find Broken Links."
Now, why isn't this feature enabled out of the box? My thought is the ramifications of Anonymous Access permissions. So ensure that you've set up your permissions appropriately for Anonymous users after you create this site.
I'm very happy to update this post -- originally I was very disappointed (ok, angry) to believe that you could not enable the Site Directory on a Publishing Portal, in spite of activating all available features. So time to eat a little humble pie; somehow I neglected to realize that on this site I didn't have the permission to see the Site COLLECTION features, which is where the features were that I'd needed. On the plus side, while I was ranting about this to another developer, he took a glance at why the Site Directory would be available based upon a feature being enabled, and created his own blog post about possible fun uses of the VisibilityFeatureDependency. 6/20/2008I was excited to find that the Silverlight Beta 2 is out. So I went to go download the new tools to upgrade the project that I am currently working only to find this screen.
See? Features are your friends. All the cool people are using features. |
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