10 Things You Wish they Told You-Part 1

I talk with a number of SharePoint customers and developers. Interestingly, some of the experiences are common no matter where you go. What is even more interesting is that every time I mention the same solution, their eyes light up! In this article, I am going to talk about five things from an architect or management point of view that you wish you knew before you started your SharePoint project. In part two of this article I will follow up with five things, targeted specifically for the SharePoint developer.

One fine day, I put my customer hat on and decided to learn about “What is SharePoint?” I went to Microsoft.com/SharePoint to read Microsoft’s description of the product. At http://www.microsoft.com/sharepoint/prodinfo/what.mspx, I read the following:

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is a new server program that is part of the 2007 Microsoft Office system. Your organization can use Office SharePoint Server 2007 to facilitate collaboration, provide content management features, implement business processes, and supply access to information that is essential to organizational goals and processes.

Brilliant. That helped me a lot. I am now thoroughly convinced that there is actually a department at Microsoft whose sole focus is to come up with boring product names and mind numbingly generic product definitions, like the above.

But collaboration and being productive, and meeting our organization’s goals (whatever they may be) is what everyone wants. Right? Of course! And thus SharePoint entered the organization and was installed. It empowered end users. They created lists and document libraries, even sites and sub-sites willy nilly. It made for such a beautiful honeymoon.

And like all honeymoons, it is short. Two blinks and you had three crying kids, a mortgage, and a recessionary job market.

Users found themselves a bit lost in the UI. They really didn’t want to share information, so they broke site permissions inheritance, locked out the administrator, and then forgot their password. You had a wild sprawl of SharePoint sites and the search indexer kept getting stuck. Users were not happy, and it was all the IT department’s fault. That’s you!

It didn’t have to be that way! You don’t have a time machine, but if you did, and for the sake of your next SharePoint project, I will share some tips to keep your life in a SharePoint project sane.

Customize Out of the-Box Roles

Please carefully observe the following complex mathematical equation:

It cannot get any simpler than that. Now, it is my view (and only my view), that the out-of-the-box permissions levels of Full control, design, contribute, etc., are way too sparse. What do I mean by sparse? They are either too liberal or they are too limiting. You might find it rather shocking, but even the out-of-the-box Approval workflow cannot be properly implemented with the out-of-the-box permissions.

Lucky for you, SharePoint 2007 allows a fine-grained permission level control. I describe this in detail in the following article on my Web site.

http://blah.winsmarts.com/2007-4-SharePoint_2007__Fine_grained_permission_control.aspx

Always study your requirements, and start out with a small set of users who have the fewest permissions possible. Gradually open the permissions and number of users, to keep a manageable level of headache.

Trim the UI

I’ve laid out the following items in order of complexity.

• Light Bulb: A light bulb is rather simple. You flick a switch and 99.999% of the times it turns on.
• Dog: You pet a dog, and it wags its tail. Sometimes it may bite.
• SharePoint: More on this shortly.
• Men: It’s not that flicking the light switch should turn the bulb on, but first we must question, is light truly what we need? Let’s call a meeting.
• Women: Well, I’m a man, so I cannot understand them myself, much less explain them to you.

SharePoint, as you can see, is more complex than a dog, but less complex than a human. Isn’t that what most computer software is becoming anyway? You flick a switch, and the bulb will turn on-most of the time.

Customers still want to treat computer systems like light bulbs. They expect things to work, always, and they don’t have the patience to learn its idiosyncrasies. Thus the iPod is so successful.

The answer is, make your computer system simple. Don’t make users think in terms of “Lists.” Let them think in terms of the business problem they are trying to fix. Trim the UI to suit your project.

So, how exactly do you trim the UI?

Customize the default master page. Don’t show SharePoint stuff like “View all lists” to users who only have read only permission. It makes no sense to them.

Ensure that your architecture does not require users to ever view the application master page.

Trim the UI, and offer in-place editing of displayed text, as demonstrated in this article http://blah.winsmarts.com/2008-5-Use_SPRSS_to_offer_a_better_editing_experience.aspx.

By: Sahil Malik

Sahil Malik is a Microsoft MVP, INETA speaker, a .NET author, consultant, and trainer, and a well-rounded overweight geek. He has a passion for SharePoint, data access, and application architecture.

Sahil loves interacting with fellow geeks in real time. His talks are full of humor and practical nuggets. His talks tend to get very highly charged, fast moving, and highly interactive.

You should check out his blog at http://blah.winsmarts.com

sahilmalik@gmail.com