Notes from April SharePoint User Group meeting showcasing a MOSS Intranet
The following is an overview of the presentation Ari Bakker and I did at last user group event. Unfortunately we didn’t have enough time to showcase some areas as the previous speaker went over the allocated time. So this post will cover the main items that I scheduled in the agenda.
**Intranet Solution Overview and Information Architecture **
The Ministry of Transport (MoT) New Zealand intranet was built using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. The project started in August of last year with a proof of concept built using the Beta 2 version of MOSS. The Intranet went live with Beta2TR in November last year! I believe unofficially this was the first MOSS production intranet in the world. The Intranet has been migrated to RTM and we are into Phase 2 development and enhancements of the MoT intranet.
Initially we were engaged to review and recommend suitable information architecture and to work closely with MoT business analysts. Our Information/User Interaction guru Zef (www.zefamedia.co.nz/blog) guided the MoT business owners and various organisation units and came up with a Meta data classification scheme.
This classification scheme was used as the blue print to build the MOSS based intranet. There was a significant amount of time taken to refine it to what it is now. The good thing about this was that MOSS allowed us to experiment with the model and change it when required. What I want to highlight to anyone who is about to start on an Intranet project is that you will NOT get it right the first time. Basically if you hold off your project until you get your IA and classification perfected then you are wasting your time. My advice is start with a simple model that your users are already familiar with. Talk to Zef he’s the best guy to ask about user interaction. J
What we did as part of our implementation was to get users of the intranet engaged from the beginning. We had a good cross section of users that were giving us feedback right through the implementation and we always strive to work in a collaborative manner with all our client engagements. It’s your users who will be visiting and interacting with the Intranet daily not you alone! You will need to do user research to achieve the same level of perfection that we are trying to achieve and it’s not an overnight success story.
**Using Content Types to drive the navigation **
We used a combination of content types and site columns in MOSS to achieve a navigation mechanism which was relevant to the majority of users. Here is a screen shot of the wire frame template that we used to determine our navigation.
The end result looks like this
**Master Pages and Page layouts **
Currently I know that most of you have heard ‘horror’ stories that MOSS does not comply with XHTML and is not standards compliant etc etc.. Well I am assuring you that this NOT the case. What is true is that the out of the box templates that ship with MOSS are NOT. But it does not mean that a savvy web developer like Zac from our team can’t build a site in MOSS that is compliant and passes a W3C validation check. Our team is quite capable of building compliant sites. We are only a few months away from providing the New Zealand public sector with a solution to this. I can’t comment further than that but suffice to say that if someone says MOSS is NOT capable of building compliant sites please ask them to email me and I will direct them to resources on how to make MOSS compliant with whatever standard they are referring to. J
Check out these great sites built on MOSS for starters.
Totally XHTML and table less design from the UK!
Plymouth Hospitals NHS Trust is an acute and general hospital providing services to 46,000 people in Plymouth, East Cornwall and South West Devon as well as specialist treatments to a population of up to two million from across Devon, Cornwall and Dorset.
http://www.plymouthhospitals.nhs.uk/Pages/Home.aspx
MoT Layout
The design and layout you see on the screen is based on a combination of out of the box templates and some customised master page templates as well as custom built master pages. We have not gone into great length to replace the web part and custom control code with valid HTML as this was not a business priority. If this was a public facing site then of course we would have ensured that the site was fully conformant.
I had an interesting conversation recently with one intranet administrator at a pre sales presentation of MOSS as a possible collaboration platform and intranet. This person was adamant that all sites should NOT have tables. And does it really matter that an Intranet has to be built without tables? I’ll leave that for open debate. J But to just kick out MOSS because of this is a bit over the top.
**Search and Business Data Catalog **
MoT wanted a solution to enable searching. Obviously MOSS was the ideal candidate for this. One of the other unique requirements was to have an integrated ‘people’ and ‘external contact’ list search.
The solution had to provide the following
MoT had a large number of contacts stored in another application. To enable staff to easily access these contacts MoT wanted a solution to be integrated with the Intranet. A simple read only web service was built to expose the contacts and the BDC was used to query and index these contacts. Out of the box search web parts and BDC web parts were customised to provide a seamless solution for end users.
Once a search result was displayed a series of actions were extended to initiate the change request process for a given contact.
**Summary **
The above is an overview of some of the capabilities of MOSS as an Intranet. The options available now for MoT with this can cover all areas of the MOSS pie. I believe that by starting with a simple solution like an Intranet for an organisation allows the organisation to understand the capabilities of MOSS. By identifying what is the feasible project to start off with MOSS can be a bit confusing. This is where organisations need to take a step back and prioritise based on their current infrastructure and what can they sustain for the next quarter if a project is started etc. We offer consulting services for SharePoint projects right from the start and can even build a business case for you. Technology itself is not going to help businesses transform broken business practices. If users don’t use something now because they are not familiar with the concept they probably will not use that even if it came in the form of a brand new technology. Key is to get the balance right.
I would like to thank the team at MoT for allowing us to showcase the Intranet at the user group meeting. Especially Murray Wills and his team and Hamish Denston who is in charge of the intranet project at MoT. It has been great working with you guys and hope to continue doing thatJ.