Mark Pawson alerted to me to an interesting thread on the IxDA.org site regarding SharePoint. The platform is not universally loved by interaction designers (a bit of an understatement). I thought I would post my response to the thread discussion below as a few of you might find it interesting.
... I have had a love/hate relationship with SharePoint for quite some time. At Habanero we have been working with the product since version 1 and have over 100 successful implementations under our belt. The product really started to gain some serious traction in the marketplace with SharePoint 2003 as a lot of companies already owned the product (via enterprise licensing agreements) and as such their IT departments wanted to use it.
As someone who has a background in information architecture, user interface design and usability engineering I despised SharePoint 2003. Website content management was a huge weakness of the product as it was primarily a document-centric (Word, Excel, etc) extension to Microsoft Office. You needed to hack the product and use a number of workarounds to create a classic HTML-based intranet, which never really worked that well or was that usable (not to mention the quality of the HTML produced) . As such, I preferred building intranets on Microsoft Content Management Server (MCMS) as it allowed us to create really great-looking, usable corporate portals that reflected the identity of the organization. The problem with using MCMS (other than the fact that it was obvious that MS was going to get rid of it) is that you couldn't create collaborative team sites on the platform to work together on documents -- something SharePoint has always been traditionally strong at.
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 changed the landscape as Microsoft took MCMS and integrated the content management functionality into MOSS (along with a number of other features like document and records management, blogs and wikis) . This was a turning point for myself and the rest of our user experience team in the acceptance of SharePoint as MOSS allowed us to design a traditional corporate portal (that has an awesome IA and UI) , while also allowing our clients to create and use team sites, where the branding and design requirements are a lot lighter. I have been pretty blown away with the intranets (and even a couple of external websites) we have been able to create in MOSS.
I think MOSS is a huge improvement from SharePoint 2003 and is a really compelling product. There are a few gotchas though (and other miscellaneous things that drive me crazy):
- The HTML the product produces (when using team sites and out of the box Web Parts) is ugly. There are tables everywhere and the HTML is really inconsistent from one area of the product to another. You can tell that a large team worked on the product and the teams didn't collaborate as well as they should have on the code they produced. This is less of a concern when you are using the content management functionality in the product as you can customize the HTML heavily
- Microsoft really has to stop designing for Windows/IE first and treating other browsers and operating systems as an afterthought. Safari, Firefox and IE should provide end-users with the exact same experience! This is really important for education or any organization that has a lot of Macs. In addition it would be nice if Mac Office provided some integration with MOSS like Office 2007 does
- MOSS is often sold as an intranet in a box. IT departments often install the tool, lightly customize it, and expect users to love their new intranet. Companies that have successful implementations spend a lot of time and money investing in information architecture and user experience design
- Sometimes it is better to modify your IA or UI to be a little more SharePoint-centric. If you do things in a way that SharePoint really wasn't architected for you can run into all sorts of issues. You want to bend it to do what you want, but not break it!
- The blog and wiki functionality isn't as strong as it could be (these are both features that our clients have been very interested in)
The last thing that is probably worth mentioning is that MOSS is an enterprise-class product, and as such the learning curve is steep. The product can be difficult to customize, infrastructure requirements can be a challenge and developing on the platform is a lot harder than just developing a traditional .NET solution. That said, if you spend time doing it right you can create a pretty compelling experience for your users!
I cleaned up a few grammatical issues in this version
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