Simple Things
Everybody, it seems, is using Sharepoint. For a product which does enterprise document and content management (including metadata and taxonomy handling) badly in its native state, and collaboration only in a mediocre fashion compared to competitors, it’s not the best deal for knowledge managers to have to grapple with. You really need to have ingenuity and a good understanding of its workings to use it well (and there are some excellent KM implementations of Sharepoint out there, Bonnie Cheuk’s implementation at ERM is just one of them).
But ubiquity combined with shortcomings does at least create a market for improvements, and here’s a report of a new release by Colligo, one of the many companies making a living out of Sharepoint’s native failure to reflect the normal working environment of users.
What I liked about this was the way in which adding small and apparently simple features can make the tool much much easier to use – and more useful than intrusive :
- integrating windows explorer with Sharepoint document libraries, so that you can share files via Sharepoint, weaning users off the jungle of badly managed shared folders
- giving drag and drop ability to reorganise document library folders in Sharepoint (I hope there’s some governance process around this, because free licence to change could turn a structured library into areplica of the shared folder madness we are all trying to escape from)
- adding an upload feature in Outlook so that instead of attaching documents to emails, you just send a link to the document in Sharepoint, limiting multiple version (and space consumption) madness
It’s small and basic things like this that should be got right first, not last. The design of a system has to stay close to the user, not migrate towards them painfully, inch by inch. On a side note, a plea for help from a colleague battling with Sharepoint workflow right now: her legal department has discovered (9 months into the project) that approvals associated with documents in Sharepoint are automatically de-linked after 60 days. This is not a good thing for anyone who cares about approvals, and it makes one wonder what piece of code was dragged and dropped unthinkingly to deliver this workflow process in Sharepoint. But does anyone know a fix? Small things, helpful or maddening. Let’s not forget them.
2 Comments so far
hi ,
i did a some slides on the features of sharepoint comparing to a CMS system .
http://www.scribd.com/doc/4242944/Comparison
sharept will go far if we also use the livecomms servers with it .
Commenting is not available in this weblog entry.Page 1 of 1 pages
Comment Guidelines: Basic XHTML is allowed (<strong>, <em>, <a>) Line breaks and paragraphs are automatically generated. URLs are automatically converted into links.
Patrick
I really enjoyed this very practical critique
especially the documents de-linked after 60 days - I have always wondered about that risk as I listen to young IT geeks wax lyrical about the automated workflow potential of Sharepoint - without much knowledge of how folks get swamped sometimes and don’t get to do the workflow task in the allotted time - always thought it was potentially dangerous
cheers
KerrieAnne
Posted on July 04, 2009 at 08:38 PM | Comment permalink