So your IT boss comes to you and says, “Hey, we just got SharePoint, and we want it to do this.” Whatever this is, this is not the a use of SharePoint that would think would be anywhere near achievable.
We run into it all the time — Microsoft representatives that we work with sell some Fortune 500 company SharePoint as the panacea for their problems, and we have to implement it. There are many reasons for this, some including there’s still a huge hole in the Content Management System product profile (or, who the hell wants to dedicate $2 million in licensing for Vignette or Documentum, or deal with the pain and performance issues of Plone or the stupid conceptualization of Joomla), or someone wants to push SharePoint as a platform, and we’re just masochistic.
In any case, someone should sit down and figure out what the business problem that needs to be solved before moving forward, just to see if there is a match. If there isn’t a 100 percent match, here are some ideas, with SharePoint being the Square Peg.
SharePoint is a great platform, and has a particular way about being used, but if you try to do too much with it, development schedules can go out the window, developers will set the building on fire, and it’s just generally a bear to deal with, like any software product.
In that case, look at your business problem and see how you can make it fit SharePoint better. Very few business problems are solved with out of the box software (and if they are, those developers are rich beyond belief).
Need to do authentication, but it’s a different model than SharePoint? Use SharePoint. No way to change the WYSIWYG editor in SharePoint because there’s a way that it uses a certain HTML tag? Relax, have a martini for lunch, and use SharePoint.
If there’s a business problem that isn’t being solved by SharePoint, there may be a third-party web part that solves it because someone else has thought about it. Remember, the idea is to look buy before build, because build is much more expensive for your company or client.
Two companies that have built a lot of controls include Telerik and Infragistics, extending SharePoint pretty far out of the box. Some of the custom controls and web parts replace existing SharePoint technology, and they solve development and design problems quicker by licensing.
There are also lists of free web parts you can download.
SharePoint isn’t for everyone, especially for those that live and die in the Open Source space, but it does have a great market segment. It just might not be for you.
Look at what you are trying to achieve, and if SharePoint fits 70 to 80 percent of it, then go for it. If it doesn’t, look at other products or even doing custom development.
So why am I posting a Consultant Thursday blog late? Just because I haven’t posted in two weeks, I haven’t lost track of time. I just think the reason for my absence is a good blog topic: Burn Out. I’ve been juggling four different projects for the last two months. In order to make it work, I had to be very disciplined, efficient, and organized. My calendar was color blocked from 8:00 a.m. til 11:00 p.m on most days. If something doesn’t go according to plan, or if there’s a shift in schedule, then I’d work until the wee morning hours. There were a couple of days where I worked a straight 14 hours, sleep 3 hours, then get up and do it again. There are also days where I did nothing to give my brain a rest.
This is not out of the ordinary, really. It’s just part of being a consultant.
Projects never come in a steady rate. It’s either feast or famine. When times are good, you juggle multiple projects. You have to be able to switch gears from one moment to the next; all the requirements and production issues competing for attention in your head.
So why don’t I just turn down work?
I never turn down projects where:
When you work for yourself, every relationship, everything you do is a business development opportunity.
Hearing all this talk about my crazy life as a consultant, most people would say why I do it. I don’t mind working hard as long as I’m learning. The money is good, but it’s not about the money for me. The sole reason why I am a contractor is because I own my time. I can work really hard when it counts. When there is down time, I can truly give my brain a rest, have the luxury of researching creative solutions, and not dwell in bureaucracy land. Or I can just take two weeks off without filling out a vacation request.
I believe that you have to work hard to be lucky. It’s a lot like karma.
From a press release, or actually a study:
The recent publication of a new benchmark report by Aberdeen Group, a Harte-Hanks Company Application Performance Management: The Lifecycle Approach Brings IT and Business Together, further signals the increasing need for real end user experience solutions. Aberdeen’s latest findings show that 50 percent of revenue loss is a result of poor Application Performance. In addition, the enterprises surveyed by Aberdeen clearly ranked the ability to identify end user problems as the top priority for any Application Performance Management initiative.
…
“Best-in-Class organizations are taking an additional critical step and are measuring application performance not only from the perspective of their data center components, but also from the end user perspective. These organizations are ensuring that improvements in application availability, response times and usability translate into improved employee satisfaction and productivity, and ultimately, improved customer satisfaction, mitigation of lost revenue opportunities, and avoid damages to brand image,” said Bojan Simic, research analyst at Aberdeen.
This goes under — duh.
Of course poor user experience can result from a website, web application, or software application that’s slow, has incoherent error messages or just plain breaks. Users don’t know the difference between what’s a bug and what’s not, or why the application is performing slowly.
So, repeat after me:
The first rule of user experience is that the application should actually work.
I wonder how much they are charging for that report. I need to start writing white papers.
I don’t know about you, but every time I’ve done the “hey, lets do the requirements gathering in a waterfall process,” by the time we get to the bottom of the waterfall, we’re nowhere close to where we started. That’s one of the reasons why I’m a huge fan of agile requirements gathering and software development.
Horse Pig Cow has a great post on the waterfall vs. the washing machine. It’s done in a presentation (I’m going to include it below).
It’s a great blog community, evoling as blogs have. More importantly, it’s a comfortable community, as in they don’t get all snooty like some bloggers do.
For the artist in you, you can create your own Stick Figure Family. It’s sort of like of a family tree that you can have. It’s cute, it’s fairly easy to use but I’m going to knock off a point because buttons should be used instead of hyperlinks in some places, but that’s not the only thing going on.
Most importantly, they have figured out like some of the other applications that they should be cross promoting across the multiple social networking sites. There are four other sites like FaceBook they are promoting this application on. The reason it’s called Open Social is that it’s an open platform. Sure, there’s some customization that goes on, but not that much, so we should be seeing more of this.
Application rating (1 to 5, 5 being highest):
So I’m going to catch up on a few posts — I’ve been moving — and one of the complaints I had was Southern California Edison. I’m moving in their territory, from Anaheim to Long Beach, and yet I had to create a new user account and re-enter all my information at their moving site.
I not a big fan of the SCE site to begin with, and this obviously boggles the mind. You know who I am, you know where I’m moving from and where I’m moving to — how about making it easy for me?
It’s more than SharePoint, but there are some good feeds here. I subscribe to them.
(It would be nice if the links worked in other browsers that Internet Explorer).
Patrick Neeman is Director of User Experience at Jobvite, a social recruiting platform and runs both the UX Drinking Game and Startup Drinking Game | More | Contact
