It’s too bad that a bank in so much trouble had this as a success story, but here it is: Pete Fields, an eBusiness Director, explains how Wachovia used MOSS to build a social network called Pulse so employees could collaborate, and more importantly, the information was stored so future employees (if there is a future for them) could access the system to view that collective knowledge.

The irony is that I saw the system, and what I like most about their approach was how they attached a return on investment to the project, and the project received its funding through reduction of travel budgets. The establishes a very real value and the users know they have to use the system to replace other methods of communication.

And it worked, as their statistics showed. It’s too bad they couldn’t have had a few years to let the experiment grow.

Clever Workarounds has a very long but strong post about how the complexity of SharePoint exposes organizational gaps because SharePoint is such a comprehensive platform. Another interesting observation: information technology people might not be the best people to plan a SharePoint implementation, because of the struggles of governance.

Is there a product that screams more for competent Information Architects and User Experience experts than SharePoint?

One of the great things about SharePoint is it is this complete platform: there are many great features that you can implement allowing end users to manage their own content.

And one of the worst things about SharePoint is that you allow users to manage their own content, which scares end users in most organizations.

We work with a lot of clients who don’t know where that content’s going to come from, because showing little boxes on a site map and empty content areas on a wireframe doesn’t equate to content making it to a published system.

Here’s a few tips about content management systems in general, and SharePoint in specific, that are forgotten during the development process:

If there’s a page in the site map, someone has to write it.

One of the biggest mistakes I see regarding developing websites is there’s time built into the quote for development, requirements gathering, and design, but almost never any time for copy writing. Why is that? Factor in some time not only for writing content, but editing content, because sometimes what you start with is the equivalent to a square peg in a round hole.

There should also be a content style guide (one sheet of paper) that describes the tone of the copy in the intranet. If you are working as a consultant, establish exactly who’s responsible for the content.

If there isn’t any content, it’s good to mock it up.

A legacy from the print work is greeking in text, which is actually latin. It’s the placement of content written in another language to show how the system will work when content is placed in the pages. Lorem Ipsum is a site that generates latin text on the fly depending on your requirements, and is a great resource. This allows end users to see how the system works without focusing on the content on the page.

What happens if the system isn’t full? Plan for this.

One of the biggest misconceptions of software development and information architecture is that all systems start full of content, and there’s never any fallback for when the doors open up and the shelves are empty. Plan for two states: 1) opening up the doors without content, and 2) when the content will grow to fill the site. Remember that you also have to plan for future growth.

Training is good; a SharePoint quick reference guide is better.

SharePoint is a huge product, and expecting the end users to remember what to do after an hour of training is unrealistic. What we’ve done is come up with a tailored quick reference guide that focuses on about 10 key use cases, and it’s the front and back of a tabloid sheet of paper. Users keep it around and refer to it, which limits phone calls in the future.

Does SharePoint’s permission and governance model make your head spin? Yup, here too. John Holliday comes to the rescue with a handy dandy SharePoint permission dependency chart. It takes a bit to get used to, but you start seeing the relationships after staring at it for a while.

Ian’s SharePoint blog has a great article about the details of creating a survey (how not to upset your customers) that relates to SharePoint, but is more guidance from a marketing and user experience perspective.

So while I was napping, Target settled with the National Federation of the Blind for $6 million, ending a class action lawsuit that stated Target.com wasn’t accessible to blind users. One percent of that would have probably fixed the Target site before this happened. Target of course admitted no wrongdoing, which means that no precedent has been set (and there will be yet another court case to prove the legal standing of Section 508).

(Oddly enough, Section 508 was declared to be valid only for physical spaces in a lawsuit against Southwest Airlines. That verdict was passed down in 2002, but it doesn’t appear to be a California-based court. In any case, I’d rather protect the site than pay for lawyers if I were CEO of a corporation.)

Is your site safe?

Just another reminder that doing a few things goes a long way in protecting yourself from issues regarding SharePoint, and the lawsuit went a bit further: if you live in California, local laws actually protect you more is you suffer a disability.

If you need consulting for your business, don’t hesitate to send us a line.

What is Section 508?

Section 508 is the section of the Rehabilitation Act that requires most websites, especially government sites, to be Section 508 compliant. Why is this important?

Ask Target. They were the first major corporation to be face a lawsuit (and more importantly, face a very expensive class-action lawsuit) over the accessibility of their site.

Now that I have put the fear of god in you, what can you do to make SharePoint accessible?

Just enough so you won’t be sued first.

Start with learning semantically correct and table-less HTML

Remember tables being used for layouts? That’s gone, and so is hacking together website layouts with inline styles. In the most literal of senses, it’s about learning HTML and CSS the way it was meant to be used: using style sheets to define everything, using headers like H1, H2 and H3 to establish hierarchy, and truly separating content from layout.

How effective is this in today’s CSS world, minus the occasional box model hack? Very. There was a site I built for a friend of mine, and we completely changed the order of content to make it more SEO friendly without changing the layout of the site. Seriously.

The best tip I was giving a developer I work with was how to define styles:

• .style1. .header = bad
• .style1 H1 = good

Using CSS styles and defining HTML elements is not only good practice, but works best and sends less HTML code down the pipe. Most importantly, remind editors and users that ALT tags, TITLE tags and LABEL tags not only mean something, they are very, very important to users that use alternate means to use websites.

Add tools that can be added easily and quickly

Start with the checklist of checkpoints listed by the W3C. Most of the items are more relevant to multimedia technologies like Flash, but it would be good to review them and understand them. Remember, you have to know what the rules are before you can break them.

Hi Software provides a set of master pages, web part plug ins and other tools, like this great conversion application that calculates font sizes in EMs. EMs are generally defined as the width of the letter M, and that can vary by font and by platform. By using EMs, this allows browsers to easily resize fonts.

The master pages released with the package contain a set of best practices, and the plug ins do some really simple search and replaces that correct some potential issues that can occur with screen readers. The plug ins are so simple to program, you could concievably write additional plug ins to catch other HTML issues before the users catch them.

Telerik’s rich content editor for SharePoint is not only fully packed with features, it’s jam packed also with accessibility features too, and much more accessible than the out of the box editor.

Test your site against the Cynthia Says tool. This will give you a list of changes you may have to make to make your site more accessible. For the record, there’s about 10 or so issues I need to fix to make this site more accessible.

Find other resources for tips

• Planet MOSS has a great article about accessibility and tips
• The Mossman reminds us that regular expressions are your friend
• Chamina points out the exact pain points of SharePoint 2007 and accessibility

Don’t sweat the small things, and use common sense

The best approach is a common sense approach. Screen readers aren’t going to freak out on a single cell table, but they will freak out if the whole page is a set of tables. If you take the approach is that it’s about return on investment (hitting the highest risk areas, and leaving other areas to chance), you’ll be okay.

This really qualifies as general project and product management, but SharePoint Shelter has a wonderful post about saying no to feature requests using SharePoint.

Some of the reasons that a project manager, in the context of SharePoint, should say no is:

• While this feature will extend our SharePoint environment, it is more of a nice-to-have, and not really a baseline requirement for this project
• The calculated effort requirement by either/both the development or operations staff doesn’t really justify the production of the feature
• The subproject in the terms of the current contract constraints doesn’t procure a practical baseline for reallocation (or allocation) of resources to make it a tangible production.
• While this feature from the development or operations end is awesome, it is something that client doesn’t immediately realize the need for, or will never be noticed by the client
• Holy crap, this doesn’t even qualify because it is so experimental, it isn’t funny (kind of like when a client asked me to build neural networks for forecasting models off SharePoint lists. Probably should have nixed that one).

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.

Make the round hole fit 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.

Make the square peg fit the round hole, but look for tools to reshape the square peg

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.

Pick a different peg completely

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.

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).