How to get your business ready for SharePoint 2010 – the user experience
SharePoint 2010 gives you the opportunity to upgrade your technology to meet the current and future needs of its businesses. It also enables other changes to improve business effectiveness to be made at the same time. This helps to justify the cost to the business from investing in SharePoint 2010 and not just keep everything the same as before. There are many features that SharePoint 2010 offers which will help maximise the benefits.
Your business must aim to give users of your intranet a much improved experience from day 1 with continuing improvements made at regular stages afterwards as part of an ongoing intranet strategy. Here is part 1 of my tips to get your business ready to use SharePoint 2010:
User experience
- ‘Mega menu’ at the top of every intranet page with functional titles that can expand to show the most popular and/or important content as a shortcut.
- Site menu on the left hand side of every page in the site to navigation menu of the site’s contents.
- Breadcrumb trail below the mega menu on every page to help people navigate easily back to a previous page on their journey.
- Title of each page to show in the header and footer of every page.
- Homepage and any other key intranet sites to have common principles of navigation, functionality, and look and feel with the option of having distinct branding. The type of content and its position can vary for each homepage.
- Content pages to have an owner, review and last updated date shown consistently at the bottom of each page. The owner can link to their My Profile for contact details.
- Content sections will clearly show what they contain. People will be able to collapse sections within the main page or expand them to show all the links and content within them. Some sections can be forced to stay open; other sections can have the option to add more links and content if people choose.
- My Profile will provide information about an individual to help people searching for someone realise this is the right person to help them. The details can include contact details, location, manager and place in the business’ hierarchy, whereabouts and relevant information, experience and interests.
In my next post I will cover how to get your business ready for SharePoint 2010 – the publisher experience.