Sharepoint Design

Over the last two months we’ve been semi-seriously dabbling in sharepoint as a probable internal communications and collaboration solution (ooh! I love “solutions”!). We’ve seen a couple of implementations where it’s working well - one museum, one venture capital group, one tech company - and I’m consistently impressed although I’ve also noticed an odd consistency to what’s been implemented.

One of the stumbling blocks in the last few weeks has been dealing with the design and style of the eventual site. Having played the role of designer off and on in my life, I care about the eventual look and feel and, on the whole, the couple of default themes available from MS are pretty much the same with minor variations in colors. Even more importantly, I’m big on standards compliant websites and snazzy semantic markup and I’m not going to repeat the usual arguments for separating content from presentation on multiple levels.

Sharepoint is good in that it’s smart about creating pages that are collections of other web elements — an rss feed, a collection of images, just raw text, etc. It ultimately means that you can create simple bits that do simple things and just use them as building blocks. It does a decent job, from a workflow point of view, of doing most of that work inline in a web page rather than totally abstracting it into a CMS backend. So, conceptually, do some design work on the site chrome and then set up good css so that all the little bits inherit nice css should be pretty straightforward, no?

Turns out that answer is no.

Sharepoint Designer, the tool that MS provides to do graphics sucks. The html behind any sharepoint site sucks. In my “redesign sharepoint” browser window, I’ve got about 20 tabs of relevant content for anyone thinking about an out-of-the-box experience. I was particularly encouraged by Cameron Moll’s early enthusiasm for skinning sharepoint only to have my hopes crushed by his 5-month later followup.

This kills me. There’s a great deal I like about Sharepoint (especially after having spent time with the Newsgator folks. Honestly, if you’re thinking about Sharepoint at all, the products that newsgator makes to integrate into Sharepoint is a critical must-have feature (disclosure: they’re friends and they’ve offered some generous support)) but the underlying bits are brutally, brutally bad. Even to the point that I looked again at a bunch of the elegant online solutions for collaboration and such.

Here’s the bottom line for us — we’re going to use Sharepoint, but a little part of me dies on the inside at the same time. I’m settling in for a solution that works pretty well for most people but there’s little joy in using and implementing (on the technical side of things). I suppose the important part for me to remember is that most people like eating the sausage, not making it.