Chapter5.Planning and Designing the SharePoint 2003 User Environment

Chapter 5. Planning and Designing the SharePoint 2003 User Environment

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Key Components of the User Environment Design Process

• Designing the Windows SharePoint Services Environment

• Designing the SharePoint Portal Server 2003 Portal Environment

• Filling the Management Roles

• Planning for Microsoft Office Product Integration

• Providing the Correct Level of Training

• Documenting the Design Decisions

Chapter 4, "Planning and Designing the SharePoint 2003 Infrastructure," covers the infrastructure design decisions that need to be made before the SharePoint environment can be configured and implemented. This chapter covers the equally important topic of designing the user environment to ensure that the solution meets the needs of the user community.

It is often the case that the design phase and the testing phase overlap, as shown by the overlapping arrows in Figure 4.1 in the preceding chapter. Because SharePoint technologies are entirely new to many organizations, the design team often needs to get hands-on experience with the product to be able to make decisions pertaining to the overall environment. As these decisions are made, the underlying hardware configuration and server farm design may need to change as well, so there can be multiple subphases to the design and testing phases, as shown in Figure 5.1.

Figure 5.1. Multiphase design and testing processes.

A SharePoint 2003 website or portal may be totally new and unfamiliar to the future users, and the processes required to save documents to document libraries or to work effectively with lists, document workspaces, and meeting workspaces may be new as well. This makes the design and implementation of the portal, if SharePoint Portal Server 2003 is used, and of the top-level and subsites, if only Windows SharePoint Services is used, that much more important.

This chapter focuses on the portion of the design phase that involves the user experience and makes suggestions for best practices to follow in the testing phase to help ensure a positive reception from end users. Experience has shown that a project may stop dead in its tracks if key users are not pleased with what they see early in the process.