Best Practices for Building a Dynamic System for Managing Content

In this section, you learn the best practices to ensure that your SharePoint site offers the maximum value to your organization based on the customizations that you implement. This is an important consideration because the right customizations can make your site user-friendly and efficient, while the wrong ones can make data entry burdensome and can cause user confusion.

Ensure that Your Changes Add Value

When you design an information system for your team to use for sharing and managing content, remember that your changes should add value; changes should make the system easier to use and the information simple and intuitive to find.

You can identify what adds value by familiarizing yourself with the information goals of team members and site users:

• Hold meetings or send questionnaires to gather information on users’ frustration points.

• From these discussions, create a list of problems that you need to address.

• Rank and prioritize the list based on the number of people who are affected and the productivity impact they experience because of the issues.

• Look at how SharePoint lists and libraries can improve the situation. For example, if people have a difficult time finding documents created during a specific time frame, you can create views that filter and sort documents based on when they were completed.

Follow Similar Processes and Practices

When you create additional columns and views to your lists, follow similar rules in each situation. The more consistency you create within the environment, the more unified and intuitive the experience will be for the users:

• A column that describes the status of a list item or document should offer the user consistent choices. If you use a certain set of status values for one list or library, use the same for all other lists and libraries. Do not use values such as “Not Started,” “In Progress,” and “In Review” in one location and then use completely different values to represent the same type of information elsewhere.

• If you start creating custom views, offer some level of standardization, such as consistent ordering and sorting of columns based on the type of information you’re presenting.

Provide Guides and Descriptions

Have you ever been asked to complete a task without receiving a clear explanation of what was required of you? If so, then you probably understand how frustrating completing forms and column values in SharePoint can be for your users if you do not offer good descriptions and guidelines for defining specific items. If users are unsure about what information you are asking for, they are highly likely to provide less than optimal information. Giving users clear direction will result in them entering the information you want into the system.