The Practical SharePoint Information Architect

SharePoint’s people search is a SharePoint feature that many organizations want to take advantage of. (I’ve heard stories of people sitting for weeks within 25 feet of a new co-worker, and even having e-mail conversations with them without realizing who they are.)

However, at the time that most SharePoint deployments “go live”, the users have not yet had an opportunity to fill-in their My Site data. This especially applies to the employee picture. Adding pictures is an element of My Sites and people search that adds great value.

 
(Some random staff pictures)

It’s pretty boring for your new users if the first time they do a people search, they just get a bunch of placeholders.

Steven Van de Craen stepped in with a great solution: He wrote an event handler that gets attached to a picture library.

• - The document library is loaded with headshots, each named with user id (account name) of that person (e.g. Bob Smith’s picture is named bsmith.jpg)
• - The event handler updates the profile picture URL property for that user’s profile
• - For our client, we used everyone’s security badge headshots as the default picture. As most people HATE their badge headshots, this is ample motivation for them to get into their MySite to change the picture.

Note: You can prevent your users from changing the image, but I’d recommend against this. You should educate your users with ground-rules around their pictures (no “back of the head” shots, or holding up things that obscure the face: The image must be recognizable).

The only problem with Steven’s solution is that it can be tricky to install and configure. To the rescue comes Itay Shakury who wrapped the event handler into an easy to deploy feature.

We’ve used this at a client, and it worked out really well: The day we went live, every employee had a profile picture (and a strong desire to go into their My Site and replace it!).

I can’t finish this post without sending out a thank you to my colleague, Brian Lalancette who discovered and implemented this solution.

Last week I attended the SharePoint Best Practices conference in Washington DC. I learned a lot and I had a great time. This was the first Best Practices (BP) conference put on by Bill English and Ben Curry of MindSharp. The BP conference was a great follow on to their recently published book: SharePoint Best Practices. I found the conference to be well organized and well run. I heard that there were a couple of glitches, but none were obvious to me. If you can get yourself down to the next one in California (in February, I think), I would highly recommend it.

The 350 attendees were a mixed group, without about 2/3 being “technical” and 1/3 being in the “CIO/Information Architect/Project Manager/Director” category (if you can call that group a category).

I found value in all the sessions that I attended, but my favourites were from Paul Galvin, Ed Hild, Mark Ferraz and Vanessa Williams.

I also presented a session on “Mind Mapping for the Information Architect”. I felt that the presentation went really well: I had some great discussions with many attendees afterwards. I promised the attendees that I would make my material available after the conference. I am currently working on that; look for a new post soon.

During the keynote, Tom Rizzo, Director of the SharePoint group at Microsoft was describing how difficult it is describe SharePoint concisely. When you point to “Exchange Server”, you can say “that’s an e-mail server” and when you point to “SQL Server”, you can say “that’s a database server”. But what can you say when you point to a SharePoint Server? I know that we’ve all had this problem…  So, here was my single favourite line from the conference: According to Tom, the reason that it’s so hard is because “SharePoint is a floor wax AND a dessert topping”. Ok, you may not find that funny, but I thought it was hilarious.

Welcome to my first post.

My main goal for this blog is to cover issues related to Information Architecture (IA) for SharePoint. However, this blog will also cover many other aspects of SharePoint.

Ruven Gotz

As a consultant who leads SharePoint projects from early planning through deployment, I deal with questions and decisions at many different levels. Although my key expertise is in the design/planning/IA area, I feel that it is important for me to have a strong technical understanding of how SharePoint works.  I am not an infrastructure expert, a designer or a developer, but I try to understand these areas as deeply as I can to be able to understand the range of solution possibilities and to make sure that I understand the approaches that my implementation team is taking. (Note: if you really want to get really technical, read my friend and co-worker’s blog: spinsiders.com/greg.)

So, you can expect to see a variety of topics covered here. Some may be more technical, and some may be less. I hope that with feedback from readers, I’ll be able to find a good mix of information that will make this site worth your time.