This month (December) our first public facing Web Site built using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 went live. This was for a division of one the leading UK high street banks.
This is a very much a first stage of a large initiative that will see the site become much more interactive and personalised in the future – but the initial aim was to replace a rather stale and static site that had been up since 2001. This old site was difficult to update, hard to navigate and did not allow the client to cross sell their products to their potential user base, which lead to calls to them which could have been answered on the web site, if only it had been easy to find things! The old site also lacked any search mechanism.
So in essence, for this initial phase, the aim was to build a site that allowed users to find out what they need to know directly from the website without the need to interact with the bank in other ways so reducing telephone and written correspondence – which is otherwise both frustrating for the users and frankly costly for the bank.
So why use Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 as the content management tool?
Clearly there are many (too many?) dedicated content management tools on the market that could have been used to build this information based site. Why take the risk of using such a new product (indeed a mere beta 2 when we started) instead of one of the tried and tested ones?
Well if the entire aim was just the new site as it now stands then maybe something else could have been used. However the long term plans better suite a truly integrated platform approach due to the need to integrate backend systems, along with the built in workflow and web forms capability. So the decision was more strategic than tactical and it was important to take the bigger picture in to account. As a CMS it has proven perfectly adequate and the users and content editors have found it very straight forward to use and it allows them to very quickly add or change content without the intervention of IT.
So what was the experience with SharePoint 2007 like?
Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007 combines and improves on functions from SharePoint 2003 and Microsoft’s old content management package CMS 2002. Generally speaking the experience was good – the consistency of the use of “Lists” to control everything from site Pages to Images, CSS and custom tables of information was very useful. However matching the exact requirements of the third part y designers was harder and called for some imaginative use of “Content Types”. Of course one of the key issues was that we started with a beta, so documentation and best practices were thin on the ground – not an issue for the future or for other such sites.
There was also a need to provide some management information capability to support strategic decision making and to show if the site was working as intended. Although SharePoint 2007 has its own reports around hits and search statistics it was decided to extend this using “WebTrends Analytics 8”. The MOSS 2007 built in search stats will help to drive site content over time by, showing for example that there are frequent failed searches on a particular topic for which there is no good content. This can also be used to drive their FAQ facilities
The project was also an example of an Agile one rather than a traditional waterfall approach. This interactive approach saved time (and the odd tree) and allowed greater flexibility. It also facilitated “late decision” allowing the client to see what things looked like and make relatively late changes – with out the need for delays caused by having to changed detailed specification documents. It did mean that the client had to commit to working closely with us – often having one or two of their staff on site sitting along side our team, with them creating content and checking the look & feel as features were refined. This close team also helped shape the site and avoided any “big surprises” as the project progressed.
So hopefully this now provides a foundation for future enhancements to this site and should allow them to really start taking advantage of the MOSS platform to deliver real value beyond that of a simple web content management package.