Improve the SharePoint User Experience: Usability Week 2012 Conference

SharePoint has become a widely used enterprise information platform, yet many organizations (and users) are still in the process of determining how to best adopt its many collaboration and social computing features for the particular circumstances of their own organization to truly enhance employee productivity. Whether your enterprise is just considering SharePoint, or you are already knee-deep into it but want to learn more about its promise, this session will provide a fast-paced dive into the most useful features, demonstrate customizations that are easy to accomplish, and give you hands-on experience to get the most out of the product.

A must-attend course for creating engaging and usable SharePoint 2010 sites and content. Whether you want to make SharePoint just look different or simply need get it up and running with the basic out-of-the-box functionality, this interactive course will provide tips, techniques, and insights to get the job done.

What You’ll Learn

In this session, you’ll learn how to:

Get acquainted with the core set of Microsoft products that make up SharePoint and understand what’s new in the 2010 version
Explore how SharePoint helps you manage content and projects, enables employee networking, and supports business intelligence and processes
Walk through the core features for collaboration and social computing
Get hands-on experience creating and customizing sites, lists and other content and then delve into document sharing, managing calendars and tasks, and creating custom views on lists
Understand how to use blogs, wikis, activity feeds, tags and notifications to stay in tune with your colleagues and track changes to important content
Explore the role of themes and CSS to make your sites look sharp
Work with intra- and cross-site navigation to ensure core sites and content are at your team’s fingertips
Ensure your understanding of the material is complete by participating in real-time hands-on exercises with a live SharePoint site using your own laptop

You’ll leave this session with the skills you need to quickly navigate and customize SharePoint to better collaborate with your teammates and get the most out of your shared content.

Course Outline

The course is divided into four main sections:

Introduction to SharePoint
- History and overview of the product and its purposes
- What’s new in SharePoint 2010 and what is Office 365?
- What are the top UX issues and improvements over previous releases?
- Get an overview of the core features for collaboration and social computing
- Hands-on: Sign up for a trial Office 365 account (free) and get familiar with SharePoint Online
Getting up and running with the basics for collaboration
- Learn what makes for great team sites, useful lists, document libraries, and discover other types of sites and content to enhance productivity
- Use project task lists to organize people and processes
- Learn tips for security and permissions for sharing sites and documents as well as enhancing collaboration on lists
- Working seamlessly with other Microsoft Office products
- Hands-on: Create and customize a team site, create lists and other content, add list views and other web parts to facilitate collaboration
Making SharePoint look nice
- Learn about design and branding basics in SharePoint
- Gain a working understanding of low and medium effort approaches to design and branding to make SharePoint have your own visual style
- Understand and modify site and global navigation
- Learn how to work with site templates, page layouts, themes, and site assets
- Use SharePoint Publishing features to apply alternate CSS (cascading style sheets) and master pages
- Hands-on: Change the design and layout of a team site, modify site navigation, create and apply a custom theme, utilize alternate CSS
Going Social—Getting the most out of your colleagues and shared content
- Work with My Sites, feeds, and profiles
- Use tags, notes, and ratings along with email notifications and RSS feeds to enhance your ability to track and share good content
- Set up blogs properly to facilitate cross-organizational communications
- Collect corporate knowledge and crowd-source content with wikis
- Get an overview of how 3rd party services can enhance your SharePoint social offering (e.g., via NewsGator)
- Hands-on: Edit your My Site profile, add and share documents from My Content, follow “colleagues”, edit your newsfeed settings, tag content, create a personal blog
Session summary
- Overview and Q&A
- Resources for further development
- Time permitting, we’ll discuss and review your company’s SharePoint sites together and provide specific ideas to help you make the most of your investment

What is NOT Covered

This course is purely about the SharePoint end-user experience and does not cover any technical aspects of installing, configuring, and maintaining SharePoint deployments; nor does it cover developing extended or integrated solutions on top of SharePoint via SharePoint Designer 2010 or other professional developer tools.

Format

This full-day tutorial includes lectures and interactive discussions as well as live product walkthroughs/demos and hands-on exercises. Important: Attendees will need to bring their own laptops in order to participate in the hands-on activities, and can optionally sign up for a free trial of Office 365 to get the most out of the material during and after the course. Internet connectivity will be provided during the course.

Course Materials

Copies of the presentation slides

Who Should Attend

The intended audience is intranet and community site managers, information/knowledge managers, project managers, team leaders, designers, web developers, consultants and everyday users who are responsible for planning, customizing or directly using SharePoint for internal teams and broader employee collaboration.

Instructor

John Pruitt is a Senior Program Manager at Microsoft, currently working on the next version of SharePoint. Since joining Microsoft in 1998, he has conducted user research and designed UI for several versions of Windows (including Windows 98SE, 2000, ME, XP, and Vista) as well as Microsoft’s integrated Internet client, MSN Explorer (versions 6, 7, and 8), and innovative mobile PCs like the Windows Tablet PC and the small form factor UMPC (Ultra-Mobile PC). Prior to Microsoft, he was an invited researcher in the Human Information Processing Division of the Advanced Telecommunications Research Laboratory in Kyoto, Japan, and also worked as a civilian scientist for the U.S. Navy doing simulation and training research. John holds a Ph.D. in experimental psychology from the University of South Florida and has published a variety of journal articles and book chapters on usability methods, skill training, naturalistic decision-making, speech perception, and second-language learning. He has been creating and using personas for more than 10 years, continually developing his approach and mentoring numerous product teams around Microsoft and companies worldwide. John authored the book, The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design (with co-author Tamara Adlin), and has presented broadly on the topic of personas at both academic and industry events.