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Contents tagged with User Experience

  • Aggregate SharePoint Event/Items into your Calendar view using Calendar Overlay

    One of the most common features I have seen in common use for SharePoint (prior to 2010) in Intranet environments for Team site is Calendar’s. Not only the Calendar list type, but also the ability to add a Calendar view to any list that has the desired columns to construct a Calendar – such as Start, End, Title etc. While this was all great for a single site/calendar, the problem of having to track numerous calendar’s remained. With introduction of Outlook 2007 bi-directional integration with SharePoint, and particularly the ability of Outlook to overlay calendar helped bridge the gap. Now one could connect to number of team sites, and setup Calendar overlays in Outlook using varying colours, to easily identify event source and yet benefit from the plotting of events on single Calendar view. This was all good, but each user in your Enterprise was supposed to setup in a “pull” fashion. This is good for flexibility, not so good when you need to “push” consistency and productivity (re-use).

  • SharePoint 2007 – How to enable left navigation, quick launch, for all web-part pages in a farm?

    Collaboration features on SharePoint 2007 are undisputedly excellent, but there is occasional quirk which impede serious usability. One of them is absence of left navigation, or “quick launch”, on custom created web-part pages in any SharePoint site. Though you can choose from various web-part page layout style during creation, there is no option to make the left navigation visible other than playing page-by-page with SharePoint Designer! In large utilizations, its impossible to go to each web-part page and hope to fix it in SharePoint Designer. Not everyone has it, nor they know how to play with mark-up of page/master page.

  • Manage Hierarchical data in SharePoint lists - Building a Project Team site template

    No matter how hard you try, or time you spend... there is always something new to learn on SharePoint. Not just as Developer, Architect, or as IT Pro, but more so as User! I have learnt along that users can best be classified in slabs whereby some adopt a new product quickly, while others find it difficult to grasp new features no matter how usable... and most get to a point where they learn most (usable!) features and form their comfort zone around what they have learnt by cognitive and settle with it. They just won't move ahead of curve, and you can either blame users or the product... go figure!

  • SharePoint Forms - Improve layout of Field's 'description' to save screen-space and enhance UX

    Default Forms in SharePoint leave you with limited choice sometimes when it comes to customization. One such thing is location of fields Description under the control, instead of under fields Title on the left. That's unlike most other system forms in Central Admin or throughout Application Pages. This leaves users with more screen utilization vertically, leaving empty spaces on left. So I think most users do not describe their form fields to keep them usable, while on flip-side it definitely makes forms hard-to-guess for others, particularly so when there are many columns in a list.