SharePoint 2010 User Experience, a brave new world!

SharePoint 2010 introduces a number of enhancements to the end user experience.

The new SharePoint UI will produce XHTML, presenting content in div tags rather then the nested tables of SharePoint 2007.

This will enhance accessibility to WCAG 2.0 AA standards. Use of Div also enhance the ability of search engines to index data.

The new SharePoint UI brings in AJAX, allowing continual flow back and forth of data from the browser to the back system.

This replaces SharePoint 2007 need to constantly be post back to the server.

The new UI is also more fluid to edit for the user, introducing a Ribbon like Office 2007 for editing and removing the need to work with a set of web parts.

The Ribbon will me that users, and even administrators, will have to spend less time fishing around for the functions they need.

Replacing a page of web parts with a single Office document like design interface will make it easier for users to edit the pages.

Now one of the things we always heard about SharePoint 2003 and 2007 is that users found them very easy to use. So you might wonder why bother make such changes to the UI.

The key element to consider is that a UI should not only be easy to use but powerful as well.

Most traditional EMC systems were powerful but not easy to use. This meant that they were generally only take up by a small set of skilled experts who could do a lot with them.

SharePoint 2007 UI went to the other end and introduced a UI that was easy to use but not powerful. This meant that a lot of staff took up SharePoint, but it limited what could be done with it.

SharePoint systems were often limited to documents shares, WCM intranets, and exposing links and lists of data.

The technology behind the SharePoint 2007 UI made it very difficult to modify the UI. Anything beyond basic branding could be very time consuming.

So though the SharePoint 2007 has proven very easy to use for certain key tasks like document sharing, it has proven hard to enhance to other tasks and hard to integrate to a larger set of system.

SharePoint 2007 has also proven very hard to build rich real time experiences that we see in sites like Flickr, Facebook, any of the other Web 2.0 sites.

Microsoft has clearly taken notice of the rich interface of Facebook and has provided a number of new features to making creating new SharePoint bases interfaces that are more powerful much easier.

These include AJAX, which allows real time flow of information between the browser and the back end data. This will reduce the need for so many post backs. It will also create a smoother experience for the user. And AJAX will greatly increase the power you can build in to SharePoint sites. AJAX means you will be able to interact with several different data sources and systems using Web Services in the browser.

SharePoint now has an extended JavaScript API which allows you to interact with most of the Objects in a SharePoint. Now you can access and manipulate data and objects in SharePoint with JavaScript in the same way you have been able to do in the DOM for years.

Designers will also be happy to learn that Microsoft has introduced new Master Pages including a simple master page which will make it much easier to write custom SharePoint pages. Many developers found it very hard to work with the master page that came with SharePoint 2010.

Also with XHTL using div tags replaicng HTML using tables for layout it is going to be much easier to build sites for mobile devices. Lack of mobile presence has been a read problem with previous SharePoint. With the new SharePoint UI it will be much easier to build simpler XHTML pages that will show up in more mobile devices.

Now nothing comes for free and the main prices many organisations will have to say for SharePoint 2010 UI will be the need to go off IE 6. But given IE 6 security issues this is something that they should do anyways.

Now what about organisations which have invested large amounts in creating rich SharePoint 2007 interfaces: does this mean that they need to simply throw away their work?

Well the answer is no, SharePoint 2010 will continue with a version of the same default master page as in 2007 available. Now this has been altered slightly so you will have to do some test and redesign, but in most cases it will be a migration task rather than an extensive transformation task.

So with the new UI in SharePoint 2010 your developers will be able to create very rich interactive environments that will more closely meet your business requirements. With 2010 SharePoint fully enters the world of Web 2.0 interface design.

Major IU and UX changes coming to Microsoft Stack

Before I started working with SharePoint I was a Web Developer. Back in 2003 the web development community was very excited about CSS, Ajax, Div tags over tables, and JavaScript enabled rich UIs. I used to developed N tier systems that ran on ASP or Java that used Flash as the UI, connecting via XML to data classes and giving real time interfaces.

Then I started working on SharePoint 2003 and ASP.NET Web Forms.

In a way this was a great liberation enabling me to make solutions for clients in days when it used to take weeks. But the cost was I was presenting HTML with nested tables and terrible CSS classes to my users. Changing the CSS classes in MOSS 2007 was harder than it should be, and the master page was very difficult to bring up to Web 2.o standards of divs, Ajax and JavaScript. Efforts to make MOSS 2007 UI WCAG 2 AA compliant were rare and expensive.

With 2010 Microsoft has opened the potential to better Web 2.0 interface design. Key new UI and UX features from Microsoft include:

1. SharePoint 2010 new UI which embraces WCAG 2 AA standards, XHTML, and Ajax. This requires that firms upgrade from IE 6 but they should anyways. Ajax gives the new SharePoint web pages modal dialogs, inline editing, and less post backs. For developers it opens the possibility to develop richer Web Parts and Master pages that meet users requirements better than the old SharePoint OTB. With MOSS 2007 design was generally restricted to new colors and graphics, but with 2010's master pages and XHTML you can produce much richer UI.

Div tags were easier for search engines to find and I often wonder how much of MOSS 2007's bad search is the engine and how much is the HTML it had to read.

It was my experience that making MOSS 2007 look and feel better was very difficult. Sometimes you would take a design and implement it in SharePoint, a very painful process. Then as you used the new design you would find that it worked okay for document libraries but not blogs or wikis. Since they shared Masterpages and CSS this could be a real problem. I hope this all improves with more master pages including simple master pages which are almost blank for developers to work with.

2. Silverlight, let me be clear here, Silverlight 4 is not up to Adobe Flash standards. If you are just looking for animations and interactions you should probably stay with Flash. But Silverlight's does allow you to create much more interactive, animated and gradated designs with ASP.NET. It also allows for rapid rich UI prototype development. Personally I don't think Silverlight will have a very long life with HTML 5 coming out, but it is there.

3. ASP.NET MVC. Now this one rocks, but it will take a long time to learn. ASP.NET Web Forms gave you great acceleration tools for creating web designs. In ASP if you want to display data you had to pass the data to a loop and have the loop write out a table or set of div tags to display the data. With ASP.NET you got the Data Grid. You could place a Data Grid on your web part of ASPX page and link it to a data source. It made things much easier. Thing is Data Grid rendered as a table. So you made a trade off. Generally time lines are too tight to abandon the Data Grid to make a better display by hand.

MVC is a new framework with ASP.NET 4. The concept is to allow you a more fine grained control over the HTML and XHTML you produce. It means a bit more work up front, but the UI experience is much richer.

Microsoft has clearly learned from Ruby on Rails and MVC is continually being compared to that framework. I have a strong concern that developers will stick with Web Forms, but if you want a AJAX based rich UI with clean XHTML code you should take the time to learn MVC.