About a year ago, I wrote a blog entry called “Window Dressing” that talked about how we rearranged the landing page for one of our Board committees so they didn’t have to navigate anywhere. We customized a few lists and library views so everything they needed for a meeting was right in front of them. I got a few nice comments from that blog entry, but more important, the committee members loved it! Last year, I thought the lesson from this project was that we should never get so enamored with our page design that we forget who the page is there for. SharePoint sites should change as the needs of the viewing community change. But, that’s not the lesson this year and that’s not the subject of this post.
Early last week, we were asked to revise that same page, for yet another meeting. I swiftly passed that task onto my recently appointed Systems Administrator. He asked me a few questions about the Content Type I created and the way I built the list, and then he did the best thing ever – he taught the owner of the site how to change the page! Now what started as a ‘great idea’ only to become a ‘bi-annual drill’, has become ‘remember when you…’ It truly doesn’t get any better than that.
Of course, it wasn’t a simple me-telling-him and him-telling-them kind of thing. The transfer of responsibility required a transfer of knowledge, and some work. The first thing my Systems Admin did was to create templates for the custom lists and libraries. Next, he worked through the process on a test server to make sure he understood the entire process. (Nothing makes a process look hard more than your stumbling through it). Then he booked some time with the user and walked him through the process. The best part of this whole exercise was when I went into work and realized that the site had been changed, and we (IT) had not made the changes.
The benefits of this “solution” go beyond eliminating one small task from my department’s collective plate. Now, this user understands SharePoint at a level he didn’t before. Now he has an appreciation of how SharePoint can be morphed and modified to meet new requirements. This is when we start to hear requests change from “can you do this in SharePoint?” to “how can I do this in SharePoint?” That is the point where the return on our investment in SharePoint ticks upward.
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