- Branding public-facing SharePoint sites considered mandatory
- Custom user interfaces (UIs) require custom training
- Invest in a governance plan, governance team
It seems that one of the first things
people want to do with a new Microsoft SharePoint installation is to brand it.
Branding public-facing SharePoint sites is considered practically mandatory.
Branding internal corporate portals to
reinforce the company image might also make sense. But the most common use of
SharePoint within an organization is for departmental sites, team-collaboration
sites, and document-management sites. Should you brand these internal sites?
There are two kinds of SharePoint
branding for internal sites. One preserves the full SharePoint UI and feature
set. This type of simple branding modifies graphics, colors, and font types. It
uses features that are built in to SharePoint to let site owners update site
navigation and Web Parts.
This branding might involve changes to
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) or edits to the SharePoint master pages, but it
leaves the UI completely predictable to the average SharePoint user and can be
supported without help from an outside branding expert or the person or
department that performed the branding.
Anything more complex than this falls
into the second category of branding. This type of branding often involves an
outside branding consultant and hours upon hours of planning, design, and
implementation to match the external company website or an older, custom
internal site. This type of branding changes how SharePoint and its UI work.
Before you decide to brand internal
sites by using this second category of customizations, ask yourself the
following 10 questions. (If you still insist on branding your SharePoint
installation after reading this article, see the sidebar "If You Must Brand SharePoint.")
#1: Would you pay to
brand Windows Explorer or Microsoft Excel?
Have you branded your word processor or
your email client? Of course not! These are tools. They should have a
consistent and predictable UI, such as an obvious start button. After learning
how to use a tool one time, you should be able to figure how to use the same
kind of tool the next time.
SharePoint is also a tool, especially
when used for team collaboration and document management. Branding sites that
are used for those purposes-especially when users might access more than one
site-should be treated as such.
#2: Do you want to
increase your per-user costs?
The per-user cost of a SharePoint
installation is fairly reasonable. That is, until you start spending $10,000 to
$30,000 per department-or even per site-to pay for a graphics design firm or
branding consultant to customize your internal sites. The real-world branding
costs can easily be in the hundreds of dollars per user and provide only a
cosmetic benefit.
#3: How fast do you
want users to get to work?
Customizing UIs takes time and often
delays the start of a new SharePoint installation. Then, when branding has been
approved, teams are put together to get the sites branded.
These
teams must interview consultants, review designs, wait for delivery, and test
the result before the sites can be deployed to users. And then, if each site
looks different, with a different and unpredictable UI, users will be wasting
time figuring out how to navigate the site and how to find content.
#4: How much do you
want to spend on training?
Out of the box, SharePoint has a wealth
of available training and support resources, including instructor-led classes,
books, online videos, and endless web resources.
All these resources are affordable (or
even free) but are useful only for uncustomized sites. Custom UIs require
custom training; without it, users are less productive.
#5: How much do you
want to spend on support?
If each site is different, will your
support groups be able to help your site users? Will your Help desk be able to
answer questions such as, "In the HR site, I click on a green duck to get
to the employee manuals, but I just went to the IT site to find software
manuals, and there's no green duck. There are just two trucks, a race car, and
a go-cart. Which should I click?"
(If you think the duck-and-cars example
is ridiculous, I'm not just being silly. I've seen many branded SharePoint
sites that can be described only as "unique" and can be explored only
by clicking everything you see until you find what you're looking for. You've
probably seen sites like these, too-although, to be fair, site owners are
sometimes the ones who insist on these odd designs.)
This brings up a related issue: Graphic
designers aren't always good SharePoint designers. Graphic designers tend to
think of SharePoint as just another custom website and often break or remove
the most basic features, such as Quick Launch or the ability to add or change a
Web Part.
After the consultant, designer, or
brander has finished with the site, who will pay for fixing such issues, or
even updating the site later? If you want to add just one more link to their
custom-designed navigation, will you need to pay to redesign the site?
#6: How much time do
you want to waste?
Of course, much too often, the site
owner is the one doing the branding. SharePoint Designer is free, easy to
download, and talked about everywhere on the web. And it's so easy to use that
site owners often become self-taught site web designers, spending much of their
time playing with SharePoint Designer.
This problem isn't new. Remember the
early spreadsheet days, when managers switched from managing teams to spending
all day playing with spreadsheets? Now, in the age of SharePoint, we have
managers and team leaders spending too much time as web designers. Most of
these site owners have no design training and no governance.
#7: Do you know who's
in charge?
When every department is doing its own
thing with SharePoint, is any department doing the right thing with corporate
assets? Are site owners following corporate standards for site content and
content governance, or are they simply creating cool-looking sites with random
links and storage?
If you lose control of SharePoint and
the content that's stored there, you might never get it back (short of starting
over from scratch). And when the legal or R&D departments ask, "Can
you find X?" or "Can you tell me who did Y?" are your SharePoint
sites organized and structured enough to actually perform an audit?
#8: How difficult
will sites be to audit?
If each department and team feels free
to create custom UIs as a means of branding, then they also might feel free to
store their content any way they like. If they have their own branding, then
they will surely have their own custom content types, list types, and metadata.
How will a researcher or auditor find
anything in such a system? Imagine being an auditor who must visit a hundred
sites, each with a different UI, to find a document about a customer or a
product. This Wild West approach is expensive and difficult to maintain.
#9: Are there better
places to invest your money?
How much sense does it make to try to
reduce costs by licensing SharePoint Foundation or SharePoint Server Standard
Edition, only to spend a lot of money on custom (and cosmetic) branding, and
then more money on custom training and lost productivity because of the
branding? For the same price, you can stay with out-of-the-box SharePoint and
spend the extra money on SharePoint Enterprise Edition, Microsoft FAST Search
Server, and some powerful business intelligence (BI) tools.
You might even have enough to invest in
faster hardware, the next level of SharePoint, or more user training. If you're
interested in doing things the right way, right from the start, then invest in
a governance plan and an ongoing governance team.
#10: Do you really
want to do this all over again?
Your branding costs don't end with the
current installation of SharePoint. Sooner or later, along comes the next
generation of SharePoint with a whole shopping cart full of new features that
you want and need.
Branded sites almost never upgrade
cleanly. Over the past few years, I've seen how the migration from SharePoint
2003 to SharePoint 2007-and more recently from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint
2010-has worked for branded sites.
Typically, it hasn't been a good
experience and has required paying branders to rebrand all the sites to work in
the new version. Are you willing to bet on the effort and cost of moving your
branded sites to the next version of SharePoint?
The Bottom Line
Before you make the decision to brand
internal sites, make sure you have a real business need to do so. Remember,
SharePoint is a tool, like Microsoft Word or Excel. You don't brand those
programs, do you?
Talk to other companies that use
SharePoint, and find out what it's really costing them to brand sites,
including the ongoing costs to support branded sites. Will new hires be able to
figure out all the custom UIs and site designs? Will you need to upgrade
customized sites to a new version of SharePoint (or even to another product)?
Look at your budget. Can you afford the
up-front costs, ongoing support costs, end-user training costs, and eventual
upgrade costs of branding?
And what about legal and business
accessibility requirements (e.g., support for screen readers, high-contrast
text, nonmouse navigation, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines--WCAG-2.0). How
might branding affect these requirements?
In a nutshell, do you really need to
brand?
If you're still not convinced, see
the sidebar
to Michael's article: "If You Must Brand SharePoint."
