UX & IA Design Thinking

Since SharePoint was first introduced in 2001its standard visual design appearance has taken on quite a few different forms over the years. The base core features of document management and collaboration have stayed pretty static but the introduction of publishing and social features has transformed the product into a Swiss Army knife and can be used for many different things. Here is a look at its progress from 2001 all the way through 2013. Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2001 Core Features: Base included document management, search and what was called then a dashboard site to display webparts. Visual Design: This was before my time but from the looks of it the design came with a standard header that you could customize the logo or title of the site. Microsoft SharePoint Team Services 2002 Core Features: Ability to create lists and HTML pages. Visual Design: The design got a slight change to the header and also add...

In some cases when you need to add a footer to a custom brand you will notice that on pages that have really tall left navigations (Quick Launch) and a small content area the left side navigation will overflow and display on top of your custom footer. The reason for this is that your left side navigation is floating to the left of the content area. And therefore it is no longer being considered for height and will ignore your footer. By default your content area will push your custom footer down as it grows larger. Here is an example where the left navigation is really long and floats on top of the custom footer: To fix this you will need to set the footer div to have a inline-block property and also set the width to 100%. Your custom footer will be included right below that DIV. See below example. <div id="s4-bodyContainer">     <div id="s4-mainarea">         <div id="s4-l...

I just recently needed to add in the default audience field control to a publishing page layout. So that when you edit the page you can easily specify the target audience for the page without having to go to “Edit Properties” in the ribbon. The only issue is that it is not as simple as you would think. In my previous post I provided detail on how to Hide SP 2010 Page Layout Metadata – WebControls however the “Audience” field control requires some additional references to the Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles field types. I found this blog here: Showing the Audience Target field in an EditModePanel #SharePoint #SP2010 #in #ProjectServer #PS2010 that really helped with solving my problem. So basically to add in the audience field control to the page in edit mode you would simply have to do the following within your custom page layout. Add in the following to the reference section near the top of your page layout. <%@ Register TagPrefix="OfficeWebControls" ...

If you ever needed to add in the local time and a date for the logged in user to your custom page layout or master page below are some ways that you can achieve this. Option #1 The first method uses a SharePoint Portal Web Control to display the logged in users current time. This control is normally used on the profile pages to show current time for the profile that you are viewing. One benefit that you get from this approach is that if you have users that view the site from multiple locations around the world they would see the current time based on the time zone that they have set in their my site Profiles. To add this web control to your master page do the following: Add in the following registration to the top of the master page: <%@ Register Tagprefix="SPSWC" Namespace="Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal.WebControls" Assembly="Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal, Version=14.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" %> Ad...

Have you ever struggled with the summary view for Links, Announcements, Events, Documents, Discussions or any other major type of SharePoint 2010 list or library on publishing pages? Well if so I hope this post will help with the identification/resolution of this bug. Hopefully Microsoft will supply a fix for this someday... Here is a common scenario: You create a SharePoint Publishing Site or you create a blank site and then enable the publishing feature. From that publishing site you create a simple links list. You add in a few links and want to then display it on your publishing page. You edit the publishing page and then click on a webpart zone and add the newly created links list on the page. From here instead of configuring the webpart to display in summary view you simply keep the current view and check the page in. You then edit/check out the page again and decide to modify the links list to show in “Summary View” to get it to display like a bulleted list...

In this post I will walk you through the process of adding in “Hidden” metadata to your page layouts so that they are only visible when editing the page. For example if you want to create a news article with categories, start date, end date, keywords, and other metadata that might not be relevant to the consumer then instead of forcing your content authors to create content in the edit mode and then force them to update metadata by editing the page properties why not have them all on the page. This allows for a single page authoring experience. This post also provides the specific field names for the most common SharePoint 2010 base columns and web controls. (Really good stuff) Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls Namespace Standard columns that are used for most metadata column types. URL: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms413880.aspx Example: <SharePointWebControls:RichTextField FieldName="MultipleLines" runat="server" /> Microso...

For content authors the ability to stylize web parts with just a few simple clicks is a big win. In some cases you might want to emphasize a web part on the page and make it stand out. There are basically 4 main web part styles/chrome that you can apply to any webpart. You will notice below that the chrome type “None” and “Title Only” do not have a unique class name so they will share the same style. The “None” style simply does not show the web part title. Chrome ( None ): . ms-WPBody { font-size:8pt; font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif; } Chrome ( Title Only ): . ms-WPBody { font-size:8pt; font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif; } Chrome ( Title and Border ): . ms-WPBorder , .ms-WPBorderBorderOnly{ border-color:#9ac6ff; border-width:1px; border-style:solid; } Chrome ( Border Only ): .ms-WPBorder, . ms-WPBorderBorderOnly { border-color:#9ac6ff; border-width:1px; border-style:solid; } ...