Good vs. EvilCustomizing your site without going to… Well, you get the point!

Good vs. EvilAdmins…

Admins…Developers

Developers

Stacy L. DeereFocal Point Solutions, LLC.

Owner

• Consultant with 17 years of IT experience• MCITP• SharePoint & Solution Sales• SharePoint 2007 & 2010 Administration• Lotus Domino\Notes Administrator for 12 years• Migrations, Assessments, Discovery, Implementations, etc.• Works with 3rd party partners to deliver end to end solutions to clients.• Blog: http://www.notjustsharepoint.com• Enjoys speaking at user groups and events!! • Co-host on SPTV http://mysp.tv• THE BOOK…yes in my spare time co-authoring a book on Managed

Metadata!!

Agenda• Show of hands (Be Honest!)• What I mean by Good vs. Evil in customizations• Something to start making you think…hmmm• Design vs. Branding• Survey Facts by Forrester • Conflicted Anyone?• Whose right or whose wrong (Which way do I go?)• Some short stories…• Making the right customization decision.• Proceed with Caution• Governance….yes I said it!• Best Practices• Q&A• Contact Information

Can I get a show of hands here?

What did you think I meant?

We did discovery

I did interviews

It worked for others…

We had a project plan

It was on time!

It was under budget!!

We did UAT It went through QA

Print Master

Design vs. Branding

Design is the visual appearance of a page. Where artistic style, design principles are put into place to creatively and effectively display each element of the page. How the customer responds to the feeling they get when clicking on a Web page is very important. It can determine whether a visitor chooses to continue to explore the site or move on to the next site.

Branding is a strategy. The ‘behind the scenes’ work that goes on in the first stages of site development. Branding encompasses detailed competitive analysis, business goals, evaluation, marketing collateral design and target audience definition. It gives the site direction and objectives and is essential to the success of the site.

Some Survey FactsProvided by Forrester

• Customers are quickly adopting SharePoint 2010. Fifty-seven percent of respondents using SharePoint had already upgraded to SharePoint 2010, a fast pace for a platform product available for only 14 months. Adoption is strong across industries and sizes of enterprise.

• Most of our survey respondents start with SharePoint’s most familiar “workloads” before proceeding to more comprehensive use of the platform. Customer-facing websites and custom applications were used the least widely. For about half the respondents, SharePoint took longer than expected to implement for a variety of reasons.

• About three-quarters of respondents said that IT and business sponsors are satisfied with SharePoint. This indicates to us that most customers are willing to tolerate some issues for strategic initiatives like a SharePoint implementation. SharePoint’s business value for these respondents outweighs its hassles, and SharePoint’s future looks bright.

Even Super Hero's get conflicted…

Yes even Spidey!

The Conflict• SharePoint can be a productive platform for business applications.

SharePoint can help your teams deliver applications fast in three ways. First, with a little customization of the human interface, SharePoint's out-of-the-box applications can work for many situations. Second, SharePoint's basket of developer services for applications involving collaboration, social media, website creation, workflows, document management, information distribution, search, and reporting dashboards can speed completion of projects. Third, you can delegate simple sites and workflows, as well as content updating, to businesspeople.

• Customization challenges stability, performance, and upgrades of your shared service. The more custom code in your SharePoint farm, the greater the risks to the integrity of that farm. A SharePoint environment is a shared service, providing applications to many departments, teams, and groups. One group's decision to enhance its SharePoint site with custom code can compromise availability and performance of every other group's applications. Also, as customers using MOSS 2007 are discovering, some human-interface customizations are impossible to port to SharePoint 2010.

Business Users?

Developers? Administrators?

Consulting Firm?

A Committee?

Management?

Good vs. EvilCustomizing your site without going

to….well you know!

Fleeing the wars that devastated their home planet of Cybertron, most of the Autobots made Earth their temporary home. Under the leadership of the powerful robot, Optimus Prime, the heroic Autobots battled fearlessly against the assaults of the evil Decepticons, protecting their new human friends.

Ok not the story you were looking for?

The Story

Story TimeYes these are all

true!

Customer wanted to update a link…

Customer wanted to add\remove announcements…

Packaging? What’s that?

Template needs to be reusable…hardcoded URL’s?

THE EVIL FACTS!!!

Over doing Social Media…

Users who are they?

Slide MasterWhich way do I go?

I Choose the Right Way!!

Basic Customizations (OOTB)

Allows the end user that is familiar with SharePoint to create sites, lists and web parts through the user interface fairly easily to produce something that meets their requirements.

Strengths– Quick to create– Basic SharePoint Knowledge– Encourages consistency….the "SharePoint way"

Weaknesses– Little to no flexibility (You will make compromises!)– Repeating your customizations in a solution are limited - manual repetition of

creation steps or templates.

SharePoint Designer (SPD)Allows power users to get a bit more creative to use more advanced options in such as custom workflows and the use of data sources.

Strengths– More Options

• Easier to fulfill more requirements– Creation and changes to master pages and page layouts (Look and Feel)

Weaknesses– Difficult to deploy customizations to other sites – Example: A custom workflow

created in SPD is applied to a specific list and cannot be reused on another list. The only option is to manually recreate the workflow again for the next list.

– If the power user is untrained a lot of damage can be done very quickly– Once files are customized by SPD they cannot be changed by custom code

Custom DevelopmentRequires a skilled SharePoint developer to write it but it is the most powerful option that opens up the full SharePoint API, web services and any other code you want to use to customize your solutions.

Strengths– Provides the most options – Customizations can be packaged up as features that are easily deployed and

reused in multiple solutions– Deployment can be controlled and governed more easily as customizations

can only be deployed by people with SharePoint admin permissionsWeaknesses

– Requires a skilled SharePoint developer– Takes longer to achieve the same results

Warning Signs• Dev. thinks building a package for deployment means a site template.

(Reminder - You can’t change a site template once you choose it)• Hardcoded URL’s• Dev states he can’t create a master page on the server and when

instructed to do it from his computer he says I don’t use Microsoft.• Changing a link or announcement requires you to know code.• Developer knows development but does not know SharePoint…• Style changes should not be done in the Master Page. That’s what the

css is for (aka style sheet)• Do Not modify the corev4 (This is the OOTB style sheet for SP)• Do Not change any OOTB files make a new one.• Avoid the rabbit hole of non-stop customization requests and tweaks.

– There’s always going to be a new version or phase

GovernanceDid I hear sighs…

Governance - Customization

• Document approved customization tools.– Example, decide whether to allow the use of Microsoft SharePoint

Designer 2010 and specify which site elements can be customized, and by whom.

• Manage your source code – use a source control system, and set standards for documenting the code.

• Coding Best Practices (Dev. Standards)• Set testing and verification standards (Dev, QA, Production)• Required packaging and installation methods.

– Control the use of sandboxing -- enables site owners to host custom solutions in a partially trusted context so they do not affect the rest of your SharePoint implementation.

Governance - Customization

• Define what kinds of customizations are going to be supported. • Example, you might want to allow the use of Web parts to

integrate Microsoft Silverlight 3 applications together with SharePoint sites.

For more information about kinds of customizations and their potential risks, see Governance and customization and for managing customizations, see the white paper SharePoint Products and Technologies customization policy (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?linkid=92311).

Governance - Branding

• If you are designing an information architecture and a set of sites for use across an enterprise, consider including branding in your governance plan.

• A formal set of branding policies helps ensure that sites consistently use enterprise imagery, fonts, themes, and other design elements.– SharePoint Server 2010, you can import a Microsoft PowerPoint 2010

theme directly into a SharePoint site, which automatically applies the theme to all sub-sites.

Practice does not make Perfect…

A Perfect Practice makes Perfect!!

Best Practices

• Collaborate with your colleagues in content management.• No 1 and rebuild situations!• Define an application-development role, and always think

ahead.• Have an Application Lifecycle• Custom Development - choose your third-party partners.• Test integration into your platform and workloads.• Get in front or at least think about the future!• Mandate UAT Testing• LISTEN TO YOUR USERS!!

Good vs. EvilCustomizing your site without going

to….well you know!

Q & A

Superman gets confused at times…does that mean he’s human?

My Bat SignalsOtherwise known as Contact Info.

Twitter: @sldeere

Email: sdeere@focalpointsolutions.co

Blog: http://notjustsharepoint.com

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/stacydeere

Twitter: My_sptvhttp://mysp.tv

Wrap-Up