Beginning SharePoint® 2007: Building Team Solutions with MOSS 2007

4.2. Best Practices for Building a Dynamic System for Managing Content

In this section, you learn the best practices to ensure that your SharePoint site offers the maximum value to your organization based on the customizations that you implement. This is an important consideration because the right customizations can make your site user-friendly and efficient, while the wrong ones can make data entry burdensome and can cause user confusion.

4.2.1. Ensure that Your Changes Add Value

When you design an information system for your team to use for sharing and managing content, remember that your changes should add value; changes should make the system easier to use and the information simple and intuitive to find.

You can identify what adds value by familiarizing yourself with the information goals of team members and site users:

• Hold meetings or send questionnaires to gather information on users' frustration points.

• From these discussions, create a list of problems that you need to address.

• Rank and prioritize the list based on the number of people who are affected and the productivity impact they experience because of the issues.

• Look at how SharePoint lists and libraries can improve the situation. For example, if people have a difficult time finding documents created during a specific time frame, you can create views that filter and sort documents based on when they were completed.

4.2.2. Follow Similar Processes and Practices

When you create additional columns and views to your ...