Microsoft SharePoint is at its peak today and MOSS applications are rocking many businesses in various ways.
Sometimes, users who consume MOSS application services do not find the default user interfaces – mostly as a result of plain vanilla implementation – very intuitive and hence sometimes are reluctant to use it aptly.
However, Microsoft has created MOSS with extensive customization capabilities and users who are serious about the end-user experience have actively started opting for the same.
Last week, we completed a project which consisted of the below customizations. While creating lessons learned document, we figured out that these are most common customizations which can enable a MOSS implementation to provide better user experience.
- Custom master pages – Master pages serve as a “template” to provide a consistent look and feel across all the pages that use the master page. Elements of the a Share Point master page are: CSS references to define fonts, colors, background images etc., Navigation menus, Site logos, Controls for login, search, page editing, Any other custom controls etc. Customization of a Share Point master page provides the opportunity to customize all the above mentioned elements and give a custom user interface to the application which will be consistent across the application.
- CSS customization – SharePoint makes extensive usage of CSS to define the OOTB (Out- Of-The- Box) look and feel of both the site pages and the application pages. The best practice is to create new style classes and over write the out-of-the-box MOSS styles.
- Custom User Controls and Web Parts - Specific user interface customization can be incorporated by developing user controls. A user control cannot be placed directly on the SharePoint page. It needs to be embedded in a web part and then the web part is added to the Share Point page.
- Features – Features are a mechanism for defining site elements and adding them to a target site or site collection through a process known as feature activation. Features are used by SharePoint to extend functionality.
- Usage of XSLTs – An XSLT data view is a great way to modify the look and feel of displayed data in SharePoint site. The data view web part is able to display data from either SharePoint lists or from external data sources.
- Rich Content Editing – The default rich text editor web part or third party tools like Telerik editor can be deployed in SharePoint implementations to enhance the user capabilities to create rich content.
- Rendering templates – These templates decide how Out-Of-The-Box controls of SharePoint will be rendered. These templates decide how the forms and the fields are rendered. These templates can be overridden to add custom elements.
- Page layouts – Page layouts are available when the publishing feature is activated on the site. Page layouts are layout templates for content pages and they are saved as aspx pages by themselves. When combined with master pages, they define the layout and branding of the content pages.
Even plain-vanilla MOSS serves businesses well but when customized correctly, it will excel the user experience by leaps and bounds; thanks to Microsoft extensive customization capabilities.
