Customizing Clearspace vs Sharepoint
If you watched any of the videos I shot yesterday closely, you may have noticed that there was an announcement at the top of the page asking Jivers to share some of the ways they’ve customized their Clearspace home page. Since everyone can have a different one, I was curious to see how people had uniquely set theirs up. I actually had about 12 Jivers send me screenshots but rather than overload you with tons of them, I plucked a few to give you a taste.
But can’t you customize Sharepoint?
You sure can. I couldn’t find many out-of-the-box screenshots on Microsoft’s site but I’m sure someone will direct me. In the meantime, I followed the “customizing your site” link and found a lot of videos for SharePoint Designer 2007 (another product you need) so I imagine this is how you can customize Sharepoint, though I don’t think it’s on the individual-employee level. I also tried the online demo to see what it was like out of the box but got the error below (under the video). So, bottomline, I can’t tell whether you can customize everyone’s individual UI in Sharepoint. Does anyone know?
Tried to test drive the online version but it didn’t work
Your very own windshield
It’s pretty easy to forget that nearly everyone at big companies are forced to stare at the same dead interfaces everyday. When equipped with control over their own dashboard, I was pretty surprised just how differently people like to see their work. Here are just for examples of how different people in very different roles set up their own view.
Adam Wulf (joined Jive yesterday from Jotlet)
Paul Biggs, Online Marketing
Chris Brentano, Information Technology
Todd McCullough, Engineer
Things people have said about this post
You can do all of this with SharePoint - it’s called Personalization. Nothing special jumps out at me here.
one kitty, please!
Being a SharePoint Sheriff this depresses me, yet excites me at the same time. I’m filled with self-pity for being stuck with the severe limitations of SharePoint and its web 1.0 hideosity (yeah I know it’s not a real word, so sue me!)! However, I am thrilled knowing that the future is bright and promising for the enterprise thanks to companies like JiveSoftware who just get it. If nothing else, this will force Microsoft to re-evaluate their entire strategy and make dramatic changes or else totally lose their market. Up until now they’ve been the only real solution in this space, with all due respect to the others who tried to compete with them. JiveSoftware didn’t try to compete, they set out to obliterate them and that they have. SharePoint is like Yahoo photos and ClearSpace is Flickr. Game over.
Pai
I think the samples are extremely valuable in promoting adoption with users who need some help “getting it”. In fact, as an admin I’d like to be able to set up several templates for users to choose from as starting points for their page. I’ve not checked to see if this is practicable yet.
Beyond that, I’d like the option to put “Your…” widgets on the main page. e.g. i might want to put “Your Colleagues” right on the main page (with the assumption that content would still be tailored for the end user) as a way to drive adoption. Right now i don’t see any of the “Your…” widgets in the main page config.
As long as I’m on the topic, it would be nice to be able to copy widgets AND layouts from space to space. Right now I can copy widgets, but I have to select the layout manually. No big deal it just feels clunky.
Lastly, do y’all have comparisons with NewsGator’s Social Sites, which seems to be more in your space than Sharepoint?
Thanks sir,
Rich
Mmm… Personalization ala Portals… came about roughly 10 years ago. Just about time for an overnight success!
Interesting that MOSS started as a combination file server/portal platform, and yet this is the “state of the (mass) art.”
MOSS brings along both the good and bad of portals, enterprise content management, search, social activities, etc. as it brings along all of these capabilities to the masses. I’m personally hoping this is more of a good thing overall, than a bad thing - see my presentation from November 2007 on “Who’s the Boss, MOSS?”
Great contrasting though, Sam. Point well made, and it shows the flexibility of actually moving to a “2.0″ mindset, as well as SaaS. Do you provide “locked” sections of your templates to make sure that company-wide, department-wide, etc. information is always seen - and the rest is personalizable? Hope so - hate to see some of the useful lessons learned from portal days fall off the map.
I kind of zoned-out after he said “based on FrontPage technology”.
Well, besides the obvious, I can’t believe someone wasn’t taken out back and shot for not having the product compatible with their flagship, Vista….that’s the biggest crashnburn I’ve seen this year.
It seems like the guy in the video is talking to a bunch of criss-cross-applesauce 6 year olds. “Let’s get started!” yaaayy!
I so cringe when I bring up sharing information online internally, and the internals start going on and on about how Sharepoint enables sharing and ease of use, and and and… ARE THEY FREAKING NUTS?! Sharepoint is dull, hard to ‘get’ and has so many layers of permissions and lock downs, one is afraid to even try. Most of internal IS won’t even go near it.
Folks, this isn’t a portal like the old days, where IT could build a portlet/web part for every lovin’ thing in your organization, then try to guess which ones to show for which user roles in a bunch of default templates. This is a *social dashboard*, scoped to social content created by them and the people they care about.
Yes, the framework and implementation might be similar to the old portal solutions, but the content is not. Yes, you could probably build a widget to surface personalized ERP/CRM/etc/so-forth content, but just because you CAN do something, doesn’t mean you should. I can eat a whole pizza in one sitting, but it doesn’t mean I should.
Users - I’m sorry, *people* - hate trying to order dinner from a 14-page menu, and they hate trying to customize a web page by choosing from 97 portlets/web parts, or being forced into one of only six user roles. They just want a frickin’ dashboard that shows THEIR content, and the content of their peeps. And they don’t want to wait for IT to figure out which widgets/portlets/web parts to create, which default templates to put them in, how to lock which widget down for whom, etc. They just want to work, for chrissakes.
Out-of-the-box usability for specifically scoped activities is the prime directive today.
I’m amused by the lack of SharePoint knowledge here though I really shouldn’t be surprised. I think that vendors should focus on how their own products address business problems rather than nitpick at someone else’s product. FYI, with SharePoint MySites, Content Editor web part, Page Viewer web part, and RSS Viewer web part, a user (with just Contributor level — not Admin — permissions) can drop just about any kind of widget/gadget onto a SharePoint page.