I had an interesting challenge posed to me recently. I was asked to offer design assistance on a new collaboration environment for a collection of virtual teams. The goal was to provide each team with a SharePoint site where they could post content and use native SharePoint tools for collaboration and communication. The challenge was the environment needed to be built very quickly so there was no time for information architecture design sessions. In fact, I couldn’t even talk to anyone to get more details. I was asked “What would you do?”. So, I turned this into a challenge… What five questions would I ask, with no other contact, to influence the design, deployment, support, and governance of this new environment. Here are mine:
1. Site Template – I’m going to demand that every team’s site looks the same. What core web parts will leveraged in the site template (document library, calendar, announcements, etc.)?
2. Security – Can we keep security simple and allow contribution by all members but isolate site administration to IT?
3. Shared Content – Let’s assume that each team has unique content. Is there any information that should be “pushed” to all teams (i.e. announcements, links, etc.)? If yes, then let’s adjust the site taxonomy to allow for a shared parent site where we might pull group content (through CQWP or DVWP).
4. Training – How much time for training can we expect? This will help match effort to medium (cheat sheet, videos, instructor led, etc.).
5. Extension – Beyond the base site and web parts, how will you deal with requests for extended functionality (RSS, wikis, subsites, etc.)? You can (1) Enable [forcing administrator privileges] (2) Allow [forcing IT help desk requests] or (3) Deny [forcing activities to stay within the scope of the template]
I may not get to the optimal design with the answers to the above but I would argue that they would help get to a design that offers much more scalability, supportability, and usability.
What would your five questions be?