SharePoint Config

Early last year I was involved in developing a Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) based Intranet for the Ministry of Transport. This post explains how we utilised the tagging capabilities provided by MOSS to create this award winning Intranet.

Findability was a major focus for the Intranet. All content entered into the site is tagged with metadata that we can use to display content in a variety of ways. This also allows us to display; tag clouds, contextual navigation, links to related content, enhanced search results, and provide summary views of relevant content from various areas of the site.

Some examples of how this works are:

The homepage for the “Tools and Resources” section of the site that contains a tag-cloud of all the company-wide documents and articles:

Selecting the “Administration” topic shows all content tagged with the “Administration” value for the “Topic” attribute. Users can then sort and filter the results to further refine the results. Note that the navigation is also driven by the tags that relate to content within the site.

A typical page on the site will contain a list of tags, clicking on these will take the user to search results page, showing similarly tagged items.

The search results for the “Manual” content type. Note the search results have been customised to show related tags to help further identify content.

The homepage for the intranet, showing summary views of content from various sections of the website:

To build these features we used a combination of custom ASP.NET development and UI customisations using SharePoint designer. The following steps detail the process we used to define and implement the Information Architecture and create these features.

Step 1. Defining the Information Architecture

The first step in the process is defining the content types and attributes that you will use for the site. This step needs to be done by someone who understands the business and the ways in which people work as the information architecture will define how content is categorised and accessed. At Provoke, Information Architects within our Design and User Experience (DUX) team are responsible for this step, and produce an Information Architecture specification that contains a list of the metadata elements that will be used, along with a content type-metadata mapping that defines which attributes will be captured for each content type. A sample of this document is shown below.

One row from the metadata set:

Attributes by content type:

Step 2. Creating the Information Architecture

The next step in the process is to create the metadata attributes and content types within MOSS. To do this we created a series of lists that contained the options for each attribute such as Topic or Origin, and then created site columns that referenced these lists. We then created the content types and used the content type-attribute mapping to add the required site columns (attributes) to each content type. The last step in the process was to add these content types to the relevant document libraries. Now when users add content to a document library they are shown the relevant tags based on the type of content they have uploaded.

Document based tagging:

We also created a series of page layouts (one for each content type) so that if users created a page within the site they would be able to tag the content when editing the page:

Step 3. Customising the User Interface

We now have the basic architecture that we need for users to create and tag content appropriately. To make it as easy as possible for users to find what they are after we provided several customisations of the Publishing site template. These were:

• Aggregating the most popular and recent content on the homepage for each site
• Using tag clouds to provide access ways into the site
• Providing contextual based navigation that displayed tag clouds for a given site
• Displaying related tags on each page, and displaying related articles when users clicked on these tags

Aggregating the most popular and recent content on the homepage for each site

Each site’s homepage contains listings of relevant content drawn from within the current section and/or subsections of the Intranet. To do this we made heavy use of the Data View Web Part. Using SharePoint designer we simply added several Data View Web Parts to each page, and selected the relevant list or library that contained the content. As the Data View Web Part contains a XSL template, our designers were easily able to customise this to provide a rich user interface as shown below:

The homepage for the Intranet, drawing content from several sections of the website:

Tag clouds

As an alternative to displaying the most recent or popular content, for sections of the site that had large amounts of content we used the homepage to display tag clouds to provide access ways into the site. To accomplish this we created a component that would calculate the tag counts every time content was updated, and a page layout that contained several Data View Web Parts to display these tags.

Tag based navigation

The metadata lists used for the tag clouds are also used to drive the navigation for sections of the site. Selecting an item in the menu takes the user to a filtered view of the content in the site that the user can then sort or filter further to help find the content they are looking for. This dynamic view of the content means users are not forced to go down a single path to find content, as is the case with tree based navigation structures. Users have the ability to filter by the attributes they feel will return the content they are after. This also has an advantage over search, as users easily sort and filter results with more control.

Related tags

Each content page on the site contains a related tags section that looks at the metadata attributes for the page, and displays each item as a link to search results for a similar item. To achieve this we built a custom ASP.NET user control that we put on each page layout.

Summary

The MOSS platform provides a great platform for implementing an information architecture that makes it easy for users to find what they are looking for.