User Interface Engineering

Cameron Moll offers some advice on getting the most out of SharePoint, with semantic code and CSS styling.

For those of you not familiar with SharePoint, it is a web application from Microsoft that’s deployed within an organization for collaboration purposes. I’ll pigeon-hole it as an intranet-in-a-box™ app.

There are a lot of people out there, web developers and designers especially, who have this app in their organization and they don’t much about it. And now they’ve been charged with wrangling it. The complaint I hear repeatedly is that it is difficult to make properly coded web pages (CSS, semantics, et al) on the SharePoint framework. The phrase “surrender” is thrown about commonly.

Several people have referenced Jared’s comments on the topic of SharePoint at the Web Directions North conference.

Implementing Sharepoint is a lot like building a house. It’s like a friend of yours says, “I know exactly what to do.” And, he drives you to a Home Depot, drops you off at the front door and says, “Everything you need is here.” Then, drives off.

Luckily for SharePoint users, Cameron knows a ton about semantics and CSS, has been thrown into the same position as many of you, and is sharing his discoveries. A big thanks to Cameron.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 1st, 2007 at 10:12 am and is filed under Design, Resources, Success Stories, Web Applications, Web Development . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.