Jeremy sent Marcy and me a note pointing to an article by Tom Wilson: “Guys just read Tom’s post on this . I think you should do something similar too to stand out from the crowd.”

Marcy sent back an extended response, which I think might be useful for those deciding when and where to start messing with basic, location based interfaces. The discussion is about the ribbon in 2010, but it could be about moving or altering any major interface piece.

From Marcy
I’ve spent a few hours diving deep into the ribbon over the past few days. You have no idea how far I’ve come in my knowledge of the Ribbon and 2010 elements since we last spoke. I even have custom graphics to help teach and train. I’m excited for the SP Designer 2010 book to be released but it’s impact on my availability is frustrating.

I wish I had a little more time this past week to review more design and content stuff. This is when you guys need me! This is my sweet spot! You are all moving at 100 miles an hour!

I’ve read Tom Wilson’s article, Ribbon Customization: Changing Placement, Look and Behavior, and think it’s great to see what can be done, but I’m not convinced on his reason…nor yours. Is standing out the most important thing or is functionality? Isn’t there something else that can be done to stand out?

Microsoft built an entire architecture and platform around the ribbon. I’d like to test it out the way it was intended first. And then see if it needs to be redesigned. It’s a functional element, not just for looks. Moving it has implications that should be well thought out.

Key Points

• Any break in the positioning decreases usability for your audience. All day every day they will be working with the ribbon in another location. Your users are going to also be using Office 2010 products.
• Moving the ribbon on task oriented site, such as a Wiki, is risky. There will be little annoying cognitive decisions about navigation when moving from program to program. For those of us that will be using SharePoint 2010 in more than one environment (ALL of your authors), it will be confusing, irritating, nettling, discombobulating. As Steve Krug has put it, “Don’t Make Me Think!”

I like that Tom proved it possible. I even think his design is slick. But just because it’s possible doesn’t mean it is good design. We should definitely prototype it first. Just move the position and not brand it. Let’s test it if you really want it.

It might be interesting. We could even implement on a subsite as an example… but for actual use? I don’t’ know.. would you want to make something harder to use to make it prettier on the eyes? I can tell you that sometimes it’s worth it. I’ve got some rockin shoes that aren’t functional. But I have to be hard pressed to wear them.

So let me know what you want to do. Test and prototype a new ribbon or get used to the one MS shipped? I will be on board either way.

Some of the community jumped on board the SharePoint Blog platform in Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0 such as myself, Andrew Connell, Joel Oleson, Rene Hezser, Todd Klindt, Wictor Wilen, Tobias Zimmergren and ZevenSeas and plenty more. Most of the WSS3.0 platform blogs out there are running CKS:EBE 2.0 to get round the limited functionality provided in the base platform.

With SharePoint 2010 these enhancements have stepped up a notch. This article will account for these improvements and also highlight some limitations compared to other platforms out there such as WordPress, Blogger.com etc.

What was available in SharePoint 2007

The below screen shot shows an out of the box Blog Site instance. This site template was available in WSS3.0 and there were no enhancements by provisioning this in MOSS 2007.

An individual post (below) shows that the date, author, title, and body content is captured. It also had the ability to “Email this Post” and a Permalink to the post that could be bookmarked.

Links

The ability to add blog links to the blog home page.

Comments

The comments section allowed for a Title and a Body and a count of how many comments was displayed in the footer of the post body shown below.

Categories

Support to allocate a category to a Post:

These categories were managed by a list (below) and you could filter by these on the blog homepage.

Archive

The ‘Archive (Calendar)’ view of the blog showed when the blog posts were posted on the Calendar.

Post Editing

Posts have Content Approval turned on by default. There is a Rich Text editor for authoring the Post Body.

External Editor

There is support to create Posts using two rich clients: Microsoft Word or Microsoft Live Writer.

Limitations of 2007 Blogs

Below are a series of limitations based on other blog platforms out there. CKS:EBE 2.0 actually removed the majority of the issues to some degree.

Not designed for anonymous support

The blog platform was not designed to be used as an Internet facing platform. It was really built for internally facing sites where all users are authenticated to the site and not for anonymous situations.

Post Editing

The Rich Text Editor is extremely limiting and one of the most common requirements was the ability to include images in posts. This was not possible via the Web UI without uploading the image as a separate step and cutting and pasting the URL into Insert Image window.

There was a better experience in Live Writer and Word rich client posting as this attached the images to the Post List Item.

Categories

The category support was very limited with the ability to only select one category that the post was relevant to.

Comments

As comments were handled in a separate list, these could have workflow switched on to have an approval process. This was not turned on by default though.

Comments were also not a Rich Text Editor environment providing no formatting and also no preview. It is unclear to authors whether than can put in hyperlinks etc. which is common in blog comments referencing other sites.

For public web sites having a title and body text fields with a submit button was asking spammers to run bots across your pages and so comments were useless out of the box. Most Blog platforms have CAPTCHA and akismet support to prevent comment spam. It also didn’t handle things like providing an avatar photo (www.gravatar.com) or providing a name of the anonymous comment author.

Subscribing to posts

WordPress and other platforms have a great way to submitting to comments on a post that you’ve replied to so that you don’t have to check back. This is often great to keep in the loop if others respond to your comments.

Trackbacks

Trackbacks are a great way for other sites to link to your site and then for your blog posts to then have the ability to list those references. This allows readers of your blog posts to see who is references you and broaden their reader base and not to forget increase your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

RSS Feed

A key requirement is for an RSS feed that was easily remembered, the url included a GUID making this hard to instantly jump to e.g  /blog/_layouts/listfeed.aspx?List={8853902E-B17C-4BE5-8CEE-982929D18028}.

There is also no control over the rendering of this RSS feed e.g. post trimming and only RSS2.0 support. It also did not validate against W3C and couldn’t be added to various RSS readers.

Category specific feeds were also not available.

The RSS feed was also not written into the header so that browsers could detect the feed exists.

Branding

Skinning these blog sites was not easy and really required knowledge of ASP.NET Page Layouts and Master Pages. There are very little skins available for the out of the box site template and Site Themes simply allowed for some colour changes.

Friendly URLs

Search Engine Optimisation is below par with the use of query string to load a blog post instance e.g. /blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=1 rather than /blog/Welcome-to-my-blog.aspx.

System Pages available

If you did try and use the blog for Internet use, system pages such as /_layouts/settings.aspx were available.

Trackback and Pingback support

Trackback and pingback support was not available to allow visitors to the post to see who was referencing the posts from external sites.

Tag Cloud

It is a common requirement for a Tag Cloud to illustrate the quantity of posts and most common categories. This often gives an indication of the main topics covered in a blog.

Social Networking Tags

There were no social networking badges such as “Digg this” or “add to de.licio.us” etc. available on posts.

Top Posts

There is no functionality to indicate to visitors what the top posts are on the blog.

Rating

There is no functionality to allow for visitors to rate the posts.

What is available in SharePoint 2010

Below is a list of functionality that is available in SharePoint 2010 on top of what was already available in SharePoint 2007. I have also distinguished between what is available in SharePoint Foundation 2010 (SPF2010) and SharePoint Server 2010 (SPS2010).

Archives

The Archives listing is more in line with other blog platforms giving the ability to navigate to a list of blog posts by month.

Rich Text Editor

The new Rich Text Editor and Ribbon improves the editing experience including the ability to easily upload images in a few clicks to a Post Body.

Categories

As seen by screenshot below Blog Posts can now have multiple associated categories from the list. Unfortunately, the multi-select control is an extremely poor interface compared to other parts of the platform such as the tagging text box with autocomplete.

What hasn’t been fixed in 2010 Blogs

All of the limitations identified in SharePoint 2007 still apply in 2010 except the multiple categories support and rich text editing improvements. This is a bit of a disappointment as the community worked hard with CKS:EBE 2.0 and it would have been great to get these as part of the 2010 platform.

Potential easy add-ons

There are various bits of functionality that are “no-brainers” that can be switched on that are available in other site templates in SharePoint.

Tagging (only SPS2010)

The new tagging functionality available in SPS2010 allows visitors to tag posts based on a folksonomy of multiple tags. For some reason these are disabled in the blog site template, only the note board functionality is available:

Tag Cloud (only SPS2010)

The new tag cloud renders the tags added by users, but as this is disabled this cannot be leveraged.

Rating (only SPS2010)

The rating functionality is not included in blog posts by default, this could be added to the interface.

Web Analytics Web Part (only SPS2010)

The Web Analytics Web Part could be used to show the Top Posts.

How can this be improved?

The CKS:EBE team are hard at work merging code bases for a new release of the open source add-on to improve this. Please keep your eyes peeled for this release.

Zevenseas are also building a commercial add-on for SharePoint 2010 blogs that adds lots of enhancements, check out the SharePoint 2007 demo site.

Other gripes

Plug-ins

So other platforms like WordPress have thousands of available plug-ins that can add all sorts of amazing additions to the platform. I’m hoping with Sandboxed Solutions, we can see this happening in SharePoint 2010 a lot more. It’d be great if someone picked up the bandwagon on skins for a start!

Hopefully this has given you a good insight into Blogs and set some expectations up front on what the blogging platform in SharePoint 2010 is all about.

Guest Author: Jeremy Thake
SharePointDevWiki.com

Jeremy Thake (@jthake) is a SharePoint Consultant based in Perth, Western Australia. He is a Microsoft Virtual Technology Specialist and also founded the SharePointDevWiki.com. Jeremy is a Microsoft Certified Trainer and holds all 4 MCTS SP2007 certifications.