Microsoft SharePoint seems to be penetrating all areas of the web as of late. It’s been around for quite a while, but the latest version seems to have built a good amount of momentum and anyone in moderately sized organization has likely at least heard of it, if not faced it in person.

My new role is now SharePoint admin. I have mixed feelings about it, to say the least. On the plus side, I am learning something new that appears to be a highly marketable skill set. It’s just that I’m not sure if I want that particular skill set on my resume. It’s like having your boss at the ad agency find out that you know Powerpoint. Soon enough, you end up just doing Powerpoint presentations all day long for clients. ;0)

I thought I’d give a quick SharePoint primer and then point out a few links that have recently sprung up specifically about SharePoint and web standards and accessibility, since that’s typically the first question we web developer have about a given CMS.

What is SharePoint?

The biggest drawback is a lack of real documentation and whitepaper/case studies. Even talking with MS themselves gave me the impression that even they aren’t fully aware of what SharePoint really is. Not that that surprises me, as it is a rather large, versatile application and, well, this is MS we’re talking about anyways.

In my words, SharePoint is Duct Tape. It’s rarely the BEST solution for a particular need, but it’s certainly usable and you’ll find all sorts of uses for it if you have it laying around, even if it’s slightly ugly. That’s the good.

At its core, SharePoint is an excellent tool for making lists. Task lists. Lists of links. Document lists. Lists of people. Etc. This makes it a great utility for centrally organizing, sharing, and collaborating on information within your organization. It’s (of course) highly integrated with MS Office. You save documents directly to SharePoint. People can email information to SharePoint. You can subscribe to information updated on SharePoint via email or RSS. For us, out of the box, SharePoint will ultimately be a replacement for cluttered email in boxes full of attachments, shared network drives, and multiple copies of outdated documents scattered across individidual hard drives. For that alone, SharePoint seems to be a worthy purchase.

Beyond that, SharePoint can do quite a bit more. Microsoft Content Management Server is now integrated (and updated) into SharePoint. There are extensive workflow options with SharePoint to route data automatically through your organization. The Search server is quite powerful, letting you index SharePoint content, content in documents, content on your network, content in other business applications, and even content on other web sites.

At this point, I should make a quick aside and quickly explain the product line. It is confusing, to say the least:

• Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS) – this is the free framework that allows you to easily set up SharePoint team sites. You will need a Windows server with IIS, and then you can install this. You can use the free MS SQL ‘lite’ DB as your back-end database as well. This is a good product and if you are running Windows Servers, you might as well give this a shot.
• Microsoft Offfice Sharepoint Server 2007 (MOSS) – this is the expensive add-on (likely 6-figures for most orgs) that provides you with the enterprise level features, namely: site-wide navigation tools, site-wide searching tools, CMS features and advanced business intelligence tools. Prior to this version, these features were found in two separate applications: SharePoint Portal 2003 and Microsoft CMS (now discontinued).
• MOSS comes in a variety of licensed flavours. The key thing to understand is that there is only one MOSS application. The differences as far as what you can/can’t do with your particular install are all based on whatever licensing agreement you come up with with Microsoft.
• If you want to run MOSS for any mission-critical purposes, realize that it is best to run it on a farm of at least 4 servers (2 redundant front-end servers, a search indexing server, and a back end DB cluster).

The Bad? Well, it’s expensive if you want the full set of features in Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007. Your 10 person non-profit is not going to want to purchase MOSS. It’s also highly tied into Microsoft Office, Microsoft Active Directory, and Microsoft SQL Server. Not a big deal if you are already a MS shop, but something to consider if you are not.

Now, the ugly. Our first major project here is going to be migrating our intranet to MOSS 2007 using a UI and IA created by an outside vendor. Fortunately, SharePoint is based on ASP.net 2.0 features such as MasterPages which will make custom UI design a lot easier than it was before. The problem is that while MS has improved the HTML output in ASP.net 2.0, it’s still quite poor relying on lots and lots of tables and still containing more than a few parsing errors. Example: “A SharePoint Server 2007 home page out of the box, has 154 HTML validation errors” This makes me sad.

As such, I’ve been doing more and more research and this past week has seen several blog posts sprout up about accessibility and standards with SP. I thought I’d compile them here for some afternoon reading for any of you looking at wrangling SharePoint yourselves.

• http://www.sharepoint2007.com/Default.aspx?tabid=23 – an article on SP’s accessibility limitations (ironically on a site using SharePoint and, as such, has a site menu that is not accessible)
• http://alastairc.ac/2007/03/sharepoint-2007-accessibility/ – Alastair Cambell shares some frustrations with SP accessibility and offers some useful links including…
  • …a link to a SP accessibility presentation by the UK SP users group.
  • …and a link to Molly.com and her quest to spread accessibility information throughout Redmond
• http://cameronmoll.com/archives/2007/05/skinning_ms_sharepoint_with_st/ – Cameron Moll shares his experiences with applying a standards based template to SP and includes many useful links, some of which are…
  • How To Create a Minimal Master Page
  • How to Override default CSS
  • A great CSS chart by Heather Soloman that that explains what all of the crazy class names refer to in Sharepoint and where to locate the style declaration to modify them.

Are you using SharePoint? If so, what do you think?

Here’s a half dozen interesting options for the multi-author collaborative website

• SeedWiki
  Not as visually sexy as some of the others, SeedWiki charges for privacy. Looks like wiki’s are public and open to anyone with a seedwiki account by default. Either $10 or $20/month buys you domain mapping (for rebranding) and some access control. This one seems the least polished of the list.
• StikiPad
  At it’s core, StikiPad is a wiki. A well-thought out, straight forward, ruby-on-rails, hosted wiki. A common sense text-formatting legend is clearly displayed next to the edit box. An unlimited number of authors gain access through an email invitation and they’ll need to create a password. Everybody gets a profile page. All the pages support commenting as well as editing, tagging, and searching. Phew. $15/month includes a 1/2 gig of storage, an unlimited number of wikis, complete CSS control & templating & domain mapping (great for re-branding). This is my favorite in the list.
• JotSpot
  This is a wiki and all that means – content over presentation, low usability as the barrier to entry. JotSpot doesn’t like Safari that much (everyone else on this list hates IE). The site feels slower than everyone else and the visual design and text-formatting aren’t as straight forward or sophisticated as the other sites on this list. Each wiki page supports comments and file attachments. Invitations to other authors is handled via email. $70/month for unlimited authors, and a thousand pages. But hey – every plan is free for two weeks. Makes me think you start one for the event, see how popular it is, and pay the appropriate monthly fee for archiving.
• Backpack
  Far more structured than a wiki, Backpack is a hosted service with explicit sections for lists, notes, pictures, urls, files, and 37sigs’ Writeboards (like a wiki). Pages can be made public and and it looks like any number of people could edit them (via an email invitation) They’ll probably need to create a password. $19/month supports 1,000 pages and a 1/2 gig o’ storage.
• Campfire
  The recently launched browser-based hosted chat again from our friends at 37Signals. It boasts permanent urls for each chat, file upload and sharing, search, image previews, and a dead simple login process (”Enter Your Name”). $49/month buys you and 39 of your friends a gig of server space and one big simultaneous conversation. What if we had 80 people? Dunno. Jason?
• SocialText
  SocialText has a hosted service called ‘EventSpace‘, sounds promising. It’s got a chat, wiki, and a weblog (depending on what feels right at the time), bios pages for everyone. As you can see from the Web 2.0 Conference and SuperNova sites, the system is very comprehensive though the branding and visual design leaves something to be desired. This sounds like it’s got everything – except a price tag on the site. Hmmm.