Technical Writer

In SharePoint, we are likely to think of developers as people who work to customise SharePoint, but there are a lot of developers out there who are simply end users of SharePoint. How do they like the system?

Everyone has preferred software, tools and working methods they like to use.  For me, it’s:

• Dreamweaver over Front Page (now SharePoint Designer) any day
• XML Spy as the best XML tool
• Never write code when XML and an XSL transform can do it for you.

Some of these are preferences I have garnered over time working with the tools. Others are just habit.

I always use Word, for example, to create lists. My business partner uses Excel.  My business partner trades shares. She records the the trades in a spreadsheet. If it was me, I would use a database.

I work with developers. While individual developers differ, I think that the majority of them would say:

• Unix is better than Windows
• Open source is the only good software (except for the code they write, of course)
• Mozilla Firefox walks all over Internet Explorer
• Visual Basic is not a ‘real’ programming language
• If Microsoft made it, it stinks
• Wikis are the only suitable tool to share information.

It’s the last point I want to address.

Wikis are useful, yes, but you can share knowledge outside of wikis.

As part of my job I coordinate the technical reference material for the developers at work. Every so often one of them tells me about a new wiki or content management system they hear about.

I look at the specs—I am always interested in things like this—and I think, “We can do this already in SharePoint, and we can do that, and that too.”

In short, every one of the features available in most wikis and content management systems is already available in SharePoint, which is the system we have and use at work. And we’re only using SharePoint 2003, we’re not on 2007 yet.

True, SharePoint is somewhat clunky, and despite the fact that you can do simple things almost immediately it does have a steep learning curve, particularly if you want to get the best out of it.

Developers use SharePoint in two ways, depending on their job.

• If they are SharePoint .NET developers then it’s their job to work with SharePoint. They know it well and know what it can do.
• Or they can simply be end users, using SharePoint to access information in the same way others in the company do.

End user developers have a natural aversion to using SharePoint. It’s a Microsoft product, therefore instantly suspect. It’s complex. Life shouldn’t be that hard. They don’t get a chance to get under the hood to do fun things they would like to, like writing web parts. Not to mention the one huge minus—Firefox and SharePoint don’t play well together.

I work with end user developers. Right now they use SharePoint as little as they can. Other users in the company must use SharePoint. Work procedures and other work related information is listed there. It has links to other systems that they use. But the developers … they can bury themselves in the code and only visit the portal when absolutely necessary.

Like every other IT department I know we’re always busy, but I keep trying to convince the powers to let me run some lunch-time sessions for developers on how to write web parts. I think if they knew more about the system they would be happier to use it, not to mention improve their future job prospects.

So far, I haven’t convinced anyone to let me do it.

I mentioned in an earlier post how WordPress really was a simple content management system, and other people have said the same thing, including:

• David Peralty over at Blogging Pro
• Tom Johnson over at I’d Rather Be Writing
• ZMAng over at BlogHelper
• and lots of others.

Maria Langer is a lady who redesigned her commercial site, Flying M Air, as a WordPress CMS.  What’s more, she blogged about how she did it.

Take a look.  She’s done a great job.

After my mention the other day about WordPress being a good, simple content management system a colleague introduced me to Joomla.

Joomla is more complex than WordPress but it has more power.  Because it’s a real content management system—unlike WordPress which is a blog with content management capabilities—you don’t have to customise it to make it look like one.  Other people have also created templates you can use.

Like WordPress, it runs on an Apache server with a MySQL database behind it.  And like WordPress, it is open source, so it doesn’t cost.

One thing I particularly like are the setup instructions.  They’re simple, direct, and even a little bit fun.

I’ll give Joomla a trial run and let you know how I go.

We are in the process of moving our fiction-related writing over to our pen name site, http://www.rowandai.com/.  At the moment it sits as a separate WordPress blog under our work site (http://www.infinitediversity.com.au/). 

We had a long discussion about how we might do it.

Did we want to do as we had done with Infinite Diversity, where we had some base HTML pages and just linked separate blogs beneath it?  Or did we want to base the whole thing around a WordPress blog so that managed all our content from the one place?  Because that’s what WordPress is, a content management system (CMS).

I know that some users of high-end CMS’s may dispute this definition, as a high-end CMS does a lot more.  But what is a content management system really?  It is content, stored in some kind of database, accessed via a front end.  That is exactly what WordPress is.

Not only that it’s free, well supported, and easy to use.

The problem with WordPress is that it’s a blog.  It looks like a blog, and while we want to include a blog, we want the whole thing to look like a web site, not a blog.

We want our blog to blend in with the site, so if we decided to go the HTML top level with WordPress sitting beneath it route we would have two sets of style sheets—exactly the same—to manage.  Not to mention two different ways of inputting the data.

We would have to customise the layout extensively if we used it.  Neither of us know PHP, but we’re both okay with HTML and CSS.  I think we can manage the PHP component, with a little help from W3Schools and the WordPress documentation.

We decided on the single solution.  A standalone WordPress website, with customised pages to look like a blog.

Because, let’s face it, if you can get around the design issues, WordPress has to be one of the best, cheapest content management systems around.