End Users and SharePoint Views: Frenemies Forever? Help make them BFFs!

In a strange coincidence, I heard the same end user frustration expressed at two different clients this week.  One variation of the complaint: “I just don’t get it – how come when I update the view it doesn’t show up on the home page?”  The other: “Why don’t may Announcements expire?” The solutions are pretty simple (see below), but the root cause is my concern: turning over full control privileges without providing sufficient training.

SharePoint is a great tool to empower end users to develop and maintain their own IT solutions, but even in simple collaboration scenarios, this can’t be done effectively without at least some investment in training – both “how to” and best practices.  Organizations that don’t make this investment will have users who just “get by” and if they use the tool, use it reluctantly or at worst, use it sub-optimally and end up wasting time and retreating back to other methods for collaborating – e-mail and file shares (oh no!).

If you are planning a new SharePoint deployment for any sized organization where non-IT people will be empowered to design, create, or modify sites, be sure to include end user training in your deployment plan, especially focused on any user who will have design privileges on a site.  If you want these users to be friends with SharePoint, you need to empower them with the knowledge to ensure that their solutions are successful.  Even if you deploy each new site with a well-designed template, users still need to understand what they should and should not do – even if they have the power to do it.  I call this training in the “Spiderman guiding principle” and I often play a sound clip from the first Spiderman movie when I train users – the scene where Uncle Ben (Cliff Robertson) tells Peter Parker/Spiderman (Toby Maguire), “With great power comes great responsibility.”

As you continuously evolve your solution, I recommend setting up a community of practice (or at least a “shared learning” team site) for your power users and keep on top of what they are doing on their sites. If one department or team sees what another is doing and then re-uses their poorly designed template, you’ve accomplished one good thing – re-use, along with one very bad thing – propagation of BAD practices, not best practices.  I saw some of this during this past week and it just makes me sad because good training up front could have easily prevented this “bad practice replication.”

If you have done training and users are still making simple design errors, consider publishing a weekly “tips and tricks” blog post and include this advice to address the two issues I saw in two different places this week:

• “I changed the view but it didn’t update the home page.”  - Views in the web part and views in the list are “disconnected” the minute you “attach” the view to the web part the first time.  As a best practice, use the barely visible “Edit the current view” link in the Modify Shared Web part task pane to tailor web part views.  Try to avoid creating a “home page view” in your list or library: edit the view in the web part itself, even if you start with a view you created in the list or library.  One benefit to using this approach is that if you save your site as a template to re-use on another site, the web part view you created is shared as part of the template and doesn’t have to be re-created or “re-attached” to a new web part.

• “How come my announcements don’t expire even if I set up an expiration date?” – I’m not crazy about the “out of the box” web part view for the Announcements list (it takes up too much screen real estate) – and apparently, many other SharePoint users agree.  While the out of the box view recognizes the Expires date in the Announcement, if you decide to create your own view to show Announcements, you will have to write your own filter to make sure that you “expire” announcements correctly.  Since the “order of operations” syntax in SharePoint is not always consistent with what a developer would expect, it’s worth making sure users know how to recognize and act on an expiration date in a view.  Most users get this wrong, sometimes even if they have had training so this is a good “tip” to share.

1. To create a custom view of Announcements, create a view in the standard Announcements view area.  (Oops, already an exception to my previous statement. That's OK, we'll delete it later.) Call it Summary Announcements and choose the fields you want to display.  I usually only show Title and Modified.
2. Sort by Modified date, in descending order (most recent first).
3. Create two Filter statements in this order:  First, filter where Expires is equal to [leave the next field blank].  Second, select the OR button and create a second filter where Expires is greater than or equal to [Today].
4. Set an Item Limit to batches of 3 to 5 or another small number so you only show the three to five most recently modified announcements.
5. After the view is created, be sure to "attach" it to the Announcements web part by
   selecting the view in the web part.
6. Then, go back into the Announcements list and delete the Summary Announcements view since you no longer need it in the list itself - you only needed it to make it easier to create the view for the web part.

• Microsoft
• SharePoint
• SharePoint best practices
• SharePoint views
• training