Matthew Knott

I've been thinking a lot recently about our development approach with Swansea Edunet, and the various pro's and con's of this approach, and wondering what the alternatives could have been.

It's not often I start a blog post and right from the outset, wonder whether there is any point in writing it. Some might say it's something I should've realised on 90% of my posts but either way, I'll press ahead for my own satisfaction if nothing else.

With Swansea Edunet, our SharePoint based learning platform, we're approaching a point where our feature set will stop growing from a distinct application perspective. It's not so much a saturation point as much as we're meeting all our primary objectives, with a few big ones still outstanding.

I've visualised our approach as a pyramid, with the horizontal axis being features, and the vertical axis being quality / functionality / integration. The vertical axis is a mixed bag because many of the features are missing one or more of these qualities in any great quantity, and here's why. When we started out just over 2 years ago, we had extremely lose objectives, so between us as a team, we formed a clear plan, a high level plan but it was clear none the less. We knew we had to use SharePoint as we were delivering the Sims Learning Gateway (SLG) to our schools, but we didn't want the portal to be just a gateway to sims data.

When we started, SLG was at the back of our minds, as we looked to providing the functionality that teachers, students and parents would want. Early on we delivered some great features, Moodle integration, personal drive access, and email integration. Then we looked at other features we wanted to provide, News and Content Management for public facing school pages. Because we wanted to keep a strict governance model in effect, but provide a very simple ad straight forward way to create news and content pages, we decided not to opt for the standard SharePoint way of doing things, and created bespoke solutions to do both. Our news and CMS administration tools provided a very visual but intuitive interface into these two potentially confusing systems that teachers and support staff have really embraced, and when we show them the SharePoint way of achieving these two objectives, they're very glad we created them. But whilst they do a good job of meeting needs, due to time constraints they don't have the full set of features they could have, and that I feel the users deserve. Likewise with our bespoke forum system, social bookmarking application and document library views, they just feel underdeveloped to me (as a developer I realise I think these tools have flaws whereas the average user may love them as-is for their simplicity).

Anyway, this is where our vertical axis becomes substantiated, but as time progresses, that vertical axis will increase because we can now look at what we've achieved and be critical:

• What works and what doesn't?
• Where can we better integrate systems?
• How can we improve the user experience?
• How can we improve user efficiency?
• How can we make the experience more relevant to the user?
• How can we empower the user more?

Governance Model

The last point, empowering the user, may surprise people familiar with SharePoint learning platforms, because of the way SharePoint works that makes delegation so simple. Let me explain our governance model. We are essentially a team of two managing, developing and supporting the portal. Our customers are 15 secondaries and 90+ primary schools, as well as a handful of other education dept. related teams. That means we are effectively two people directly supporting 35000+ users, and as we start to roll out our parental access, that figure goes up again. Because potentially we could be bogged down day in day out with support calls we've been very strict on the areas of Swansea Edunet that we let the schools control. Our model for a school site collection is for a public facing site to sit at the top level, with Teacher, Student, Parent and Governor portals sitting beneath that.

All school sites look the same as far as colour scheme go, with the only real customisation to the site design being the school logo in the header, and school relevant welcome image on rotation. We then offer the school the CMS I've mentioned before for managing public facing content such as pages, events, image galleries, and twitter integration amongst other things. The secure portals that site beneath the public facing area are highly restricted, with features being largely generic across all schools. The schools often request the ability to create their own designs but it's not something we plan to loosen our grip on, simply because of our desire to keep the content readable and in a common format across pages, and to reduce presentation issues. Although some schools might be okay, the bulk do not appreciate many modern design concerns such as cross-browser functionality, accessibility, and information architecture, and as professionals it's something that makes sense we keep in-house so to speak.

Some emerging technologies such as our Google Apps SSO are creating a support burden under some circumstances, so that is one of a number of things we're looking at how we can devolve the power to the user or an administrator so that we can free ourselves of one more category of support. Empowerment is a double edged sword though because you are trusting the user with a portion of functionality, which, as any developer will know, will create it's own support calls, and so we have to look at it with a view to finding the balance between what helps the user and what helps us.

Other Approaches

While developing our learning platform, we've seen how other authorities have approached the same challenge. Some have experienced death by planning, some have relied heavily on 3rd party development.

My original comparison was features v's quality over time, but there are a number of other comparisons we can make.

• Planning versus Production over time
• Functionality versus Content
• Integration versus Features

Planning versus production is an interesting one because we planned quite well before producing anything, but other authorities have done nothing but planning, and produced nothing over a period of years! Our initial plans centred around the SharePoint site infrastructure, how the sites fit together, what sites would be there, and who could access what. 2 years on from that plan and we're still fitting into it perfectly, and it's served us well. But where we may have differed from others is that if we knew we wanted a forum in the structure, we noted that, but didn't plan the forum until we actually reached the point where we were ready to develop it, this has kept us free of details and changing requirements.

Functionality versus content is another interesting comparison, as we have a relatively small amount of content, however the infrastructure we put in place is supporting a steady growth in user created content. I feel we have a general lack of strategy in relation to content management, leaving it generally up to the users and I'm concerned that going forward, we'll have to review how users access this information, but at the moment it's working well. Other authorities have a mass of content, but little functionality out side of this and I wonder which model leads for the best user experience.

I've mentioned integration versus features because not all authorities have a dedicated developer. In this scenario they buy in webparts and solutions from a variety of 3rd party developers. This means they can offer a great deal of functionality, but only by sacrificing integration. These webparts will often look and work differently to one another, putting a burden on the user to adjust to different UX designs.

Conclusion

I still don't really know what the point of this post was beyond explaining how we've chosen to do things but maybe that in itself could be useful to someone.