How We Did It: ShowMe for SharePoint 2010
Not surprisingly, one of the most frequent requests from SharePoint customers is for information worker training and more comprehensive help for end users. This issue cuts across the rich, diverse, and powerful capabilities of SharePoint; it applies regardless of whether information workers use the platform for collaboration, insights, search, content publishing, community building, or assembling their own composite solutions. Given the successful release of SharePoint 2010, with its completely new user interfaces and its impressive array of new features, almost every organization that implements SharePoint will encounter this request for more comprehensive help and training. At Point8020 Limited, we have worked with the SharePoint team at Microsoft for many years to create official training courses, videos, evaluation guides, and other educational material. It seemed only natural, then, for us to provide an answer to this most common of requests from SharePoint customers and partners.
Some might say we got carried away, seeing that we took this issue to the extreme and built a rich, engaging, video-based solution that provides on-demand, ‘how-to’ videos to SharePoint users. We’re glad we did though, as we ended up integrating our solution right into the SharePoint user interface where it is most useful!
Our solution is called ShowMe for SharePoint 2010, and I’d like to take this opportunity to describe the benefits of our solution and also to describe how we developed it.
Overcoming the biggest barriers to returns on investment in SharePoint 2010
Organizations can be somewhat reluctant to roll out SharePoint 2010, even though they know that the new platform can introduce many efficiencies into how their employees work. The problem lies not with what SharePoint 2010 is capable of, but rather with the daunting task of ensuring that your information workers can adapt to some of the new ways of working.
To paraphrase one of the most important questions: ‘What’s the point of a new, improved version of SharePoint if our employees don’t know how to use it?’
Perhaps an even trickier concern is ‘We know that SharePoint 2010 will eventually introduce new efficiencies, but won’t our current productivity levels diminish while everyone gets up to speed?’
In short, you want to know that what you spend on deploying SharePoint 2010 will quickly show a return on investment and increased business value for your organization. This applies whether you are implementing an upgrade from WSS 3.0/MOSS 2007 or whether this is your first time deploying SharePoint. And you know that the biggest, most pervasive barrier to such deployments is adoption of the new platform by your information workers.
That’s exactly what ShowMe for SharePoint 2010 provides: It helps your users get up to speed in an incredibly short time.
Why users need help with SharePoint 2010
One of the most common reasons why your users need help and training in using SharePoint 2010 is that it provides a completely new user interface. So much so that even actions with which your users are familiar from previous versions are now performed in new ways. Providing help and training ensures that current productivity levels for upgrade scenarios do not diminish.
Another reason why your users need help and training is that SharePoint 2010 provides much more efficient ways of working, compared to previous versions of the platform. And, of course, you want your users to start working more efficiently, otherwise why upgrade? So showing them quickly how to achieve specific tasks efficiently must be one your goals.
Taking these concepts further, SharePoint 2010 provides completely new capabilities with which even the most experienced of your users will initially be unfamiliar. You need to raise awareness of these new capabilities and show your information workers how to use them, or the huge value that your organization can derive from SharePoint 2010 will remain unrealized.
What is our solution?
The main driver for our efforts was to develop a solution that provides video-based, on-demand help that can show information workers how to perform many tasks in SharePoint 2010. In fact, specific words in what I’ve just stated are key:
§ Video-based. Our approach has always been that the best way to teach a complex product is to break it down into bite-size chunks and show people how that specific bit can be used. Our solution includes 101 videos, all of which are focused on one specific task and almost all of which are less than two minutes long. (Many are less than one minute in length!) In brief, our videos are consumable and useful and don’t take valuable time away from the user performing their tasks!
§ On-demand. We provide help and training to users when and where they need it. Our solution is integrated into the SharePoint user interface, so information workers can get help and learn while actually performing the tasks they need to fulfil their role in your organization.
§ In SharePoint. The key with integration into the SharePoint user interface is to make use of the amazing new (and not-so-new) features of SharePoint to deliver our solutions. For example, we provide access to our solution from the standard Site Actions menu, from the new context-sensitive ribbon, and through search results.
What does the solution look like?
The following screenshots show the key integration points of ShowMe for SharePoint 2010 with the new user interface of SharePoint.
Figure 1 shows how our solution adds a context-sensitive ribbon tab called ‘ShowMe’. This ribbon tab appears when users need it, in 50 different contexts. You can see the controls on the ribbon tab - each control leads to multiple videos in that specific category.
Figure 1. The ShowMe for SharePoint 2010 Ribbon Tab
Figure 2 shows the engaging Silverlight-based help and training system that appears when a user clicks a control on the ribbon. Users can watch videos right here. They can also navigate through the other categories, all of which is provided in an iTunes-style, engaging user interface. (Well, we had to make it look good, didn’t we?)
Figure 1. The ShowMe for SharePoint 2010 User Experience.
There are 101 short, bite-size videos that your users can learn from. We have assessed the core tasks that are undertaken by users and ensured that ShowMe for SharePoint 2010 covers those core tasks. We will be creating even more videos over the next few months and these will become available to our customers and partners free of charge! For the current list of videos, refer to our FAQ. (This FAQ topic has a link to the list of videos that we keep up to date.)
Figure 3 shows how the solution is accessible through the Site Actions menu. This ensures that regardless of context, the solution is ‘always available’ to your users.
Figure 3. The ShowMe for SharePoint 2010 Site Actions Menu.
One other integration point is extremely important: Search! Your information workers use the built-in search features as part of their daily tasks, so we ensured that the words spoken in our videos are indexed and that relevant videos appear in normal search results. This is a ‘first’ for SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Search in the entire world!
To see all of these features in action, you can view our demo.
How did we build it?
The key development efforts for our solution were:
§ Building a rich, engaging user interface. More development effort was required for this part of our solution than for the rest of the product put together, but Silverlight proved to be the ideal development platform. We made extensive use of the new SharePoint 2010 Client Object Model for Silverlight which now makes building rich interactive applications on SharePoint a reality. In short, Silverlight provides the slick user interface components (such as navigation and being able to play videos) while SharePoint provides storage for the videos, images and configuration files. The client object model bridges the gap between these two different environments, so we are eternally grateful to the SharePoint team for providing this key bridging technology! Without the client object model, our development would have taken much more time and effort.
§ Integration with the ribbon and Site Actions menu. The good news is that this bit turned out to be relatively easy. We created ribbon controls by using what’s called the ‘declarative’ model. Truth be told, this took some getting used to, but the documentation for ribbon control development is getting better and better as time goes by!
§ Integration with the SharePoint client-side dialog platform. As you can see from the screenshots, our solution is typically displayed in dialogs that are similar to the built-in ones provided by SharePoint. This development was pretty straightforward and turned out to be one of the joys of SharePoint user interface development. Who knew it could be so easy? Well, we did as it happens, because we wrote the official developer Getting Started course for Microsoft! You can learn more about dialog development in Module 10 of the Getting Started course.
Next Steps:
For more information about ShowMe for SharePoint, you can refer to the FAQ page.
If you want to evaluate and play with ShowMe for SharePoint 2010, you can download the fully-featured evaluation version.
If you are a Microsoft Partner and want to learn how you can use our learning solutions to drive SharePoint adoption and create business value for you and your customers, you can refer to our partner program.
If you want more information or insight into our learning solutions, feel free to contact us!
About the Blogger
Martin Harwar is Chief Solution Architect for Point8020 Limited. He develops content for the SharePoint team at Microsoft as well as developing learning solutions based on Silverlight and SharePoint.
