Can I have a BBC and iGoogle style homepage for my SharePoint site?

iGoogle and the BBC allows its users to customise their home page through drag and drop widgets, but doesn't SharePoint do this?

iGoogle and the BBC, and others, have vastly improved the user experience for their users by allowing them to customise their pages by dragging and dropping widgets from a pre selected list.

Available widgets are selected on page and are smoothly dragged to the desired location. Online edits allow each widget to be sized and configured.

This technique is simple in principal and extremely effective because the user has a page tailored to their exact needs and desires and moreover they don't need training to learn how to customise their information because of the intuitive interface. It is the current big thing in website personalisation as the user get to feel the site they're using is really their own, thus increasing the time spent on site and its overall uptake and stickiness.

But doesn't SharePoint support all this? Well in principal it does. In fact it was one of the first products to do so.

Let's consider a SharePoint page. A suitably privileged user can select a menu to put a page into edit mode, they can add web parts and configure them:

There are some challenges to overcome however:

• The SharePoint interface is designed for business users and is therefore more formal in its user interface, the screens to add and configure web parts are much more technical than the iGoogle / BBC equivalents.
• The editing process involves multiple web pages and is not as smooth and slick as the other interfaces [within SharePoint].
• Only users with content editing rights can change a page in SharePoint and when a change is made these changes affect all users of the site. Note that there are exceptions to this such as each user's personal My Site.

So, yes, SharePoint has the logical pieces, but in practice the out-of-the-box site templates have a more corporate focus rather than a user focus.

Is it, therefore, possible to build a page template for SharePoint that supports iGoogle / BBC style user editing of the home page?

The answer is a definite yes, and what is more Ballard Chalmers have done it:

• A new site template and page template is developed that has a slick JavaScript based user interface just like iGoogle.
• When a content editor edits the page they determine the maximum set of web parts and their default positions and sizes for everyone.
• When a user sees the page they position the web parts where they want and hide the ones they don't want and SharePoint remembers this for them.

The result is the usability of iGoogle and BBC with the business power of SharePoint. What a combination!

If you would like to know more about how we can achieve this for your SharePoint site please contact Andrew Chalmers on andrew.chalmers@ballardchalmers.com or call 01342 410223.

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