Search Done Right

I was supposed to go to the SharePoint conference but I did not go. I caught the flu. With a 104 fever, shivering under 2 shirts, 3 sweaters and 4 covers, I decided that spreading my germs in Vegas (and collecting some more) was not worth the trip.

Fortunately for me, Microsoft set up a comprehensive conference site with all the sessions, downloadable presentations and videos. It is almost better than being there (I sure hope I can’t get a virus from it). The cherry on the cake is that the site is built on SharePoint 2010 offering a firsthand user experience.

Microsoft needs to be commended for demonstrating SharePoint live during many of the session (using their internally deployed system). That led to some interesting Hmm Hmm moments but it takes some guts to demonstrate a live beta during the CEO keynote. As we all know, presentations are when bugs always like to creep up.

The conference site on the other hand is not supposed to be a demo and one could reasonably expect a usable system. While its content is comprehensive and valuable, the user experience on the site itself is pretty buggy, unusual and at times maddening.

The sign-in process

For the life of me, I could not figure out how the sign-in worked. I tried to get other people colleagues to access the site and had to send them 10 different links/processes before getting it to work. The site uses a complex combination of customer number, Live ID, cookies, redirection, etc. Has SharePoint heard of username and password?

Steve Ballmer was adamant during his keynote that SharePoint was now ready for the internet prime time. Despite being designed originally for Intranets, according to him companies can now design complex and user friendly websites based on SharePoint. The user friendly part has never been the forte of Microsoft and of Intranet applications… now try to combine both…

Silverlight video, aka, “if it works, why not break it!”

Flash videos are ubiquitous, we are all used to them and they work well. Until Microsoft decided that they were not good enough and introduced its own Silverlight replacement. Not only does Silverlight require installing an add-on but the user experience is plain awful. As an example, the cursor is so tiny you can barely grab it and it seems to have a life of its own making. It is almost impossible to skip through a video.

Search

The site provides a decent calendar view of the sessions, some nice filters + a search box. Enter a keyword, press enter, the browser sits idling for 10 seconds and goes back to the same page. No search results. I tried it again and again, thinking someone would notice and fix it but no. It remained that way.

Just before writing this article I finally noticed an unconventional icon next to the search box. You need to press it for things to happen. But what happens then is a little underwhelming. A long list of results. The calendar is gone. The facets/filters are gone (so much for making 2010 the release where SharePoint will get faceting) and the content of the presentation is not searchable, just the meta-data.

There is a common thread to all these issues. Microsoft tries to be the provider of choice for everything for everyone. It does not matter if there is already a good solution for something. It does not matter if what Microsoft offers is inferior, poorly adapted or user unfriendly. What matters to Microsoft is that it’s done by Microsoft.

I don’t mean to imply that SharePoint is a bad product—in fact, we are planning to deploy it internally for our marketing department—but that by trying to do everything Microsoft once again takes the risk of doing it all poorly.

Next week, I’ll talk about what wasn’t talked about at SharePoint 2010.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 30th, 2009 at 9:33 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.