Read all about: SharePoint Designer 2007
Effective patient care relies heavily on teamwork across departmental boundaries – the sort of teamwork that Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007 can help to deliver. It helps employees create and manage their own community websites; but for the less technically minded, adding content and customising these sites can still be a daunting task.
To help them, Microsoft has developed SharePoint Designer 2007 and made it available to download free. A new book by Penelope Coventry explains how to use this powerful tool. She tells Paul Curran how it can help NHS workers create and customise compelling websites.
The words on the box say that SharePoint helps information workers make more accurate and timely decisions by providing one integrated place where they can collaborate efficiently with their peers and quickly find useful resources, such as experts and reference material.
“Thanks to SharePoint, busy staff need go to only one place to find everything they need to do their job; through blogs, wikis, or personal ‘MySites’.”
Penelope Coventry, author of Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 Step by Step, says that’s a pretty accurate description and one that fits most NHS organisations like a glove.
“SharePoint Server’s content management, business intelligence and collaboration tools make it ideal for healthcare trusts, where lives so often depend on people finding and sharing information efficiently,” she says.
“It allows health workers to create community web portals - or intranets - where they can save and retrieve documents securely from anywhere via a standard web browser or mobile device. In an emergency or for a second opinion, a nurse might be able to quickly locate doctors and even know immediately who is online.
“Thanks to SharePoint, busy clinicians and medical staff need go to only one place to find everything they need to do their job; through blogs, wikis, or personal ‘MySites’. It means teams can work together more effectively.” SharePoint also works seamlessly with the Office software that many people have used for years.
So, where does SharePoint Designer come in?
Yet not everybody has the natural ability to work with software, particularly such a feature-rich program as SharePoint Server. “Some need a guiding hand, which is where SharePoint Designer 2007 - a direct descendant of the FrontPage web authoring tool - comes into play,” says Ms Coventry.
“By combining the design and customisation features of SharePoint Designer with the collaboration features of SharePoint Server, non-technical staff can easily create and update a SharePoint site to help them work more effectively.
“The book helps non-technical users get to grips with customising SharePoint sites and applications in easy stages, offering helpful hints and trouble-shooting tips.”
“It gives them powerful tools to produce attractive web pages, bring data together from a wide variety of sources into interactive web pages, and allowing them to build bespoke applications.
“SharePoint Designer renders each page so that what you see is what you get without getting your hands dirty with code. Of course, for those who get the shakes if they can’t get at the code, you can still hand-code if you want to. So, whilst experienced users will no doubt appreciate its many advanced functions, you don’t require a particularly technical background to use it.”
Beware the ‘webmaster bottleneck’
Ms Coventry says that part of the SharePoint ethos is to allow users to carry out tasks that could only be achieved in the past by the webmaster, web hosting company or skilled members of the IT department.
She says this often led to long delays in updating content and became known as the ‘webmaster bottleneck’ - where intranet sites quickly become dated and visitor numbers dwindled as a consequence.
“The purpose of SharePoint is to let people put data on their website by themselves using a browser. It’s about giving ownership of the data back to the user,” she says.
“Typically, you can use a browser to achieve 75 per cent of the changes you need to make to a SharePoint site – the pages then create themselves dynamically based on that data. SharePoint Designer is there to augment the methods exposed using the browser, and between the two, an experienced user should be able to put together highly functional intranet sites.”
A great tool for conditional formatting and prototyping
SharePoint Designer not only allows you to uncover data that’s held within SharePoint, but also within other websites, systems and databases. Ms Coventry says users can format this data for easy presentation using a Data View Web Part – often described as the Swiss Army knife of web parts.
“This lets you create conditional formatting - as you might in Excel - so you can use dashboards, for example, to track key performance indicators (KPIs), use balanced scorecards, and spot immediately when thresholds have been exceeded.
“By applying a set of rules, the Data View Web Part automatically colours or formats the data how you want it - each time it’s updated.” SharePoint Designer is also a great tool for prototyping knowledge management applications quickly.
“Using a combination of the browser and SharePoint Developer, an experienced user can sit with a project team and work out precisely what they need for a particular program on a ‘trial and error’ basis,” Ms Coventry says. “And even if they don’t quite complete the work, they’re usually more than half way there by the time they need to call in a developer.”
An invaluable guide
SharePoint Designer 2007 Step by Step covers many of these topics in an easy to follow format. As its title suggests, the book helps non-technical users get to grips with customising SharePoint sites and applications in easy stages, offering helpful hints and trouble-shooting tips.
Readers can choose the lessons they need specifically or work from cover to cover. The guide also includes an easy-search companion CD with hands-on practice files, a complete eBook, and other useful learning materials.
“My aim was to teach people how to create Web pages complete with cascading style sheets, lists, libraries, and customised Web parts,” says Ms Coventry. “It’s meant to help them make their sites really work for them by adding useful data sources, such as databases, XML data and Web services, and RSS feeds. Readers will learn how to create workflows and applications with custom forms, templates, and dashboards to enhance their team's productivity.”
Tapping into collective knowledge
In addition to helping information workers manage web content and share information across trust boundaries, SharePoint Server is ultimately about empowering them to make more informed decisions.
“The purpose of SharePoint Designer is to help a trust’s non-technical users create solutions for online communities that mirror its structure and the groups of staff within it, whether that’s nurses or radiologists,” says Ms Coventry.
“As well as making it easier for these groups to access latest versions of guidelines and documents, SharePoint allows trusts to tap into their collective knowledge. For NHS organisations that typically employ lots of highly skilled and specialised individuals, it provides a means for others to benefit from that expertise.”
Box: Penelope Coventry is the author of SharePoint Designer 2007 Step by Step, as well as being co-author of several other SharePoint books by Microsoft Press. These include Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Step by Step, which helps users learn about using SharePoint with the browser. The two books go hand in hand and can be purchased separately or as a boxed set.
Paul Curran is a writer, journalist and commentator on business and technology issues. In a career spanning 25 years, he has acted as a media consultant to many pan-European, American and Asian companies in the UK and Europe.
Useful links
NHS Bookstore homepage (50% discount on Microsoft Press books.)
Read more about this book in the NHS bookstore (you must be signed in to reach this link)
Sharepoint Designer download