The gap called "included paths"
"How do I add two or more documents as an attachement to an email from Outlook" a user asked me.
We're of course talking a pure Sharepoint document management solution, and of course we've locked down every single Z-drive factor (they've got no disks at all) in the network to force all content into the portal.
"Well, uhm..." I responded, whilst scanning my brain, rss feeds, googling, and at the same time opening Outlook to show her how it's done.
"You simply write the url to the portal in the File Open dialog and browse to the files you want to attach, or you can even use that portal link they've made for you in My Places in Office". I was quite pleased with the quick response that actually came from my brain.
"Sounds great!" she replied. "And that will work for document libraries in my project teamsite aswell? You see, I need to send a couple of project documents for QA".
Hammering the File Open dialog in Office with great speed I found no way to navigate to any teamsite on the portalserver. Experimenting with urls in the filename field, however, proved successful. "Oh, well then you have to write http://portal/projects/project123, hit enter and then locate your document library". I lost her on the included path part, on [projectsites].
"Why can't I get a list of those project sites?" The followup was not unexpected. "I'll get back to you on that one.."
Enough storytelling.
There is definately a gap in the navigation of Windows Sharepoint Services sites. The portal areas has a rather nice UI from Office, but there is no way to click into the actual WSS sites. Users expect to be able to get to them through the site directory area.
Why is this important? Weren't supposed to move away from navigating hierarchies? When using network drives and fileshares, experienced users often write complete complex paths like K:\documents\users\me\project123\letters\january\mydoc.doc to find a document, and they memorize it by clicking the path. Comparing this to simply writing http://portal/projects/project123 shows an actual improvement, but the point is that users need to be able to navigate the first few times and then they type the paths directly.
Even better if they could have search capabilities from the File Open (or save) dialogs, but I guess thats further ahead.
Anyone found creative approaches to locating WSS sites in a Sharepoint portal? Users really need to add more than one document as attachements in word at a time.