User Support in MOSS 2007

Abstract: The purpose of this report is to present the findings from the thesis work performed at Qurius Sweden (former Ibitec). The goal was to evaluate how usable Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007) was in general and how usable two portal solutions created for MOSS 2007 were in particular. The goal also consisted ofevaluating how SharePoint could be improved in terms of usability and accessibility. The last part of the thesis work was to create a dynamic help tool, from where application specific help could be created.The usability was evaluated with a variant of usability engineering. Not all of the original method could be used because the products analyzed were already finished. The results from the analysis show that MOSS 2007 is quite usable, especially when it comes to document handling. It is also possible to create web pages and sites with ease. MOSS 2007 lacks in usability when it comes to presenting information to the user regarding what is going on in the system and. The system can also be quite complex and much to grasp for an end user. Solutions created in MOSS 2007 follows closely the usability of MOSS 2007 but they can be made very usable if only certain aspects are considered. Example of improvements could be the placement of the help system, clearer error messages and an overlook of managing user rights.The dynamic help tool was created in the programming language C# and based on the .NET platform. The implementation is a so-called Web Part that can easily be inserted on a page in MOSS 2007. The help tool uses the built in help system in MOSS 2007 for editing present help files and for adding new files to it. The help tool has a very minimalistic design and the focus was on the tasks it should be performing rather than a nice-looking interface. To ensure usability for the help tool, future work should be done, testing the product with real users and apply other usability methods to improve the help tool. As of now, no usability methods have been used while developing the help tool, nor have any tests with real users been performed. This is to be considered as future work.As a conclusion, both MOSS 2007 and the solutions created for it can be said to have a certain degree of usability shown from the evaluations. Improvements can be done, and should be, in order to increase the users’ experience. With the help tool, it is now possible to create solution specific help for a project intended for MOSS 2007.