SharePoint 2010 for Project Management, 2nd Edition

Customizing the PMIS

Once you have created your SharePoint 2010 site, the next step is to customize the PMIS. Customization can be done in four key areas:

Branding

It is important to determine whether you have to apply corporate branding standards to your PMIS. You will have to check with IT/IS to see if there are any custom site templates or themes that have your corporate colors and logo. These custom templates or themes must be developed by somebody who is familiar with tools such as SharePoint Designer or, in some cases, Visual Studio .NET.

In a project environment, a consistent look and feel throughout various projects will minimize your stakeholders’ learning curve as they start using the PMIS. Wouldn’t it be frustrating to have a PMIS that looks different every time you begin a new project within your organization?

Usability

Two things come to mind when we look at site usability:

• Site navigation: In SharePoint 2010, three mechanisms are used for site navigation: breadcrumb navigation, the top link bar, and the Quick Launch (see Figure 2-13).

  

  Figure 2-13. Site navigation options

  Breadcrumb navigation is used to navigate between top-level sites and subsites. Typically, when you initially create a site, SharePoint 2010 enables the top link bar and Quick Launch, and it is up to you to customize and update them. By default, the top link bar and Quick Launch are prepopulated with links to ...