There has been a lot of positive resonses from the Visio template for SharePoint that Ferry has created for us. L and C have put some questionmarks on the use of this. One of the reasons is that if you want to communicate about how SharePoint will look like to a customer, it is very easy to create a site in SharePoint realtime, and show the actual site itself. Or if that isn’t possible, sketching it would be a good alternative.
They are right about that, it is very easy to give the customer an impression of the site by just demo it. There is however a difference in demo-ing/sketching and designing functionally. The main goals for us to design a SharePoint site this way are:
- It is a contract between the customer and Tam Tam how we will build the site. And I don’t mean the lists really, but it is very usefull for things like custom webparts and their way of working and visualising the flow. Everything in the template can be made clickable, and the customer can click through its future solution.
- Second reason is for developers to get a real impression on how to build those custom webparts. What should it do? How should the interface look like? What is to be expected when clicking on this or that button? Also this is a contract to the developers, is it build how it is meant to build? Visio can give a good anhancement in visualize the solution in a bigger picture.
Of course, when implementing a SharePoint site bases on standard lists and webparts only, it could be not that usefull. But in most cases (we’ve done several project this way now), it is a huge difference. For the customer and for the project team.