I was finally able to upload the final draft of our new intranet style guide for intranet authors yesterday - after which I took great pleasure in picking up my pen and crossing that off my task list.
Writing the style guide was a task I'd been struggling with. As the Intranet Manager moving from FrontPage to SharePoint 2010, I also have a huge learning journey ahead of me just as our authors do. It's hard to direct everyone else on this level of governance when you don't quite understand the product yourself in an organisation that has limited SharePoint knowledge (certainly from an intranet management perspective) and when you are a team of one.
I spent some time with third party consultants and treated my workshops with them a bit like a journalist would with a source. I asked lots of really basic questions and posed scenarios and 'what ifs?' to not only find the answers I was looking for, but to get them rephrased back to me in plain English and put the concepts of SharePoint back into everyday terms.
I think sometimes people can get too caught up in the 'SharePoint' lingo ... lists, libraries, views, columns, inheritance ... when really these things just mean a list of information, a folder, sorting a folder, metadata, cascading permission levels.
There were lots of topics and information in the style guide that of course remains unchanged; regardless of the technology you've chosen. But I really struggled with the stuff I didn't understand. It was a great exercise for me as the intranet manager to get my head around some of the not so basic decisions we had to make early on to lead our authors to produce a consistent and usable site. I'll revisit the style guide at the end of the project to make changes and refine it, before getting it nicely designed and published. I'm also considering making a collaborative online learning centre/how to wiki to support it where perhaps the intranet manager, site owners and super authors can contribute.
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