SharePoint: ChooseChicago
December 18, 2008
I scanned the MSDN Web log postings and saw this headline: “SharePoint Web Sites in Government.” My first reaction was that the author Jamesbr had compiled a list of public facing Web sites running on Microsoft’s fascinating SharePoint content management, collaboration, search, and Swiss Army Knife software. No joy. Mr. Jamesbr pointed to another person’s list which was a trifle thin. You can check out this official WSS tally here. Don’t let the WSS fool you. The sites are SharePoint, and there are 432 of them as of December 16, 2008. I navigated to the featured site, ChooseChicago.com. My broadband connection was having a bad hair day. It took 10 seconds for the base page to render and I had to hit the escape key after 30 seconds to stop the page from trying to locate a missing resource. Sigh. Because this was a featured site that impressed Jamesbr, I did some exploring. First, I navigated to the ChooseChicago.com site and saw this on December 16, 2008:
The search box is located at the top right hand corner of the page and also at the bottom right hand corner. But the search system was a tad sluggish. After entering my query “Chinese”, the system cranked for 20 seconds before returning the results list:
I clicked on the companies tab. Here’s what the system displayed:
According to ChooseChicago.com there were five companies that matched the key word Chinese. Yahoo Local delivered a list of 598 companies here. In the ChooseChicago.com list, I noticed that two companies seemed to be Chinese. However, the other three were not companies and did not seem to be Chinese. the link to the Chinatown Chamber of Commerce is an association, but I can see how an indexing system–even one as sophisticated as SharePoint’s–can be confused. The stem “Chine” is in the name of the group. The other two of the five hits puzzled me, Lizzadro Museum of Lapidary Art. There were two entries, bringing the total to four hits. The outfit seemed to be a museum or art gallery, not a company and not obviously Chinese. Stepping back, I wondered how there can be only two Chinese companies in Chicago. I did a bit of sleuthing and learned that in 2006 an effort began to attract Chinese investments and business to Chicago. Sponsors of the initiative include various governmental entities and a number of Chinese banks. You can read this report here. Chicago opened a development office in Shanghai in 2007. I concluded that ChooseChicago.com’s indexing was not too useful.
I learned some good things about SharePoint and some not so good things. First, the SharePoint implementation can replicate the busy interfaces that many designers find necessary. The system can rotate images, insert advertisements, and provide hot links to features such as “My Notebook”. I don’t think I would visit this site enough times to require a notebook. I am an old goose and have a habit of writing key information on old fashioned notecards with a–gasp–pencil.
The not so good things I learned is that the system was sluggish. It was usable, but I grew tired of waiting for the innards to digest my instructions and then spit out my info packet. It was clear to me that the search system needs quite a bit of love and care. For a city index, the notion that Yahoo does a better job than a local search system baffles me. Local knowledge should translate to more useful information, not less. I didn’t compare ChooseChicago.com to Google because I wanted to give the site a fighting chance. Yahoo knocked out ChooseChicago.com within one second of the first round.
When I have the time and the motivation, I think I might click thorough the WSS list. For now, ChooseChicago.com has exhausted me. One final thought: I learned what Jamesbr thinks is really cool. I don’t share his aesthetic judgment.
Stephen Arnold, December 17, 2008
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