We love simplicity, it’s even in our logo. But we looked at our new extranet, and realised we’d somehow got it wrong. As a new user, getting to the doc library took a massive 6 steps, including the dreaded re-enter your password screen (how annoying is it to enter a password, and then be asked to enter it again!)

As we added things, like better security and profiles,  we just forgot to take things away.

So we did a cull, and got it down to 3 steps for new users to get straight to documents.

To do this we added a ‘site contents’ dashlet, which throws the document library onto the front page of the site, and then cleaned up the login process, making it 1 click to get in.

What did we lose? Well, less people now take the time to fill in their profile, and add a picture, which is a real shame. I think we’ll need to add in a discrete “add your picture” reminder instead.

The new ‘simple site’ and dashlet

We have added a new site type, ‘Simple File Share’.

This just contains a dashlet with a list of files and folders, and an activity stream.

You can even remove the activity stream to keep thing super simple.

If you want to add this to an existing site, hit ‘customise dashboard’, and drag down the ‘site contents’ dashlet. 

Or when you’re creating a site, choose the simple one!

Anything else we need to streamline? Better todo lists are on the radar.