Internal Janssen R&D SharePoint 2007 Portal
As the team leader for the Managed Team Site Service (a process improvement project and service offering to improve user experience within SharePoint team sites by enforcing a governance model and supplying an enhanced support SLA), I needed to find a method to advertise the offering, along with supplying users with additional training and information. Additionally, the bi-weekly special form training presentations were beginning to become too numerous to distribute ad hoc. Therefore, James Norman and I began working on a SharePoint portal as part of the outreach effort (along with customized HTML emails and postings on the internal Yammer channel).
The most important part of the outreach effort was getting people information about the service quickly and easily, without a lot of site interaction and reading. There was also a need to find out what people thought of the service (to offer continued improvement), as well as discovering what people would like additional training on and how to find it. After some discussion, we decided on a tabbed interface as the perfect way to engage users without requiring them to wander through the site to find information and provide feedback.
The tabbed interface was innovative in the way it handled the web parts used on the site. Instead of creating one big CEWP and placing all the script and information inside, I built a special layout which allowed for the placement of web parts within the tabs themselves. I also allowed for expansion of the number of tabs for future use, which would only display once information was available for them. The base script for the tabs was discovered by James while taking classes on Lynda.com and extended for use on SharePoint by both James and myself.
Besides the front page tabbed interface, the site also contained general SharePoint training information (in the form of Microsoft documentation), specific J&J training information (team developed presentations as well as presentations from other groups throughout the enterprise), a calendar of training events and opportunities, an interactive map explaining the governance model used for the service, and several SharePoint based forms (with their respective workflows) to request new services or provide feedback.
Work was completed in early 2013, with improvements to the interface (in the form of CSS based buttons) later that same year. As far as I understand it, the site is still in operation, with all the training information and feedback mechanisms (as SharePoint forms and workflows), but sadly all the core team members of the service have been laid off. So there is no longer any formal training available, and the status of the service is in doubt.
Below you can find a sample of the tabbed layout as used on the SharePoint site with the default styles applied. If you would like to download a sample of the code, along with the SharePoint layout files, please click here. I have not tested the layout in SharePoint 2013.