Sometimes it’s the tiniest of things that makes a difference. You might recall seeing an interesting change in the shape of passenger jet wings about eight years ago. The ends of wings with these modifications curve upward. Boeing introduced these modifications to 737s after receiving FAA approval to retrofit jets then in service. Today there are roughly 2500 Boeing jets in service with these curved wing tips know as winglets.
Winglets were introduced to reduce drag in other words to improve performance. Estimates are that since their introduction, winglets have saved the airlines over $1,000,000,000 in fuel costs. (Sometimes I think we should all see how many zeroes it takes to make a billion; then think about trillions. I digress.)
That’s over $100 million annually in fuel cost savings.
Do you want to reduce the drag on, that is improve the efficieincy of, your SharePoint users? Of course you do! There are many ways you can achieve this.
In a previous blog I included a brief paragraph on the seldom-used SharePoint custom Help feature.
Every native SharePoint web part has the built in, configurable property known as the Help URL. It can be found in the Advanced configuration properties. You should find this property on all other SharePoint web parts as well unless it was explicitly hidden or removed during its development.
You can use this property to provide web part specific help to users. You can also use it to provide help information for an entire page or site. Furthermore all this help information can be centrally managed and sited within a SharePoint document library, providing all the native document management capabilities for your Help files that it provides for your other documents. It’s a tiny, tiny change but so are winglets. Tiny changes can have huge cumulative benefits.
Maybe we should call these Helplets.
