It’s bittersweet for me to announce that I will both be leaving Rightpoint and the realm of SharePoint consulting too. I’ll share more details in the coming weeks, but I want to make one request to clients before I go: please don’t display the weather on your intranet’s homepage.
Do you have a phone in your pocket? Are you near a window? If you answered yes to either of these questions, you do not need a weather web part.
Weather web parts are just intranet filler. Whatever executive decided that weather was an important part of their company’s digital transformation lives in a world that predates 2008. Phones are incredible tools. Dollars to donuts if someone wants to know the weather around them, they check their phone and not the intranet. If they don’t check their phone, they probably gaze out the window. Your employees are already looking away from their work to check the weather; placing it on the homepage is not saving anyone time or money.
Speaking of saving money, weather web parts are fickle to develop. I’ve written two posts on the matter before, and those solutions worked well at the time, but over the years the requirements have become more sophisticated to match the capabilities and expectations of the SharePoint platform.
There’s several free weather services out there, but clients easily run into performance problems around API calls. In my experience they usually don’t want to pay up to a few hundred dollars a year to get real-time weather, ironically after just playing six figures for an intranet. To appease everyone, I cache the weather. Adding cache means the weather is updated maybe three times a day. Thus, this high priority, high-visibility, personalized item turns into a cheap, non-real-time, cached six ways to Sunday solution. If you have a Cadillac intranet, why not get a Cadillac weather web part?
I beg with you – organizational decision maker – please don’t put weather on the homepage. Weather is a powerful force, but so is white space. You’ll make everyone’s life better. Your support team won’t have to open tickets because you hit your API limit, and your developers/consultants can work on some cooler stuff instead. This is my last request as a SharePoint consultant, please honor my wishes.