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The turn of the year is traditionally a time to talk about lessons learned and plans for the upcoming year, and this blog will be no exception!
About “Path to SharePoint”
I wish I had started this earlier. “Path to SharePoint” is my first blog, and it has been a great journey so far. My main discovery is that a blog can be more than a publishing platform, you can really make it an interactive experience.
For 2009, I plan to keep the current tone: straightforward and high level posts, letting the reader figure out the details or variations; and interactivity, with same day response to the readers’ comments and questions.
I’ll continue to focus on original approaches. In 2008, I published my work on calendar views, Gantt views, and of course the “HTML calculated column”. These 3 series will continue in 2009, and I plan to start a couple others. I’ll also try to move away from scripts and spend more time on best practices.
A dual platform
However, along with these great moments I can also feel some frustration.
I think that the tone of the blog is perfect for power users, who have already pushed SharePoint to its limits and can leverage on the back doors I open. But it may not satisfy occasional designers, who are just looking for plug and play solutions.
The blog also has its technical limits. It is timephased, so updates and series are not easy to manage. It is static, while interactive demos are needed to better understand some customizations. Last but not least, it is blocked in China, like most blogging platforms.
For all these reasons, I recently launched a separate SharePoint site. It is still in an experimental phase, and I am going to replace it with a more robust solution. It will host live demos, links to SharePoint resources, packages for download, etc. I am also considering other options like using it for online workshops, online support or screencasts (how about a “SharePoint with a French accent” series?).
While the blog will remain personal, I see the SharePoint site as a more professional approach.
Other online activities
I have been posting on the Microsoft SharePoint forums for 4 years, and this is not going to stop.
I’ll also try to stay close to the “End User SharePoint” site. In one year, Mark Miller’s site – aggregating a blog, a forum, a newsletter, screencasts and a download section – has grown to become the primary online resource for SharePoint end users. I plan to continue posting there my contributions, applause and criticism…until Mark stops me!
Btw I am also learning a lot on this site, in particular from the enthusiastic Paul Grenier.
From what I’ve seen, there’s a geat SharePoint online community, and I hope to establish tighter connections with it in 2009.
Special thanks
To conclude this year, I’d like to thank my early readers, Greg Osimowicz, Ben Bradley and the others who posted their encouragements in the comments section or by e-mail. This had a direct impact on the amount of effort I put in my blog.
Also, special thanks to guest authors Peter Allen and Alexander Bautz. I am proud that my example has inspired them to start their own site.
Happy holidays!
Alexander Bautz has released a new version of his countdown, to take into account regional date formats.
Update [01/03/2009]: I have corrected an error in the script I initially published.
Three months ago, I published a script to display a random picture on your SharePoint site.
To answer Chris’ question, here is a variation to display a random quote. The method is the same as for the random picture, except that in this case I am using a SharePoint custom list to host the quotes. For my sample script, the quote is entered in the default Title column (SharePoint calls it “ows_LinkTitle”).
Note that the script and the list don’t need to be on the same site, they just need to be on the same server.
Read the rest of this entry »
A frequent request from SharePoint users is to remove weekends from the calendar view.
Back in October, a reader, “Delpfine“, posted the question on my blog. And last week, another reader, Chris Howell, pointed to a script on Vince Rothwell’s blog.
Unfortunately, the proposed solution has several issues (see comments), so I decided to write my own.
Once in a while, I like to add a little touch of originality to catch users’ attention and drive SharePoint adoption.
The Holiday season is a good time for this. In this example, I have replaced standard indicators (green/yellow/red) with a Christmas theme.
To do this, you first need to upload a set of icons to SharePoint. I have downloaded mine from this pack on iconspedia, and renamed them (green.png, etc.). I used the 48×48 size for the demo, but there are other sizes available in the pack.
Then you need to create a calculated column for the color. See my previous post for this. In my example I have used the Priority column of a tasks list.
We are now ready to create the HTML calculated column (called “Display” in my example). Very simple here, just an image:
="<DIV><IMG src='[path to image library]"&Color&".png'></DIV>"
The final step is to add the usual script to the page. That’s it!
See the live demo here (with falling snow):
http://8002.freesharepoint2007.com/Lists/Christmas/AllItems.aspx
How about you? Any original ideas to share for the Holiday season?
I already published an article about color coding for SharePoint lists three months ago, and its sibling for calendar views last month. Both rely on the same client side method, the “HTML calculated column“.
Color coding involves 3 steps:
1/ Select the color
2/ Apply the formatting: traffic light, font color, background color, etc.
3/ Include the magic script that renders the formatting (SharePoint OOTB would just display text)
People are usually comfortable with step 3, which is just a copy/paste of a generic script. But some users are struggling with the first two steps, because they are not so familiar with SharePoint calculated columns.
So I have decided to publish a list of examples based on the default SharePoint lists. They can be used as is and should cover a wide range of use cases. For each example, you can grab the formula by clicking on “copy to clipboard”.
If you are a seasoned list designer, skip this post…but forward the link to your friends!
Some readers have tried to combine in a same list the “HTML calculated column” and the countdown proposed by Alexander Bautz.
Look at the chart in the above picture. Isn’t that cute? Such little, text size graphics are called sparklines. They have become very popular, and you can see them all over the place, for example in Excel spreadsheets.
This post will show you how sparklines and other charts can easily be inserted in SharePoint lists.
If you checked out the 7+1 live demos, this post refers to examples 3 and 4.
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