You are currently browsing the monthly archive for January 2009.
There are now more than 350 sites referenced in my list of SharePoint blogs. A lot of content to explore, with personalized links to the blogs themselves, as well as to Technorati, Delicious and now Diigo.
As an end user, however, you may experience some frustrations, as the majority of the top blogs target developers. How about trying your luck with my Random Blog Explorer? Oh, you did! So? Well, maybe it was not your lucky day…
To help out, I have decided to tag the blogs for which a major part of the content is accessible to end users. I have created a subset that you’ll find on this page:
http://www.pathtosharepoint.com/Pages/ForEndUsers.aspx
As you can see, for these blogs I also track RSS feeds. I have aggregated them and they are currently displayed here:
http://www.pathtosharepoint.com/Pages/EU-RSS.aspx
This is still under construction, and the future of these pages will greatly depend on your comments. Please send me your suggestions to improve navigation and findability! Also, let me know which sites should be added to the list or on the contrary removed. Leave a comment below or contact me by e-mail at Christophe@PathToSharePoint.com.
What is a SharePoint End User btw?
And first, what’s an end user? Among a bunch of definitions returned by Google search, I picked this one from Yale:
An individual or organization that accesses digital information for their own use.
We used to live in simpler times, with on one side IT building applications and on the other side end users running them. Today, with Web services, mashups and workflow tools, where is the frontier?
I was going to build my own definition, when I was stopped by an announcement from Mark Miller. I sure want to wait until Thursday, and read what he has to say on the subject.
Also, I am thinking that we don’t necessarily need a definition a priori. Let’s gather the list of “end user blogs”, discuss it, and whatever we’ll end up with will be our view of a “SharePoint end user”.
Looking forward to your comments!
This is one of the frustrations with the SharePoint UI: you can’t display on your site a list from another site.
Well, of course, you have the Page Viewer Web Part, which allows you to embed in your page another Web page. But usually the result doesn’t look good, as the embedded content doesn’t fit nicely in the host page.
If you are looking for something nicer, there is still hope. You may for example have SharePoint Designer, in which case you can use the Data View Web Part to display a list from another site. However, in SharePoint 2007 I have not been able to make it work across site collections (did I miss something?).
The next level is to build your own viewing interface, and use XML to retrieve the content of the list (through the URL protocol, Web Services or RSS for example).
For today, let’s keep it simple. I’d like to offer an alternate option: a “quick and not too dirty” way to display a simple, flat list in another site.
The slider for Gantt views was part of the 7+1 live demos I published last November; moving the handle or directly clicking on the slider allows you to resize the Gantt.
After some additional adjustments, I am ready to release today a sample script.
I did not build the slider. I simply took an existing one offered by the jQuery UI library, and combined it with my technique to scale down the Gantt view.
A frequent request: have the ID displayed when viewing an individual item, in display form (DispForm.aspx) and edit form (EditForm.aspx). This is for example useful when a team uses the default SharePoint ID as identifier in an Issue Tracking list.
Note: the ID cannot be displayed in NewForm.aspx, simply because the ID doesn’t exist yet when you add a new item.
The answer is easy: the ID is actually already in the browser window, in the URL to be precise:
http://…/Issue%20Tracking/DispForm.aspx?ID=1&Source=…
Right, this is not very user friendly, so we are going to add a short script to grab the ID and display it in the page.
I am about to release some scripts to improve the filter drop-down box for the “HTML calculated column”.
As I worked on this, I came across an issue with calculated columns: the filter doesn’t work if the content of the calculated field is longer than 256 characters.
If you have more information on this issue please let me know!
This will impact you if you use calculated columns and create HTML strings longer than 256 characters. You may also experience this issue in other situations, for example if you use calculated columns to aggregate text strings.
Six months ago, I showed on a simple example how to reuse the default SharePoint drop-down menu. As Larry reminded me, it’s time for me to keep the promises I made and share more advanced solutions.
The solution I am going to detail adds two features:
- two levels instead of one
- the menu items are pulled from a SharePoint list
Visit my SharePoint site for a live demo.
There are various ways to pull content from a SharePoint list. I have chosen to use SharePoint Designer and the Data View Web Part for this example, as it is very convenient when working with grouped items.
I continued populating the list of SharePoint blogs last week, and I now have 330 blogs referenced.
Under Technorati Authority, I have added a “N/A” category for blogs that don’t fit in the main list. This includes:
- Blogs from SharePoint experts that are not registered on Technorati
- Blogs that aggregate the content from other blogs
- Blogs that sometimes talk about SharePoint but have a wider scope
So many blogs! Where do I start?
Of course, you’ll find outstanding content if you visit the top 50 blogs (Authority of 25 or more), or the top 100 (Authority of 10 or more). But you should not dismiss the other blogs with “some authority”. Believe me, gaining one point of authority is not as easy as it sounds! Also, some blogs have excellent content but a low authority just because they don’t publish often.
My recommendation: use the “Search Delicious bookmarks” button for a sneak peek. This will highlight some of the most interesting content, and give you a better idea of what the blog is about (IT, programming, Web design, end user, etc.).
Also, the blogs list has been online for almost two weeks, and we start seeing some trends. Check out the blogs whose authority has significantly increased (green value vs. reference), these blogs will certainly offer fresh and interesting posts.
Note that the reverse is not true. There’s an aging effect, so if a blog has a stable authority it simply means that it is renewing its content.
Do you feel lucky?
Then try out my Random Blog Explorer! It will randomly pick a blog among a list of 200+ SharePoint blogs that have “some authority”. Refresh the page to move to the next blog.
The page will display:
- Technorati window: authority, recent posts, reactions from peer bloggers
- Delicious: most bookmarked posts
- the blog’s home page
Btw I used Paul Grenier’s script for manually resizing Web Parts. This will allow you to expand the Technorati and Delicious windows.
One last thing: please help make this list better, remember to report errors and omissions!
So let’s take a look at your SharePoint page header: a banner, the site title, search, tabs, breadcrumbs, the page title… Before you know it you have already consumed one third of the screen.
Of course, this is not wasted space. But sometimes you just want your users to directly get to the content of the page, without having to scroll down. It is for example the case if you build a dashboard.
To do this, simply append #mainContent to the URL of your SharePoint page.
See it at work on this example:
Link to the page
Link to the page’s main content
An alternate option is to drop a Content Editor Web Part in your page and add the following code:
<script type="text/javascript"> window.location.hash = "mainContent"; </script>
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