Aug25

SharePoint Charts

If you need to create charts of SharePoint list data within your site, there are some very sophisticated server-side .NET tools out there for doing this such as Dundas Chart for SharePoint. 
 
If you just need a simple bar chart, you can do quite a bit with XSLT in a data form web part.  A good example of how XSLT can be used in this way is the "form-based survey results" web part displayed on the home page of this site.  This web part was part of the Business Performance Reporting SharePoint template in the Fantastic 40.  Writing custom XSLT like this can be a bit of a pain though if you are creating more sophisticated charts.
 
So here is another option: LiteChart.  It uses a data form web part bound to a list containing the data that is being charted.  The XSLT includes a reference to a flash charting engine which does all the heavy lifting to output the chart.  Since this uses out of the box web parts and web services, there is no custom code to deploy to the server.
Published: Aug-25-07 | 11 Comments | 1 Link to this post

Aug20

Requirements Management

"Product and Marketing Requirements Planning" is one of the Fantastic 40 SharePoint Templates.  It provides a basic site template and a couple key Word document templates that appear to be built off the Blackblot PMTK methodology.  These Word templates are great for creating a Marketing or Product Requirements Document (MRD or PRD) for final approval.  However, there is a lot of collaboration that leads up to the creation of those documents regarding which features are going into the products and why. 
 
SharePoint lists provide a nice way to collaborate on that information for both the marketing and product requirements, and the two lists can be linked via a lookup.  This template implements the core requirement lists and provides a document library for the Word templates that come with the F40 template from Microsoft.
 
Here are links to the demo site and template download.
Published: Aug-20-07 | 2 Comments | 0 Links to this post

Aug11

Survey template

Customer surveys are a very popular way of guaging the performance of an organization.  Here are a couple SharePoint options available to you.
 
1) InfoPath form-based survey.  One of the Microsoft Fantastic 40 SharePoint templates is called Business Performance Reporting.  This template is basically an InfoPath survey form and a data view web part which provides a slick XSLT chart of the reponses in the forms.  The advantage of this style of survey is that you can email a form to a customer, have them fill it out, and then upload it into the form library.  Of course, this is also the disadvantage - not everyone has InfoPath. 
 
2) Survey list-based survey.  The out of the box SharePoint survey list can be used to achieve the same thing as the form-based survey.  It has the added benefit of being able to be completed by a customer over the web, and can also easily include branching logic (e.g. the next question depends on how you answer the current question).  Basically it provides the same capabilities as your typical web-based survey tool.  If you want to use it for anonymous surveys, you can simply configure the survey list permissions accordingly. 
 
I've created a demo site that includes both approaches using pieces from the Business Performance Reporting template.  I put the chart of responses for the form library into a view also and made this the default.  You can compare this with the graphical summary view for the survey list - they are very similar.  You can download the template from Codeplex.
 
Published: Aug-11-07 | 8 Comments | 1 Link to this post

Jul18

Using Silverlight with SharePoint

When first looking into the possibilities for using Silverlight with SharePoint, I found a number of things confusing, so in case anyone else out there is starting from scratch like I was, here is what I learned.  Hopefully most of it is correct :)
 
a) Silverlight vs. Flash - yes, on a number of levels Silverlight is just a MS version of Flash.  A great example of this, and of a cool tool, is the GOA framework for building/porting windows forms applications to run on Silverlight.  The same tool will create Flash versions also.  The big difference is really the development environment and media support are all tailored to MS technologies such as (.NET, XAML, WMV, etc.) - more on this in a second.   I think MS is rightly distancing itself from Flash, not just to avoid a me-to comparison, but I think the positioning Flash has currently in the minds of many people really sucks.  People think of "flashy" things on a web site that are generally graphical in nature and also generally useless when they think of Flash.  Silverlight can start with a clean slate as rich internet application platform and become something completely different, even if in fact it is fairly close to Flash in terms of capabilities when it comes to RIA's.
 
b) 1.0 Beta vs. 1.1 Alpha - now this was really confusing at first.  Basically Silverlight 1.0 gives you the ability to do rich media, etc. but must be scripted using JavaScript.  So basically a Silverlight 1.0 "application" is a combination of XAML and JavaScript.  Silverlight 1.1 allows you to write the logic for the control in .NET instead of JavaScript and the Silverlight loads the dll and runs it.  This has several benefits such as being easier for developers who are familiar with C# but don't know much about JavaScript.  It also eliminates the cross-browser issues that arise due to differences in the JavaScript engine in the browser.  Finally, in some cases the Silverlight .NET mini-framework is faster than JavaScript.
 
c) SharePoint deployment -  It looks like if you go with Silverlight 1.0 + javascript, you should be fine with deploying this in a simple .dwp web part (e.g. by using a content editor web part initially and then exporting it).  However, if you go for Silverlight 1.1 using .NET and a .dll, you can't just upload the .dll to a document library, so you'll need to configure things differently.  Also, here is an example of a SharePoint Silverlight web part template I ran across - haven't tried it.
 
d) XAML? - Silverlight UI is based on XAML.  While this is the basis for WPF in .NET 3.0 that ships with Vista and is available for XP also, it appears that there are very few developers (e.g. doing a search on a popular development job board like RentaCoder yields only a handful of hits for XAML, and only two for Silverlight) who know how to build XAML applications using tools like Expression Blend 2 (you'll need 2 for Silverlight support).  XAML is likely the way of the future, but for right now there isn't much happening on the developer side.  My suspicion is most developers will end up using UI toolkits from folks like Telerik and Infragistics to abstract themselves completely from needing to know any XAML at all initially, and slowly it will gain adoption.
 
Ok, it's cool, but what is it really good for when it comes to SharePoint?  The obvious application is rich media.  If you're going to have WMA or WMV content on your SharePoint site/portal, Silverlight is a great way to render it in a YouTube style fashion.  The fact that you can go full screen with the Silverlight control is just a killer feature in my mind, especially when you're talking about screencast content that MUST be viewed full-screen for any decent quality.  Stay tuned to see something like this coming to my blog in the near future.
 
Beyond that, the next area I can see being interesting is running client-side computationally intensive data visualization tools.  My guess is you'll see something from the experts on this at Dundas soon.
 
Also, here is a great blog with lots of Silverlight stuff provided by Scott Barnes.
 
Published: Jul-18-07 | 7 Comments | 1 Link to this post

Jul02

Outlook-style tree-view navigation

Continuing the navigation theme, this post about the tree-view gave me the idea that it should be possible to create an Outlook-style navigation based on the standard tree-view in SharePoint 2007.   The idea is that you group the lists, libraries, and sites and display them when a certain tab is selected. 
 
Here is a demo site.
 
You can download site template at Codeplex. 
Published: Jul-02-07 | 11 Comments | 3 Links to this post

Jul02

Horizontal tabbed navigation based on quick-launch data source

The tree-view in SharePoint 2007 provides a great alternative to the quick-launch for navigating the lists and libraries on a SharePoint site.  It is particularly useful when you have a deep structure of nested folders, or users that are just more familiar with that style of navigation from using Outlook and Windows Explorer.  
 
One of the added benefits is that once you've turned on the tree view, you can now configure the quick launch for links to things other than basic list and library navigation.  For example, you could have a tab called My Content that has sub-menu items pointing to the My Tasks and My Documents views. 
 
With this new use of the quick-launch, you may find it preferable to also give it a new position and style on the page.  Those using MOSS will have come accustomed to the horizontal tabs with ability to have a second level of drop-down or cascading sub-tabs.  Well, the same thing can be done in WSS also simply by making the quick-launch horizontal and giving it the same style as the top-link bar.
 
Here is a demo site.  You can download the master page and site template from Codeplex.  Don't forget to activate the tree-view after creating a new site with the template.
 
You might also want to check out: MSDN article on Quick Launch modification
 
Published: Jul-02-07 | 12 Comments | 1 Link to this post

Jun24

Community Kit for SharePoint Enhanced Blog Edition 2.0 Beta1

The Community Kit for SharePoint (CKS) open source project which includes the Enhanced Blog Edition(EBE) released 2.0 Beta1 last week.  This is actually the first release for the EBE project, but it is 2.0 because that is the version for the overall CKS project.  Vince Rothwell contributed the bulk of the code for this release, while Ari Bakker and his crew at Provoke donated most of the themes.  Share Perran provided the great Summer theme also.  The rest of us did testing and provided suggestions.  We'll have the source code in the source control soon and would encourage you to get involved.  If you are interested, contact me. 
 
This blog is running on EBE 2.0 Beta1.  
 
I've put together a quick screencast overview of the CKS EBE 2.0 Beta1 release to walk you through how it works and the main features.
Published: Jun-24-07 | 53 Comments | 10 Links to this post

Jun20

GroupBoard workspace

From Microsoft Japan, this SharePoint template provides a combination of features to assist with the administration of running an office such as the following:

- Room and equipment reservations
- Time sheet
- In/out board
- Phone memo list
- Circulations list
A general screencast of the Groupboard is here.

The circulations list is the most interesting, as it provides a form of private message board that can be used instead of a standard SharePoint discussion board or announcements list found in the Team site SharePoint template.  Let's look at the options: 

Announcements - One-way (no replies), and one to many.  Audience is defined by list permissions.
Discussion board - Two-way (you can respond), but still one to many based on list permissions.
Circulations list - Two-way (recipients have option to edit or comment on message, but this is not as good as discussion threading), but the key is that the message can be targed to specific users, just like email.  Furthermore, recipients can confirm they have received the message similar to an email "read receipt", which is very useful for situations when it is time sensitive information.

The circulations list is shown in detail in a screencast here.
Published: Jun-20-07 | 7 Comments | 0 Links to this post

Jun01

Team Site

This is the most commonly used SharePoint template that is included out of the box.  This template includes basic features for general team workspace functionality. 
 
 
 
Published: Jun-01-07 | 5 Comments | 0 Links to this post

Jun01

Contacts Management

Contacts Management is basically a regular blank site with a single contacts list and a cool AJAX-style search web part on the home page.  This search web part shows the list values (in this case names) that match what you are typing.  E.g. If you type "k", all contacts beginning with the letter k will show up.  Then if you add an "a", the results will be reduced to all names starting in "ka".  This search web part concept could be applied to any list on any site - once I figure out exactly how to do that I'll let you know. This contacts list, like all standard SharePoint contacts lists can be synchronized with either Outlook 2003 or 2007. 
 
 
 
Published: Jun-01-07 | 13 Comments | 0 Links to this post

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