Many of us have experienced the frustration: of encountering challenges when working in SharePoint intranet portals. Bamboo’s very own Julie Auletta, Director of Solutions Center, discussed some of those challenges and how to bridge the out-of-the-box gaps using third-party components during her FOSE spotlight session “Improve Workplace Collaboration with SharePoint.”
During the 30-minute session, Julie showed attendees how some of Bamboo’s popular Web Parts simplify the user’s SharePoint experience. Discussing the Tree View Web Part, Julie revealed how the familiar Windows Desktop Explorer navigation allows users to maneuver through any SharePoint list, document, or picture library.
The presentation segued into a commonly used SharePoint feature – calendars. Out-of-the-box SharePoint allows end-users to display events from multiple calendars on one display and color-code them based on where they came from.
However, there’s no legend and the information on the pop-up is limited. Enter Calendar Plus, Bamboo’s calendaring Web Part that visually communicates important events and deadlines with color-coding and icons, providing quick and easy access to event details. She also showed how List Rollup, which aggregates data, can be used in tandem with Calendar Plus to automatically show updated information.
Information in SharePoint can quickly become disorganized, uninformative, and ineffective. Built-in SharePoint Lists are great for collecting information from users, but the information displayed in a list does not provide meaning to all audiences – just the original author or group who owns the data. You can create different views but, without SharePoint Designer, you cannot change column labels, set column width, or color-code data based on certain criteria.
Bamboo Data Viewer Web Part fills this gap by connecting users to task lists or libraries across sites and site collections. Julie also demonstrated how the Web Part is more than a simple grid view, including sorting, filtering, and search options in a datasheet display. Data-Viewer Web Part allows you to customize the information displayed, providing the capability to tailor each instance of Data-Viewer Web Part to a set audience.
Also highlighted was Alert Plus, a Web Part that triggers alerts when an existing item is created, modified, deleted, or when a column changes. Customizable notifications are then sent to distribution lists, identifying the change in status.
As always, feel free to try out Alert Plus — or any of the other Web Parts — discussed in a no-installation private or public hosted sandbox environment, available 24×7.
