SharePoint in Photographs

Recently I had a new Blackberry and although my chubby fingers are slightly too wide for the qwerty keyboard I am getting use to it. Especially as I now know you don’t have to have it so it bleeps all night long every time a message arrives. With the add-on apps like Google Maps and mobile Facebook added it is sadly becoming a big part of my life. I can even view my SharePoint sites on there. Of course as is the norm these days every mobile device has to have an inbuilt camera. I mean I am typing away at the moment on my laptop and if I accidently press the wrong function key I will hear a clicking noise and an unflattering picture of the top of my head will appear on the screen. When I follow the boys in claret and blue to Wembley in February my Blackberry will probably end up videoing my walk to my £70 seat or taking a photograph of the Wembley arch in the dark. The world is becoming full of digital images and videos. So how can SharePoint handle all this digital images?

If you hear the term DAM SharePoint it isn’t always a bad thing as DAM can be Digital Asset Management. This is how you manage your Digital Assets. If you have SharePoint (either WSS or full MOSS) then there is a terrific application for you called ‘MediaRich for SharePoint’. MediaRich does really have the wow factor and brings SharePoint to life. For media people it finally gives them a reason to use SharePoint even on their precious Macs. It adds a couple of extra webparts that makes the out of the box SharePoint Picture Library look as exciting as a conversation between Steve Davis and Nigel Mansell on the subject of stamp collecting. It allows you to zoom in close on images, crop sections, change formats, turn to trendy black and white, sharpen quality, flip upside down and even email as a zip file to your commercial printers. Even if you haven’t got thousands of images or videos the automatic thumbnailing of all types of files including Office Documents makes it worth trying. Throw in the enhanced Search capabilities and suddenly your SharePoint has come to life. Who needs 3D TV when MediaRich can make your SharePoint this dynamic and you don’t even need to put on any cardboard glasses. Oh and I haven’t even mentioned that you can set all these image changes to run as an overnight batch job.

If you have SharePoint I recommend you take time to watch the MediaRich Demonstration video now because it might make you rethink the way you use SharePoint. Just Click Here and I think you will be impressed.

So now I need to send all my photographs, videos and audio recordings from my Blackberry to my SharePoint. Many of them taken at the recent Villa semi-final game. I need to make room for pictures of Villa lifting cup against Manchester United on 28th Feb.

Make SharePoint Count

If you are a regular reader to my SharePoint blog you will have guessed that the only place to start this week is by congratulating Aston Villa on reaching the Carling Cup Final. There were joyous celebrations on Wednesday following a game that had more goals than you get site templates in the popular ActionSharePoint Bumper Bundle. Yes, at 6-4 (sounds like a tennis score) it wasn’t always easy to keep track, so this week I am going to discuss some of the unused ‘Totals’ features in SharePoint. The BBC must have been delighted with ten goals, a sending off and incidents galore. I have never seen Alan ‘Captain Scarlett’ Hansen so excited. But even Mark Lawrenson would have sounded interesting talking about that game.

So how could SharePoint have helped keep track of the goals? A great feature is ‘Custom List’ and these are often the best starting point for creating any form in SharePoint as you can define all the fields/columns yourself. On Wednesday we could have had a custom list called ‘Semi Final Goals’. In this list we could have created fields for the following ‘Time of Goal’, ‘Villa Scorer’, ‘Blackburn Scorer’, ‘Description of Goal’, ‘Reason for Sam Allardyce to moan’. Then each time a goal was scored added an entry. The next part which a number of users don’t use to its full capabilities is the create View option.

When creating a ‘View’ you can decide which columns you need to display and how to display them. There is an option here to display them as a Data View (this means it will look a bit like a spreadsheet). A rule I always use is only display the columns that contains vital information as the user can always click on the link from one of the records to see the full item. Try to make it so the user does not have to scroll to the right on the list by reducing number of columns to display. Also useful sometimes to think about the length of the column name as this can also cause scrolling. If you wish the users to be able to update items you also need to make sure that either one of the columns contains an ‘Edit’ or ‘Link’ option otherwise a trick I use is to add the ‘Edit’ column as the first column to display. When you see the list of Columns in the View you will see that some columns have in brackets after their name ‘Edit item’ or ‘Link to item’ this means that they will be hyperlinks for the user to click to be able to edit or view the whole form.

Now you have your View created you can modify it to set things like ‘Sort’, ‘Group By’ or ‘Filter’. With ‘Filter’ you could select ‘Show items only when following is true’ select the field ‘Villa Scorer’ and then select the options ‘is not equal to’ then leave the next box blank. This will then only display goals scored by the mighty Villa. The other option on the Modify View which would help us count the goals is the ‘Totals’. From here you can add a total for each of the columns. The options under ‘Totals’ include Count, Sum, Average, Maximum and Minimum. If these are selected they will display the appropriate Total at the top of the column. So if we added the ‘Count’ option to both the ‘Villa Scorer’ and ‘Blackburn Scorer’ columns we would see a 6 and a 4 appear. So we could keep track of all the goals that went in. With the other Semi Final at Old Trafford next Wednesday you could also use these totals to calculate the ‘Fergie Time’. During the game Alex Ferguson could add an item for every injury, substitution or time wasting during the game. One of the fields could be ‘Length of stoppage in seconds’ and on the View this could be totalled using ‘Totals’ and ‘Sum’. Then after 90 minutes Sir Alex could start waving his laptop at the 4th Official and pointing to his SharePoint List.

So with my train from Birmingham Snow Hill to Wembley Stadium booked for 28th February I can now start work on my Carling Cup Final Souvenir SharePoint Template. This will be available free of charge as soon as we know which club from Manchester will be runners-up to the Villa in the 50th League Cup Final. Now who won the first one.....oh yes Aston Villa!

SharePoint Awards 2010 - Nominations

In England we will soon know the finalists of the first football tournament of the year and after last night I am very hopefully I will be visiting the new Wembley for the first time on Sunday 28th February.

After the success of last year's Andy Dale SharePoint Awards I have decided to repeat the awards this year and I am seeking nominations for 2010. The closing date for all nominations will be 28th February 2010, yes the date of the Carling Cup Final. A few things I ask though, firstly please do not nominate yourselves and secondly let's stick to WSS 3.0 or MOSS 2007 applications. Then in the first week of March I will announce the three finalists in each of the ten categories (which will be the same as last year). We will then announce the overall winners at the SharePoint Summit 2010 between April 12th and 14th thanks to kind offer by Chair of the summit Dany Boulanger.

Let me remind you then of last year's winners of the Andy SharePoint Awards and then you can start thinking about nominations for this year;

1 Best SharePoint Information Site 2009
Winner – SharePoint Reviews

2 Best SharePoint Webpart Provider 2009
Winner – SharePoint Boost

3 Best SharePoint Administration Tool 2009
Winner – ControlPoint from Axceler

4 Best Website built on SharePoint 2009
Winner – Cadbury

5 Best SharePoint Training Package 2009
Winner – CBT Clips

6 Best SharePoint Offline Solution 2009
Winner – Colligo Contributor from Colligo

7 Most Useful SharePoint Webpart 2009
Winner – Batch Check-in from SharePoint Boost

8 Favourite Free SharePoint Webpart 2009
Winner – Google Search Webparts

9 Most Fun Free Webpart 2009
Winner – Picture Puzzle Widget from Spring Widgets

10 Biggest SharePoint Mess-up 2009
Winner – Microsoft for 180 day expire error on SP 2.

So please email any nominations to andy.dale@office-talk.com or leave a comment here.

Hopefully in next week's blog I will be celebrating Aston Villa's place in the Carling Cup Final, but there is still a big game to come next Wednesday. It could be a cracker like in 1994.