World Cup 2 - SharePoint with Flair

Is it only me and Alan Hansen who are becoming despondent by the lack of excitement in the World Cup? Every game just seems the same with countries more interested in not losing their opening game wow factor. Perhaps the games involving Brazil, Spain and Portugal might change things but at the moment the only real entertainment has been the Germans beating the aging Aussies. Mind you this hasn’t stopped me from watching two games every day. So still we wait for that moment of magic and the game to makes us go wow. Some SharePoint sites also lack flair so how can we make them more appealing?

With SharePoint the options really are endless. The use of video, audio and flash can so easily be added to add an extra dimension to any site. The very adaptable Content Editor Webpart can be used to add impact and flair. If your firewall doesn’t block YouTube then you can have access to millions of videos and almost certainly find one appropriate to you. All you need to do is copy the HTML code that you will find to the right of each video and paste it into the Source section of the inserted Content Editor Webpart. Not only can it be used for playing YouTube videos but all over the web for will find ‘Widgets’ and these also have code you can copy. Widgets are simple, fun, and useful applications that can be embedded on a webpage, blog, social networking page or for us SharePoint. Almost certainly you have already seen widgets, and used them, even if you didn’t know they were called ‘widgets’. You have probably seen a quiz or a game on a friend’s Facebook wall, well these are widgets. You may have seen countdowns to events, like the World Cup, on blogs or a YouTube playlist on your child’s MySpace page. All of these are widgets and they are great because they allow you to add customised content to your SharePoint with no coding knowledge necessary. All you need to do is insert that famous ‘Content Editor Webpart’. It works on WSS, MOSS 2007, SharePoint Foundation 2010 or SharePoint Server 2010.

One of the best places to get thousands of different widgets from is Widget Box where you can take code from widgets including Calculators, Dancing Penguins, Arnold Schwarzenegger sayings, Simon Memory games, Site Translators, Cat Clocks, Weather Updates, Space Invaders, World Cup Updates and many more.

Talking World Cup, as another game reaches half-time disappointingly goal-less, if you Google ‘Fifa widgets’ you can find a range of interesting World Cup Widgets that you can be added to your SharePoint.

So don’t let your SharePoint resemble a France against Uruguay World Cup game use the Content Editor Webpart to add some video or a widget.
Time now for my second set of World Cup predictions. The ones last week were not too bad even if England didn’t quite manage that second goal. I am going to start with England to beat Algeria one-nil.

My other three predictions are;

Group D – Germany 0 Serbia 1
Group F – Italy 4 New Zealand 0
Group G – Brazil 2 Ivory Coast 1

If you haven’t got your FREE World Cup 2010 SharePoint template yet please visit http://www.office-talk.com/index.php?id=160

Come on England !!!