Welcome to Kraft Kennedy

When you click “New Item” in any SharePoint list or “Upload” in any document library, SharePoint sends you to a standard form for creating the new item.  Behind the scenes, SharePoint also passes in two parameters to let the form know where to post the item and where to go after the item is posted.  By leveraging these two parameters in the URL, you can make a link anywhere that posts data to any list and sends you someplace else when finished.  This has come in handy for us when creating intranet home pages, as we can create a list of links to post data to custom lists, which sends the person back to the home page afterwards.  Otherwise, the person would end up in the root of the list or library they submitted the item to.  So we were able to easily meet a requirement that the person be directed back to the home page after submitting the item.

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In a previous post, I discussed some useful free web parts for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0.  In this article I’ll discuss two more very helpful solutions for building extranets in SharePoint and for building more advanced workflows in SharePoint Designer.
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Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) doesn’t come with a whole lot of web parts out of the box, but here’s a few handy ones we’ve found to spice up some of the home pages we’ve built.  These are all free and work with WSS.

• Tim Heuer’s RSS Feed Reader
  http://feedreader.codeplex.com/

Only MOSS comes with an RSS reader, and even that one can display only one feed.  This web part is invaluable if you’re using WSS.  This is the best free RSS feed web part that I’ve found, and it allows you to neatly pull multiple feeds next to each other.

• Bamboo World Clock and Weather
  http://store.bamboosolutions.com/pc-55-1-world-clock-and-weather-web-part.aspx

This web part neatly displays the weather in 3 cities side-by-side and can optionally display the time if they are in different time zones.  This is a nice looking web part and tends to fit nicely on the right-hand side of a home page for a firm with multiple offices.

• Amrein MSN Money Stock Quote
  http://www.amrein.com/apps/page.asp?Q=5731

This web part displays stock quotes, company names, changes, and percent changes pulled from MSN Money.  It’s the best free web part I’ve seen to do this, and will save a lot of time over trying to follow one of the examples online for doing this with a data view.

• Matt Jimison’s Twitter Search Web Part
  http://www.mattjimison.com/blog/2009/03/04/twitter-search-webpart/

This uses the twitter search API to search twitter based on the parameters you specify in the web part, and you can download the wsp or the source code from the web page.

• Kraft & Kennedy Google Search Box
  (Code below)

We’ve had a few instances where we were asked to put a Google search box on a SharePoint page.  This can easily be accomplished by just inserting a content editor web part on the page and editing the HTML directly.  You can paste in the following code, which includes JavaScript, to open a Google results page after the person enters a search term and presses enter or clicks a button.  This is of course a simple approach–you could also federate search results in your search center to include Google–but this simple html code works well in many cases.

<P align=left>Search Google: <INPUT id=Google name=Google onkeydown="javascript:if (event.which || event.keyCode){if ((event.which == 13) || (event.keyCode == 13)) {
window.open('http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&amp;q=' + this.value + '&amp;btnG=Google+Search','_blank','');
return false;}};"> <IMG alt="Go" id="btnGo" name="btnGo" src="/images1/icongo.gif" onclick="window.open('http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&amp;q=' + document.all.Google.value + '&amp;btnG=Google+Search','_blank','')"  onmouseover="this.style.cursor='hand'">
</P>

Whether or not SharePoint can be a viable DMS at a law firm has been a big point of contention in the legal community.  A lot of this comes down to the mentality and size of the firm, and the specific requirements that the firm has for document management.  With proper planning and one or two simple addins, SharePoint may be a viable DMS for certain firms that are flexible and willing to invest in a development effort.

The advantages of using SharePoint as a DMS are many:

• Being able to wrap an intranet or extranet around all of your content.
• Having basic matter management features available in every workspace, such as a shared calendar, task lists, and discussion threads.
• Having access to document workflows.
• Being able to search all of your repositories with Enterprise Search (available free with Microsoft Search Server Express.)
• Being able to integrate business intelligence dashboards.
• Providing access to web 2.0 features such as wikis, blogs, and personal sites.
• Leveraging native Word features, and not having to rely on vendors to update their software to support the latest version of Office.

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