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Jun
11
www.theSharePointSchool.com – how it was built
By Justin Raymond
Category: Development  |    
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Unlike so many SharePoint Blogs … using SharePoint!


This was critical, if we are going to give our genuine opinion on SharePoint then it is important to show what SharePoint can do. We wanted to take ownership of this blog and have it hosted on our servers (as this is an official blog of Abbotsleigh). Another important consideration for us is that the hardware and software is already there for our intranet / extranet (AbbNet). This blog just utilises our existing infrastructure, another pro for SharePoint, being able to host multiple web applications (multiple urls – each is its own instance of SharePoint).

For those of you who have heard us talk, you will know how pro SharePoint Designer we are. Whilst we do write our own web parts and other solutions, we are very big on the thought of using the right tool for the job and being highly productive. SharePoint Designer has provided us with a highly productive tool that we are finding can do close to 80% of the development work required.

The nuts and bolts:

  1. Create a new web application on our existing SharePoint install
  2. Create a new site collection in that web application and create it in its own separate SharePoint database
  3. Enable Anonymous Access for that web application (so that you can see it!). Otherwise no one can see it as SharePoint expects you to be authenticated.
  4. Create a standard SharePoint Blog site
  5. Create a new master page and style sheet in SharePoint Designer. Including adding Google analytics to the master page so that we are able comprehensively track visits to the site and all related data.
  6. Using SharePoint Designer, create some custom pages and insert DataForm Web Parts to change the way that posts are listed and displayed. This web part was also used to create the archive web part which shows the months that posts were created and then the totals for that month.
  7. Add posts using MS Word – this has been a real winner for us at Abbotsleigh, particularly in the classroom. For student to create a post in word including adding pictures and other media is a very simple process. For them to simply then in MS Word choose publish to blog is really simple. The cool thing is that Word is smart enough to recognise any images you have in your post and will automatically upload and name for you all images used in the blog post … very cool (yes this even includes screen shots). It is for this reason that we are using word to publish to blogs extensively in our Virtual Classrooms.

The tagging solution used is the KwizCom Tagging Solution which we have purchased for the farm, we will however; be using the out of the box SharePoint 2010 functionality when we upgrade ready for July.

Hopefully this is another example of what you can do once you have invested in the SharePoint platform there are so many things that you can leverage off it. Please note it is worth checking your licensing arrangement if you are looking at doing something similar. SharePoint 2010 handles this a lot more directly. We are looking at having a number of other Abbotsleigh supported blogs that are about to be released (not on SharePoint) as publishing arms of the school.

Jun
10
Upload multiple files in SharePoint 2010
By Justin Raymond
Category: Tips  |    
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Whilst preparing for our impending SharePoint 2010 upgrade the other day we noticed a great feature for mass uploading files and folders into SharePoint 2010.

If you go to the Upload Multiple Documents option:

You are then presented with a pop up which you can DRAG AND DROP files and folders in to the blue zone.

Once you have dragged and dropped your folder(s) you are presented with the following interface, which lets you preview a folder and all of its contents … very simple and quick!

We had previously used Explorer view for this behaviour, however this new interface will be a real success for staff and students once we have migrated.

Jun
09
QuickLinks Web Part Video
By Justin Raymond
Category: Development  |    
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In order to better show off the functionality of the QuickLinks web part we have written, we have now published a short video demonstrating its usage. There has been a lot of interest in this web part from the Microsoft RoadShow so we thought it was worthwhile showing it in a bit more detail to give schools a better idea of how it works.

You can watch the video here:

http://www.thesharepointschool.com/blog/Pages/QuickLinksVideo.aspx

This video picks up more on the elements that you cannot see through screen shots such as animations, scrolling and the automatic reflection on the icons.

If you would like more information on the web part we have another previous post here:

http://www.thesharepointschool.com/blog/Post.aspx?ID=13

Jun
04
Microsoft OneNote 2010 and SharePoint 2010
By Justin Raymond
Category: Reviews  |    
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Is this the perfect match for classroom collaboration?

A few of us have been OneNote users for many years and it has proven to be the perfect personal note taking tool for us. Almost every application / web part I have written over the last few years has been started by an inspired scrawl in OneNote closely followed by all other planning documentation using many of its tools and all the goodness that it provides. I could not survive without it.

OneNote now has a great structure that is a complete metaphor for how we work with paper. You can have a book of notes, within that a section and within the section you can have pages. This concept is simple to understand and should make the transition for staff and students a seamless one in adopting and running with it.

Our time travelling around with the Microsoft Roadshow has exposed us to a great presentation by Sean Tierney from Microsoft who is espousing the benefits of using OneNote 2010 hand in hand with SharePoint 2010. Something we always were aware that it could do but never threw any time at investigating was the concept of sharing OneNote notebooks (placing it either on a shared drive – or even better in a SharePoint document library somewhere). A key point of Sean's presentation to school leaders was the use of tablet pc's as well, particularly when it came to working on maths problems and being able to hand write mathematics symbols (equations and formulae) and share them between teacher and student. Students are able to hand write out answers with full working in an electronic format just as if they would on paper, the teacher is then easily able to comment and make notes on the students work as if they are standing next to them on their sheet of paper. The key difference – this could happen anywhere: teacher and student in the same classroom, different parts of the school or even at home – yet they could still work together.

So what is the most exciting feature?

Real time collaboration on the same file.

OneNote 2010 and SharePoint can be your big sheet of butcher's paper in the virtual classroom. Everyone can handwrite / draw / type all on the same page at the same time and truly collaborate.


Collaboration is an overused term in education, of which there are very few successful examples in the classroom using technology. OneNote and SharePoint could actually be the real deal.

Some examples of how this could be used:

  • A great brainstorming tool – small group work, if you work with the butcher's paper analogy the teacher could have the OneNote page visible on a data projector and all each group could contribute back to a whole class concept
  • A class debating tool – three or four team members busily collating ideas and research material all on the one page at the same time. Vetting and improving the suggestions of others while the debate is raging forwards.
  • Collaborative research tool – multiple students able to present their ideas together in the one document (OneNote visually indicates who does what) with the teacher being able to instantly see the contribution from each student


What does this have to do with SharePoint?


As we have been saying throughout the Roadshow, SharePoint's strength is that it provides you with the ultimate platform from which you can leverage many things. SharePoint lets you share the OneNote Notebook between students, teachers; at home, at school etc…

I am full with ideas as to how we can look at rolling out OneNote Notebooks as part of our Virtual Classroom templates for next year. I hope the next post you see from me on OneNote is a case study on what we have been able to do with it in the classroom.

Jun
04
A Drop Box for the Virtual Classroom
By Justin Raymond
Category: Development  |    
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The biggest question we asked ourselves when creating AbbNet (our SharePoint Intranet) was how far did we want to go down the road of a Learning Management System (LMS) versus using the portal for all other key communication components first (notices, news, calendar, files etc..). After a number of years where we now have close to maximum user adoption for these features and we were starting to hear requests from teachers to have a secure facility for students to be able to drop off work for staff (submit assignments etc..). The great thing about this system is that there was a genuine need and the drive was coming from teachers and not from IT.

Our experiences with LMS's have been that in general they are too complex and try to do too much. Most teachers are far too easily frightened away with interfaces prompting for outcomes, metadata and whole course frameworks when all they want to do is distribute work and collect the returning work electronically.

The key for this system is its simplicity. There is no work required for the teacher. There is now a QuickLink icon in every virtual classroom straight to the drop box and students are able to submit work at any time. We deliberately went for this method to encourage user adoption. There are some features we think it still needs but we will roll them out once we get a critical mass of teachers and students using the drop box. Once they are comfortable with this we can then introduce some more challenging concepts.

What did we create?


A simple interface for students to drop off work for a class. When submitted the teacher(s) of the class are automatically notified that the student has submitted an item in the drop box, the date and time of the submission, any submission notes and a link to the complete submission including any attached files the student has submitted. Importantly the students are unable to retrieve the work once submitted, they can re-submit a later version but are unable to edit theirs or any other students work

How to access it:

Using our QuickLinks Web part we simply added a new icon to every virtual classroom (because all quicklinks point to one central location) to access the drop box

 

Student View of the drop box.

This provides them with a full listing of all work they have submitted for their classes.

 

A really cool feature is the quick find text box on the right hand side. Using jQuery I have been able to create an as-you-type filter. Eg: if a student types in 'eng' it will automatically hide any submission that does not contain 'eng' in the class, department, task notes or task name fields. So in this example you would expect to bring back anything they have submitted for English.


 

Student Submission Form:

This is launched in a pop up. It only has three simple steps:

  1. Select your class (it only displays the few classes that the student is a member of)
  2. Attach your files
  3. Provide a task name and some submission notes

 

The workflow of the drop box:

 

Teacher view of the drop box:

The teacher view of the drop box prompts them to select one of the classes they teach (list is pulled live from the timetable). Once they have selected a class the student work submitted against the class that is displayed. There is also a subject and department view of the submissions.

 

 

How did we build it?


Using SharePoint Designer and Nintex workflow (a solution we have purchased) I was able to create this system in a 2 working day period (this includes all the usual interruptions – probably not much over a day of concentrated time). As with many of my recent creations it leverages heavily upon the jQuery javascript library to bend the SharePoint interface and provide some far more slick functionality and improved user experience – which is always a primary concern for us.

SharePoint Designer was used to create the interfaces you have seen and Nintex workflow was used to control the logic once the work had been submitted.

What is still to come?


Without running the risk of creating our own LMS (we are not keen to go there), the most critical thing we have identified is the need for a teacher or head of department to be able to define a task. This would mean that once a student selects a class to submit some work into they would then be prompted to choose a particular predefined task and submit work against that particular task Eg: In a maths class the teacher could create a task called Algebra Task 1 and the student would be able to effectively say this is the work for this task. Whilst we can do that at present as there is a task name field, it is free text which means we could get ten different spellings of Algebra Task 1. This can cause sorting and filtering problems for the teacher later on if they want to pull out all submissions for a particular task.

Jun
02
Quick Links Web Part
By Justin Raymond
Category: Development  |    
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Overview:

The QuickLinks Web part has been arguably the most influential aspect to the success of our SharePoint solution. We spent many months researching interfaces and trying to find rich, innovative and practical ways of improving SharePoint navigation. A key driver for us was the need to provide an interface that was appropriate for children as young as 5 years old through to adults.

We knew that we needed to provide users with a graphical experience that was easy to use and was not reliant upon the use of text for navigation. From this the QuickLinks Web Part was born. Initially a proof of concept was created using Flash, once we were happy with the prototype we moved into creating our own custom web part that could be deployed across the farm like any other SharePoint Solution.

Here is the QuickLinks Web Part in context:

(As you can see, it is a clear and obvious navigation element that grabs the attention of the user)

 

An example where we have used it in a Virtual Classroom space:

As you hover over an icon (Photo Gallery below) there is a short animation sequence to grow the icon in size, as you roll off it the icon animates back down in size again:

An example of where we have used it on our Parent Portal:

 

How it works:

  1. Place the icons you wish to use in a picture library, assign a url to each icon.
  2. Place the web part on a page and point it to your picture library
  3. Start using the web part!

Anecdotal evidence suggests that seven is the magic number of items that a user is able to digest without feeling inundated and lost in the navigation. With that in mind we display by default seven icons, an arrow to the right provides a way to access the next batch of seven icons. When clicked the next lot of icons slide in.

Each icon dynamically receives a reflection giving a modern and slick look without the need for us to manually apply it to every icon we use in the web part.

Another key agenda for us was to be able to show different icons to different users. The easy solution for this was just to use SharePoint permissions on the item in the Picture Library. As an example the icon which links staff to their Faculty spaces has read permissions to staff on it and no permissions are set for students.

 

What can be customised:


Everything!

Look and Feel:    

  • Background colour
  • Font colour
  • Icon size
  • Reflection height
  • Number of icons displayed in each batch
  • How each link opens (in the same window, a new window or in a pop up)

Settings:

  • Specify the site the Picture Library lives in (does not have to be the same as where the web part is being used – very handy if you want to create one central library to reuse for multiple sites eg: a single set of icons for all virtual classrooms or all faculty spaces etc…)
  • The name of the Picture Library
  • The name of the column which contains the URL

Customisation options for the web part:

Technology Used:


Our journey with SharePoint continues to evolve and along the way you discover some pearls. For me as a developer, this has been jQuery. This lightweight javascript library has enabled me to bring so much rich functionality to our portal and provides interface options that are rich and engaging to both staff and students. Importantly jQuery is well supported, has a large user base and is truly cross browser compatible. It has enabled us to radically improve our portal without the need to rely upon products like Flash which require plugins and often particular versions which is difficult.

Standard SharePoint – this is critically important. All that we have created uses standard SharePoint out of the box, we need to ensure that our customisations are fully compatible. I can comfortably say after doing a trial upgrade to 2010 we have had no problems with this web part (or any other customisations to our portal) because of our diligence to following where possible best practice with SharePoint development.

It's Evolution:


Originally it started as Flash Movie (created in Adobe Flex) embedded in a web part that was able to read the items in a standard picture library via its RSS feed. This first incarnation worked well however we noticed some things we thought we could improve on.

  • Flash Movies add unnecessary weight – every page with this web part on it was loading approximately a 250kb flash movie as well as then loading in each icon. Whilst we did not notice any sluggish performance either internally or from home as an extranet, it was not ideal in our eyes and needed to be rectified long term.
  • Flash would produce jagged edges on the icons if they had to be rendered down to a different size, this made the navigation feel like it has lost its crispness and looked as if the icons were very low quality.

Then came jQuery and the web part was rewritten:

  • All of the above issues were resolved; jQuery which was used only added ~120kb for all functionality used throughout the whole portal and not just for this one web part.
  • All content is regular HTML and is accessible via the DOM

What is to come?


As you type filtering – this feature is one that was written into the initial Flash version of the web part and is yet to be implemented into the latest jQuery version. This provides a small text box in the top left corner that lets the user find Quick Links by typing in key words eg: By typing 'vir' they are presented with any Quick Link icons that have the value in its title, description or keywords (such as 'Virtual Classrooms') and it lets them with one or two characters find an icon without having to scroll. If they hit enter then they are redirected to the first icon's url.

We are now looking at removing the main SharePoint navigation because the QuickLinks Web Part has been so successful. That would mean there would possibly be an option written in to display a home button if required.

 

Jun
02
Microsoft Video Case Study
By Warwick Noble
Category: News  |    
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We were recently asked to participate in a Microsoft video case study to overview the work we have been doing in SharePoint.

As you would expect this involves a marketing company, film crew and a fair amount of coordination of students and staff to make it happen, of course all of the students involved had to be cleared by their parents. The film crew from Melbourne were on site from the start of the day until around 6PM and carefully constructed every shot and took multiple takes, especially with my part of the video. After almost a whole day of filming the final result is a two minute video that has been published on the Microsoft Australia website. We've recently been told that Microsoft are looking at using the video in the US as well. The video captures well a very general view of how we use SharePoint but couldn't obviously overview some of the great custom systems we have designed and developed, nonetheless we are pleased with the final result.

Click on the graphic below to go directly to the case study.

May
28
SharePoint 2010 Upgrade – Case Study – Part 1
By Justin Raymond
Category: Planning  |    
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Why we are doing it:

  • Provide stability to our platform for at least the next 3 – 4 years
  • Leverage many of the SharePoint 2010 features we will benefit from immediately. My top 5 (pre-upgrade).
    • Social Media
      • Tagging – out of the box being able to use a corporate taxonomy as well as an ever growing tagging system offers us a more flexible way of presenting data to staff and students
      • Note board – This easy to use feature, makes Knowledge Management a breeze with every user having a simple process to add a note to any SharePoint content.
    • External Lists
      • Easily show data from your school management system in your portal (or anything else sitting in your SQL databases).
      • Data is presented in SharePoint as any other list would appear, it can even be set up to write back to the original data source!
      • Build your own reports, show key staff important information, stop storing data in isolated spreadsheets having isolated pockets of information
    • SharePoint Ribbon
      • Simplifying the user experience
      • Bringing it in line with the Office suite
      • Simplifying uploading images etc
    • Interface / performance enhancements
      • Dialog boxes to view item level data (pop up to show individual items)
      • Use of ajax technologies to refresh sections of the page without refreshing the whole page (imagine an auto refreshing dashboard page showing student absences as they are being entered into the separate school management system, or a teacher in the classroom having their online drop box dynamically refreshing and showing student work as it is being submitted)
  • To relaunch our public website as well as newsletter (The Shuttle) on the SharePoint Platform. Our newsletter will break from tradition and present articles in a 'real-time' fashion being posted as the data is relevant, breaking away from a standard edition based set up. Certain articles will be available for comment.

Pre-Upgrade Issues:

 

  • Change Management
    • User Training (particularly regarding the Ribbon)
    • Communicating the changes visually to staff before the upgrade takes place (requiring a suitable development environment to replicate our portal)
  • Compatibility of 3rd party add-ons
    • Being dependent upon the compatibility of purchased solutions before we can upgrade
  • Simulating the production environment for trial upgrades
    • Replicating all installed solutions on a production server as SharePoint 2007
    • Replicating key content and some key SharePoint Designer customisations
  • The unknown! Those issues we discover related to content that we are unable to replicate in a test environment

     

Next article in the series:

 

The processes we undertook to upgrade

The results of our trial upgrade:

  • The errors we had and how we fixed them
  • Things to watch out for with production
  • Server requirements we weren't clearly aware of

What we have learnt about running a converted portal in visual compatibility mode. (SP 2010 portal displaying as SP 2007)

Our decision on which upgrade method best suits us.

May
28
Abbotsleigh presenting at Microsoft Roadshow 2010
By Justin Raymond
Category: News  |    
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Both Warwick Noble and Justin Raymond will be presenting at the 2010 Microsoft School Roadshow.

We have been invited to attend by Microsoft and present two sessions at each roadshow across all states of Australia that the roadshow is visiting. One session is directly targeted to Principals and School Leaders, the other is directed towards IT Managers.

Our agenda is as follows:

Date

Location

27th May

Launceston, Tasmania

1st June

Adelaide, South Australia

3rd June

Perth, Western Australia

8th June

Brisbane, Queensland

10th June

Canberra, ACT

15th June

Melbourne, Victoria

17th June

Sydney, New South Wales

 

To register:

Principals – Register here

IT Managers – Register here

Apr
29
LMS or Intranet?
By Warwick Noble
Category: Planning  |    
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One of the key decisions we made when we first started developing in SharePoint was whether we should be aiming to make a Learning Management System (LMS) or a communication Intranet. We decided that the Intranet would be the starting point and we feel strongly that this was the right decision. We were aware that many schools had started with developing or implementing an LMS, and in many of the cases user adoption was very poor. We thought that if we could change the culture of communication by making a portal/Intranet solution that centralised services, communication channels and provided collaboration spaces for users, then that would be a great platform to introduce an LMS at any other point. Either way, what type of LMS was a whole debate in itself and was not clear of what type of features an LMS needed to have. The Intranet was relatively straight forward. (AbbNet Plus was our first SharePoint based Intranet, developed 2003 )

 

A key component of our initial solution was to remove additional login credentials to services that previously required them, like our school database system. These services were sporadically used but still contained important information that should have been more accessible by staff.

We incorporated links to My Docs and Email and to some surprise the OWA client that we incorporated was being preferred over the Outlook client. The power users still preferred the Outlook client but the fact that OWA was just there seemed to be the choice for many, convenience over features.

It was very important that the students and staff would look at the Intranet every day or as frequently as possible. An effective solution to this was to load the browser on login so that AbbNet would be presented without having to actively retrieve it. This process has been in place for many years now and has proven to be simple and effective.

Our aim was to get staff and students to work with and retrieve data/information in small steps and change the culture in which information and communication was disseminated, compared with LMS' that we always thought were 'clunky' and by design bureaucratic. As our initial setup was just like browsing the web we received little resistance from staff, in fact we were applauded for making life simpler when we presented it to staff with the new single sign-on services. We didn't make an LMS, but we did lay the foundation to widespread user adoption, which is one of the biggest challenges.

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