LearnShifting

 A friend contacted me the other day about a strange SharePoint problem. She had created two document libraries which she wanted to display on the front page of her school website.

The situation was quite strange and it was a real credit that this person who had only recently started working with SahrePoint 2010 had done all the right things and gone through good testing and fault finding.

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This entry was posted on April 2, 2012 at 7:29 AM and has received 109 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

 I have had two schools contact me wanting to add submenu links under the default top left menu item that appears on our sharepoint sites. You can't add sub menu items to this menu item by default... but we can hide it and create duplicate menu heading under which we can add submenu items.

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This entry was posted on March 26, 2012 at 8:24 PM and has received 798 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

 We have been enjoying considerable success establishing SharePoint 2010 as the school website building tool of choice for a number of reasons explained in a previous posting here.

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This entry was posted on March 26, 2012 at 6:25 AM and has received 124 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

 Last week I attended a course creator and administration course for Moodle 2.2, the latest release to be deployed within the Department of Education here in the Northern Territory.

I won't try to repeat the three days of excellent training provideded by Julian of Pukunui but I will note the things that resonated with me as a person who manages the backend of our moodle system.

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This entry was posted on March 19, 2012 at 5:07 AM and has received 230 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

I use a blog tool created by Ray Camden. I love it and use an online editor to create my blog posts. One small annoyance is that I have to upload graphics into my blog and then point to them from the article so that it appears embedded... like this picture of a storm taken from my office window.

It would be better if I, and other folks building school websites using SharePoint 2010 could use Microsoft Word 2010 to creating an article, copying and pasting pictures into the word document as they saw fit and then with a button click or two have the whole article, complete with pictures transported up to the website with the layout they had created in the word document.

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This entry was posted on November 16, 2011 at 6:27 AM and has received 301 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

With now about 30 schools in the Northern Territory looking seriously at using SharePoint 2010 for their websites (and I suspect many more to come when they find out how easy it is) I have been furiously searching the web looking for answers to things I don't know - which means a lot of searching...

...and of course there are some gems out there.

Thanks to Jane W for inspiring this post.

This post focuses on just three areas - basic infopath forms, modifying cascading style sheets to hide bits of SharePoint that you don't want folks to see and modifying the masterpage.

From an enterprise perspective this is potentially a little dangerous, so if your SharePoint administrator asks you to "step away from the keyboard", it is probably best just to do so. Why? In an enterprise environment, we want consistency, we want forms to follow the same workflow, things to look the same and so on.

For a school, which is a site collection, the school site collection owners have greater freedom to implement branding that reflects the character of their school - hopefully without compromising usability.

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This entry was posted on November 8, 2011 at 10:29 AM and has received 519 views. There are currently 1 comments. Print this entry.

I think anyone who has worked in a school has realised that although a website maybe important for a school, whose job is it to create and maintain? I was surprised to find that although I expected teachers with computer skills to be involved, or an enthusiastic parent or possibly even be outsourced to a local company - it was the school Principal who in many cases took a leading role in the look, feel and content of the website.

I hear many of you thinking "We knew that!". But, to add to this revelation is the fact that some principals actually build the website in among the myriad of other tasks involved in running a school.

Here is a typical scenario played out in small schools across Australia (and even further I suspect). An energetic teacher and principal supported by the school council have a website built. Someone is trained to upload content. There are easy parts of the website to maintain (like uploading the weekly newsletter) and there are hard bits like changing the picture of the Principal when they move on or retire.

Many schools close an eye to the out of date content on the website because the newsletter part is still working and that carries the news of the day.

Then one day, the person in the front office retires or moves to France to tend a vineyard. The password to get into the system that is etched in the departing person's mind is forgotten and when the new person turns up 6 weeks later and the first newsletter is due to go out, the website can't be accessed at all.

If that is not your reality in school then you are fortunate.

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This entry was posted on October 12, 2011 at 7:00 AM and has received 527 views. There are currently 1 comments. Print this entry.

Don't like the colour scheme or fonts of your SharePoint site? Changing them in the old days required knowledge of cascading style sheets and html. Now, if you use Microsoft Office tools, you can change your SharePoint website. For those schools who are lloking to SharePoint 2010 as their website content management system for their public facing websites, this is great because it doesn't require costly or time consuming changes to the website. How do you do this? Read on...

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This entry was posted on June 10, 2011 at 8:54 AM and has received 1850 views. There are currently 1 comments. Print this entry.

Sometimes you want folks to be able to edit documents and entries in SharePpoint but you don't want people to actually delete anything. How do you achieve this? 

Out of the box, giving someone contribute rights means that you are also giving them delete rights. In some cases you will not want to grant them delete rights.

You achieve this by establishing custom permisisons. Rather than me repeating the steps from this very good blog entry - here is the entry.

http://blah.winsmarts.com/2007-4-SharePoint_2007__Fine_grained_permission_control.aspx

This entry was posted on May 3, 2011 at 3:06 PM and has received 412 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

My dilemma with communicating to folks is not that I don't like communicating - actually the opposite is true.

But I do like efficiency and relevance. When our son was born in 2001 I would add news articles to our website with simple categories. I discovered blogs in 2005 and thought that they were a better way to capture chronological and category based media pieces.

Blogging came with easy ways to tag entries and easy ways for people to follow the topics they were interested in by using RSSfeeds and Google loves blogs from a search point of view as they are filled with changing content, that is indexed (tagged) and appears chronologically by groups or sub groups. The move to blogs for me occurred in 2006 and as recently as mid 2010 I was still questioning the validity of twitter as a tool I could use.

I have three blogs because family, work and aviation are three major parts of my life where sharing information is something I want to do. Because they have very different audiences and subscribers to a flying club blog didn't want to receive emails about my son's last basketball game, I have kept these three separate.