Alex Pearce's SharePoint Blog

Just a quick post that there is a SharePoint User Group meeting tonight in Nottingham.

If you want to come sign up at the link below and hope to see you there at 6.30.

http://suguk.org/forums/thread/18475.aspx

Well tomorrow sees the start of the first (of hopefully many) European SharePoint Best Practise Conference and I feel very lucky not just to be there as an attendee but also as a presenter.

I’m currently on my way down to London at the moment on the train and thought I would look at the agenda and make my final decisions on what I would go attend.  Below you will what I am planning to see – I may change one of these but have undecided yet.

I hope as many of you will be able to make the SharePoint in Education session with the SharePoint User Group on a Wednesday lunch time and see myself, Andrew Woodward and everyone in the room talk about the great work that is going on in this sector.

Look forward to meeting you all

Back last year I did a post about how higher education students can get free software which included Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Studio.

I’m finding in my school there are more and more students who enjoy playing with software, finding out what it does and learning from it. Because of this I always seem to be challenging myself on how I can help these pupils and hope to be starting some after school clubs that will allow these pupils to learn more.

Well you can now get this for your high school students too.

Looking at the list, there is a great number of peices of software now, XNA Games Studio for one – imagine your pupils creating educational game as part of the ciricullum.

You need to register your school first through this link https://www.dreamspark.com/highschool/wayf.aspx before students can download anything.

Click here to find out more https://www.dreamspark.com/About/Overview.aspx

Yesterday the lunchtime sessions were announced for the European SharePoint Best Practices Conference in London starting on the 6th April.

Andrew Woodward (Blog, Twitter) and myself will be having a panel discussion on SharePoint in Education.  Come and join the conversation and get involved as we talk all things SharePoint and Eductation.

If your not registered yet make sure you do and get yourself there for a great 3 days of none stop SharePoint.

For many schools its that time of year where you find a bit of money in a budget and you have to spend it.  Instead of buying a few computers why not to try and get some professional development for yourself.

If you have or looking at getting SharePoint in the coming months there are 2 great conferences coming up.  One is local to the UK the other is in the US – maybe you can get them to push the boat out

European SharePoint Best Practice Conference, 6th – 8th April, Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre, London

Best practice is always what we should be doing right?  But what is the best practice, it’s not always documented so how can you do it?

In the States there have already been 2 Best Practice conferences and its great that we are having one in the UK.

Even though you can sign up online there is a academic discount available by contacting zoe@combined-knowledge.com who will be able to help you.

http://www.sharepointbestpractices.co.uk/

Microsoft SharePoint Conference, 19th – 22nd October, Mandalay Bay Hotel & Convention Centre, Las Vegas

This is Microsoft’s big SharePoint Conference.  Last year it was hosted in Seattle but its heading south into the desert and going to be a great 4 days.

On the website for the conference it states “SharePoint Conference 2009 will be the conference to learn about SharePoint 14″ so make sure you are there to see the new version.

http://www.mssharepointconference.com/

Hope to see you at both

As a school we have decided to evaluate Moodle for a VLE for our school.  The main reasons we have done this is because of the course builder with built in quizs and SCORM builders.

I have to say they are very well built.  They are not page viewers like some companies make for their SharePoint webparts but these are written to look at the Moodle database and give you the information presented in a proper ASP webpart.  I’m very pleased to see this happen.

What caught my eye straight away and credit to the writer of this is the office presence by the names of the course.  One of the web parts is the moodle courses which lists all the available course and as you can see it (screen shot below) has the teachers name and then the office presence.  I think it is a shame that in Moodle itself doesn’t show this – because if the pupil was accessing the course, doing some work and they had an issue they could see the teacher straight away and ask them any questions.

In this post I’m going to mainly list the webparts with a screen shot – I’ve already started on another post to do with the install of them and I will also do a post on how to publish Moodle, SharePoint and the Moodle WebApps from the same URL through ISA.

Moodle: Welcome

Moodle: Messages

Moodle messages is the built in online chat available in moodle.  Here you can see the message someone has sent you while you were away – the text they sent is ‘testing’

Moodle: Courses

In the Filter Option in this webpart you can select from My Course, Upcoming Courses and All Available Courses

Moodle: Online Users

Again this is more powerful in SharePoint than in Moodle as you can see their Office Presence as well.

Moodle: My Assignment

Moodle: Document Exchange

 I do like this web part.  On the left you have your Moodle course, on the right hand side you have your SharePoint Document library.  This web part will allow you to transfer documents between both products.

There are some other webparts but they are very similar, depending on the user.

Here is the full list of the X Moodle WebParts

• Moodle: Courses
• Moodle: Document Exchange
• Moodle: Messages
• Moodle: My Assignment
• Moodle: My Courses
• Moodle: My Supervisied Assignements
• Moodle: My Teaching Courses
• Moodle: News and Announcements
• Moodle: Online Colleagues
• Moodle: Online Students
• Moodle: Online Users
• Moodle: Welcome

In the next few weeks I’ll do a post on how to install moodle and the webparts on a Windows System with SQL Server and also another post which I have been asked to do on how to publish it all through ISA on a single URL.

There are several ways to add a banner to the top of your SharePoint site like below.

The banner sits in your global breadcrumb so you need to think about your design of your image

I create my images in Adobe Photoshop and this is the only additional tool used in this how to.

Open up your image editor (Photoshop) and start with a blank canvas that is width of 2200px and height of 100px.

When your SharePoint page loads it will load this image from the left hand side so any images like a logo need to be aligned to the left.  If a computer screen is at 1024 x 800 it will only show the first 1000px.

So add a logo, a bit of text and anything else you want to add.

We need to create our own custom css file, so on your computer create a new text file and rename it to custom.css.  Dont forget to change the file extension as well so its not .txt at the end.

In the file you want to add the css reference which is below

.ms-globalbreadcrumb{
font-size:8pt;
text-align:right;
background-color:#ebf3ff;
padding:2px 10px 2px 5px;

}

This is the same as the default CSS’s used in SharePoint so we need to edit it so an image appears instead of a colour and the padding.

So as a new line we will add

background-image:url(“/_layouts/images/banner.jpg”);

And change the padding to

padding:2px 10px 79px 5px;

Save the file and open your top level SharePoint site.

Create a new document library and hide it from your Quick View Panel.

Upload the banner file and the custom.css file

We now know the URL of the banner and we need to add this to the custom.css file so it can load the correct file.

Right click on the banner image and click on Copy Shortcut.  Open the custom.css file and change the background-image URL to the location of the new banner.

Now right click on the custom.css file and click on Copy Shortcut.

Now go to Site Actions – Site Settings and click on Master Page.

Here you can specify your own css file – scroll down to the bottom of the page and select; Specify a CSS file to be used….and paste the URL of the custom.css file.

If you want to have this css file for all your subsites click on the button below

When you’ve set all these click on OK and you will see your site with a nice new banner