Two custom development examples build for SharePoint 2007
September 30, 2007 19:26
SharePoint provides a lot of functionality out of the box, but of course there are always parts that have to be custom build. In this post I will show you 2 cool examples of what is possible with SharePoint when you add some custom development. Last week I’ve developed these two custom parts at Macaw to extend the functionality of the document library.
File preview
The standard document library allows the user to manage and download documents. One of the things missing in SharePoint is the option to show a preview of the document. To add this functionality we have decided to add a Web Part that streams the file inside an IFrame. The web part is then connected to the normal document list. I have created a small Flash movie that shows the final functionality.
Send a file attachment by e-mail
One of the out of the box functionalities that SharePoint provides is the possibility to e-mail a direct link to a document that is hosted inside SharePoint. The receiver of the e-mail can click the link inside the message to connect to SharePoint and view the file. This works fine for internal SharePoint users, but sometimes you must also mail a file to an external user.
It requires custom development to send an e-mail with the file attached. To make SharePoint email the file we have used a SharePoint feature to add a new menu option to the item menu that presents the user with an e-mail page. After filling in the form SharePoints sends out the message with the selected file as attachment. Of course you can see a demo of it in another Flash movie.
[UPDATE 12-11-2007]
Changed the flash html files. Because of an error in the script the flash movies where not visible in Firefox.
Tags: custom development, demo, document library, email, macaw, SharePoint, streams.
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Don’t forget that you can use the convert functionality of MOSS to convert a document to HTML. I’m planning on using this on Macaw’s intranet to make company policy Word documents easily readable in the browser as HTML.
Comment by Victor Vogelpoel — September 30, 2007 @ 9:55 pm
Hi Victor, thanks for the tip. I’m going to take a look at it. It’s probably also a good workaround for the MS Word 2007 inline display problems: http://edwin.vriethoff.net/2007/09/24/how-to-open-an-office-2007-document-inside-an-internet-explorer-7-window/
Comment by Edwin Vriethoff — October 1, 2007 @ 10:23 am
I found out that out of the box Sharepoint is only capable of converting Docx, Infopath and XML into HTML. So with the older Word documents this is a problem. You will have to write your own document converter. A nice instruction about building a converter for Sharepoint is found here.
Comment by Edwin Vriethoff — October 1, 2007 @ 11:45 am
Hi Edwin, great demos of some cool functionality you have been building lately. Keep up the good work!
Serge
Comment by Serge van den Oever [Macaw] — October 2, 2007 @ 10:45 pm