Some Great Planning Resources

Last night we sat in on the first ever virtual user group meeting by SharePoint Nation! It was a great experience. Thanks to Shane for putting it on. Our friend Rob Bogue from the Indianapolis SharePoint Users Group gave an outstanding presentation on "SharePoint Governance." He pointed us to a couple of resources he co-authored with Microsoft for planning SharePoint deployments and governance. If you are considering implementing SharePoint, this is a great place to start:

http://office.microsoft.com/download/afile.aspx?AssetID=AM102306291033
http://office.microsoft.com/download/afile.aspx?AssetID=AM102552101033

Creating a Multi-Person Scheduling View in SharePoint

We were recently challenged with a unique opportunity to customize a SharePoint calendar. The requirement from this medical office was to use SharePoint calendaring for maintaining physicians' schedules from a single page, but by default there is no view to show all timeslots for multiple physicians at once. Using SharePoint’s customization features were able to achieve this using Visual Studio and SharePoint Designer.

The end result was a custom view of the calendar which made it easier for the schedulers to see all the appointments at once without sacrificing SharePoint's built-in features, such as appointment recurrence, version history, and user security. The design allows for the calendar to be used for other applications as well, such as: hair salons, insurance claim agents, shelter house reservations, etc.

Technical Details

• Color preferences for the calendar entries and doctors names are externalized into separate SharePoint lists Custom properties were added to the web part for setting the start/stop times, appointment duration and other settings
• The object model was used to query all of the appointments from a calendar list for a given date
• The required information for each calendar entry was inserted in to a data grid which was formatted and displayed in the web part
• After creating the web part we modified the default view using SharePoint Designer to include the custom web part