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Jan
6
A SharePoint Solution Looking for a Problem: The Focused HREF
Waldek has been playing around with some pretty cool interface stuff. The last article he wrote for EndUserSharePoint.com showed a way to highlight characters on a page as the user was typing. He’s come up with another interface trick and we’re looking for ideas on how it might be used.
Here’s the scenario: Let’s say that you are looking at a page in SharePoint that has a ton of text on it… it’s a procedure document or something like that. There’s a specific passage in the document that you’d like to highlight and then have your team view the highlighted passage when they access the page.
What Waldek has done is create a way for you to highlight that passage. You can try it out for yourself here. Click the ‘focus’ link on the page, then drag a rectangle over a passage. When you’ve got the size you want, let go and click the ‘Focused link’ tag in the top, left corner of the rectangle. You can now cut and paste the URL string in an email or put the link on a web page and people clicking on that link will see the highlighted page.
Our question to you: How would you use this functionality? This is a solution looking for a problem, but what a cool thing to go to waste. How would you use this?
Mark and Waldek
Interesting capability. Here’s some suggestions on its use:
* Highlight Steps in a Process *
I would use it to highlight a specific section on a wiki page, possibly some steps to take to submit a helpdesk ticket or the contact name and number for a specific person that supports an enterprise application, and use the focused link to send people directly to that information.
I would make the focused area have a border of .5 inches of ‘white space’ around the information I want to highlight so that I could add information to the page in the future in the area of focus. As an administrator, the benefit would be that I could maintain a single wiki page with the information I need to communicate to my users while my focused links maintain the ability to highlight info on a large page of text.
In this way, I would be using focused links in a similar fashion to HTML bookmarks. As SharePoint Wiki’s don’t have this capability, it eases my administrative burden in a significant way.
* Easy Access to Screen Shots *
I would use the focused areas to reinforce steps in a process. As an example, we all know that people like to consume information in their own preferred way. Some of the users I work with prefer to have steps in a process provided in a list without screen shots, for example, while others like to see screenshots.
I would use the focused links to provide access to a single wiki page that contains screen shots of the steps to take in a process so that those that prefer to simply read the steps can do so while those that prefer to see the screen shots of a step are accommodated as well. As an administrator, this gives me the ability to have a single page with all of the screenshots of a particular process without having to put the images in-line with the text on a page while allowing people to consume the information in their preferred way. This also increases the speed with which I can provide information to my users as I don’t have to fight the formatting battle of placing in-line images in my instructions.
1) Select the Views area on the web part. (focused link to screen shot)
2) Choose ‘Modify View’. (focused link to screen shot)
3) etc, etc. (focused link to screen shot)
* Provide Detail on Bulleted Items *
When I publish an article or project justification page in SharePoint I like to provide a 5-bullet executive summary at the top of the page. I would use the focused links to link each of those bulleted summary items to the location in the document where the reader can find the detail behind the summary item. This will increase the speed with which the reader can consume my page of information, which is the whole point of the bulleted summary.
* Information Association Page *
One of the benefits of collaboration, in the general sense, is that people internalize information differently from one another, making associations between information that’s presented differently from their co-worker. Focused links would allow me to see associations between pieces of data presented on the site and build a single page that brings that information together. This would allow me to create a single page of links to specific information on a set of pages without copying the information from the source page to a new location. This provides me the additional benefit of allowing the owner of the original page to maintain the information and update it as necessary while I am linking to it from a ’summary’ page that is fleshing out my information association.
I could see it as a client-side script and/or bookmarking tool. You could use it to mark your place in a large article or e-book.
There are other highlighter tools, but this one has the potential of working with visual elements like charts, graphs, and images.
If it could work on top of some viewer objects (like CAD viewers or embedded PDFs) you have something the other highlighters can’t do.