Jazz Up SharePoint Announcements with Windows Live Writer 2009
Ever hear the term, “SharePointy”? As in, “The site looks great but it still looks too….ummm…SharePointy.” What the person generally means is that SharePoint doesn’t appear very visually interesting OOTB. I’m going to show you how to Jazz up your site’s announcements using Windows Live Writer 2009.
I know, I know. I can hear some of you saying, “But Live Writer’s a tool for blogging!” Well, that’s true, but there are two things I like about it that make it perfect to enhance our announcements. The first thing is that it’s FREE, and the second thing is that it produces HTML code quickly and easily.
Download the Windows Live Writer 2009 and let’s Jazz Up your site’s announcements!
Author: Lee Reed ThoughtBridge, Atlanta, GA
Lee Reed is an expert in collaboration and user adoption on the Microsoft SharePoint 2007 platform. His consulting with companies large and small throughout the East Coast has resulted in many successful collaboration environments and increased user adoption.
Lee is currently the Director of Business Process and SharePoint Education for Thoughtbridge, a Microsoft Gold Partner focused exclusively on the Microsoft SharePoint 2007 platform.
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Great post Lee, I suspect you’ll find the “problem” with being on the EUSP team is that your audience is so demanding – expecting high presentation standards, innovation and death defying frequency of output – You’ve Mark to thank for that :)
As an OOB experience the SP interface needs as much visual help as it can get – what a great idea to use other less wieldy HTML tools to bring a bit of life into SharePoint. I liked the comment about changing the title to ‘hot news’ or similar. The word “announcements” never seemed appropriate to the snappy news people want to communicate. It is particularly inappropriate now that there is a little color and life in the webpart! Looking forwards to more of the same.
For your scenario, you can also simply add a column of type “Picture” to the list, and display it as the first column.
What I’ve found can also be critical in presenting links to site images in the sites which use them is to ensure that the link is relative instead of absolute – should sites/site collections be migrated/moved to other server URLs (Proof-of-Concept to production, QA to Production), the relative image reference won’t be broken if referenced correctly.
Ray, I agree with you. I went back and reviewed my video and noticed that I used the absolute link to the image rather than the relative link. I teach people all the time to use relative links rather than absolute links and can’t believe I didn’t make that point in the video. Thanks for bringing that to light.
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For those of you that are looking at these comments and are saying, “What are they talking about?”, here’s what we mean.
In brief, ALWAYS use relative links to images and DO NOT use absolute links to images. This becomes important when you move or upgrade your site later in its life-cycle.
An Absolute Link to an image looks like this:
http://www.mysharepointsite.com/myteamsite/images/london.jpg
A Relative Link to the same image looks like this:
/myteamsite/images/london.jpg
Notice that the relative link is missing the domain name at the beginning of the URL (ie http://www.mysharepoint.com/).
Lee
Cannot play the video
Do you have Windows Media player installed?
I too am having trouble viewing the video. Using IE7 and have the latest version of Windows Media Player installed.
Video says “Ready” but just stays there when I hit play.
My issue with playing the video was related to our corporate firewall blocking the video.
Resolved now.
When I go into my Announcements, I don’t have the Edit HTML Source button (or that whole row of buttons). The only buttons available are the 2nd row of buttons shown in your screencast (bold, text color, bullets, etc.)
Nice… Thanks.
Now when you click on the annoucement how does it display? Also if the announcment is long how can I restrict the height of the block.