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Of all of the capabilities of SharePoint, I thought I would start with the most basic installation — as a corporate intranet. It is likely that we will need to discuss some of the elements of SharePoint as we go along, so this also gives us the opportunity to review these elements for future reference.

Before going into too much detail, I would like to point out that you can try the core SharePoint framework (known as Windows SharePoint Services or WSS) for free. On Microsoft's Web site you can download a trial version of Virtual PC 2004 (VPC). Using VPC, you can install the Windows 2003 Evaluation Kit and the WSS add-on. This combination will give you 45 days to evaluate the setup.

Typical Intranet Features

For this article, I am assuming that a corporate intranet has a few standard features: company announcements, company events, a staff directory, and a repository of documents. Not surprisingly, WSS has these features built in to the default template called a Team Web Site. The template contains an Announcement list, an Events list, a Contact list, and a document list called Shared Documents. The template also includes a picture gallery, a list for links (URLs), a task list, a discussion board, and the ability to setup a survey. The home page for the default template is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1

The lists in the default template perform much as you would expect. The announcements are entered with an expiration date and will no longer display after that date has passed. The events can be viewed in a monthly calendar view. As you can see in Figure 1, a recently posted item is noted as "New!" to help overcome the information glut. (The length of time that an item is "new" is configurable.)

Basic Customizations

Figure 2

A popular feature of WSS is the ability to customize the site and its pages. Notice above the windows logo is a link titled "Modify Shared Page." This link provides a pop-up menu (Figure 2) for making basic customizations to the page. This menu is called the Web Page menu. Customizations can be made for the current visitor (Personal View), or with appropriate permission, for all visitors (Shared View).

Customizations in WSS consist primarily of the ability to add and remove blocks of content. These blocks are called Web Parts. In Figure 1, you can distinguish each Web part by its title bar — the light blue bar above announcements, events, etc. The windows logo is also a Web part, but the title bar has been turned off. Since you most likely do not work at Microsoft, let's remove the windows logo from the page and replace it with the current date.

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Remove the Image Web Part

From the Web Page menu, click on Design this Page. This causes the page to refresh with gray boxes indicating the Web Part Zones (there are two, titled Left and Right). Each Web Part is shown with a title bar and a blue border. On the title bar of the Site Image part, click on the down arrow symbol to display the Web Part menu. Choose Delete from this menu. After confirmation, the image is no longer displayed.

Add the Current Date

Figure 3

Click on "Modify Shared Page" again. When you move over the "Add Web Parts" option, a sub-menu is displayed. Click on Browse to display the Web Part Galleries. From the Team Web Site gallery, drag the Content Editor Web Part to the top of the Right column of the page. A dark blue line will appear in the position will the new Web part will be displayed. Release the mouse button to drop the new part on the page. At the top of the galleries, click the white "x" to close the Tool Pane. The right side of the page should now appear as shown in Figure 3.

Within the Content Editor Web Part, click the link to open the Tool Pane. The tool pane looks like the Web part gallery page, but it contains options that are specific to the selected Web part. In our example, we want to add some client-side script that will display the current date. Because VBScript has better date formatting options, we will use it rather than JavaScript.

In the tool pane, click the Source Editor button. Enter the following HTML, which will display the date and format it to match the Web site:

<DIV class="ms-sectionheader" id="CurrentDate"></DIV> <SCRIPT language="vbscript"> Document.all("CurrentDate").innerText = FormatDateTime(Now(),1) </SCRIPT>

Click Save in the Text Entry dialog, and the current date will be displayed inside the Web part. Still in the Tool Pane, click on the + symbol in front of Appearance. At the bottom of the Appearance group choose "None" for the Frame Style then click OK. Lastly, return to the Web Page menu and click again on Design this Page to leave edit mode.

Other Possible Customizations

As you have seen, the Web part framework is very simple yet powerful. Static Web content can be entered easily by non-programmers via the Content Editor Web part. We didn't discuss it, but in the Tool Pane of the Web part is a button to launch a rich-text editor. This can be used to perform basic text formatting like bold, underline and tables. The Web part gallery has other parts that can be used to include external content on a page. And, there are several different formats that the Web part page can take — you are not limited to the two-column format that we've seen on the home page.

It is also possible to choose a different color scheme for the Web site. Via the Site Settings page, there is an option to apply a theme to a site. Using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), the colors and fonts of the site can be set by an administrator and they will apply to all pages in the site. In the HTML for our Current Date, the actual date is inside a <DIV> tag with a specific class name. This ensures that the font specified in the theme is applied to this text. You can find all of the class names in the WSS Software Development Kit (SDK) or online at http://www.sharepointcustomization.com.

About this series
This series of articles on SharePoint is intended to help you understand the capabilities of the product, as well as provide tips and tricks, development ideas, information from Microsoft, information from the community, and perhaps some samples. Like many other series on IntranetJournal.com, I plan to include how-to articles that can help you with your deployments — ways to customize a page; deployment scenarios; content management; etc. With such a diverse product, there is no lack of topics for this series of articles. What would you like to read?

About the author
Paul Schaeflein is a developer with more than 20 years experience. Paul has been developing dynamic and interactive Web sites since 1996. Paul has worked on all of the versions of SharePoint and has worked with the .Net framework since its debut. You can reach Paul through his blog at http://www.schaeflein.net/blog/.