This has been a big month for me, with two Intranet sites I’ve been working on for a while launching. While the Charter Intranet site, “Up to Speed” launched last week, another, larger Intranet project that I worked on for about 6 months launched earlier this month. It’s the Intranet site for the Associated Electric Cooperative, Inc. in Springfield, Missouri.
This is an Intranet site that utilizes the Publishing features of SharePoint. It layers the collaboration features of SharePoint with the nice visual presentation of a Publishing site.
I’ll be taking some time in future posts to talk about some of the planning and decisions that went into the construction of this site. For now, I’d like to point out some of the features you see on this page, which is a department homepage.
- There’s a Quick Links control at the top of the master page that displays a drop down list of global links which appear on every page in the site. Furthermore, each department also has a quick links list that shows up on their departmental homepage, which allows them to provide quick access to their users to the most popular content in their departmental subsite.
- There are a number of content query web parts used on this page. The news article at the top is driven by a custom Article content type, articles having their own page layouts. The Events calendar and FAQ list are driven by underlying lists. End users should never need to go to the FAQ list because the FAQs are presented in a friendly format on another publishing page that has a similar content query web part that shows all the FAQ questions and answers.
- Each department has 10 objectives that have been laid out at the beginning of the year. A manually manipulated KPI list shows them what their status is for achieving those objectives throughout the year. This is a visual way of letting departmental employees know if they’re on track.
- The “Days without Incident” web part is a SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) web part.
- The web part in the middle of the page is the out of the box Summary Links web part that has simply been skinned using CSS.