Richard Willis – SharePoint Learning Kit Coordinator, SalamanderSoft Owner

There are currently still places available for SharePoint Saturday in November.

SharePoint Saturday is a free community event devoted to SharePoint, and this year is being held in Nottingham. There’s more information at Home – SharePoint Saturday UK. It’s got a fantastic line up of speakers and well worth attending if you have any interest in SharePoint, whether an IT Pro, Dev or End User.

I’m attending so if anyone wants to talk SLK or SharePoint in education, I’d be happy to meet up.

I’ve just released SLK 1.6 to Beta on the CodePlex site. This has actually been ready to go for a while, several months in fact, but I haven’t managed to find the time for documentation of the new functionality. I’ve now taken the decision to release it without the documentation so that people can at least start using it and feeding back any problems.

The main changes are:

• Better handling of not quite fully compliant SCORM content
• Textual grading as well as numeric (optional) e.g. ABC type grades
• Quick assignment type. That is assignments not based on a document. This should make it much easier to use for a homework diary, especially if the assignment is along the lines of "Read chapters 1 & 2 of book y."
• Email alerts. The most requested extra functionality.

The Calendar Overlays in SharePoint 2010 is a fantastic feature which allows you to display multiple calendars in the same view. This allows you to logically partition your calendar events into separate calendars and view them all together without having to lump them all in one calendar. This makes maintaining the calendars far simpler, especially as each calendar can have it’s own permissions limiting read and write access to the events.

An example from a school might be:

Here’s a sceenshot of the calendar’s overlayed in month view. The Whole School events are in green, the Exams in yellow and the staff in blue.

  This all works great out of the box. The problem comes when you don’t have permission to one of the calendars. So when a student views this they can see all the events from the Whole School and Exams calendar, but also get the error message "Unexpected response from server".

This doesn’t look very good.

Luckily there’s an easy solution to this. You just need to add the following css to the page. The easiest way is through a content editor web part, either directly in it, or my preferred method is to link to a text file with it in so it can be reused.

<style type="text/css">.ms-acal-error{    display:none !important;}</style>

This will hide the text and error image from showing so they won’t know that anything is amiss, or that there is a calendar they don’t have access to unless they look at the page source.

I have just added an option to export thumbnails from Sims.net using our free PhotoExport tool.

The driver behind this was to load the photos into Active Directory for use in Outlook/Exchange 2010. For use in Outlook the photos need to go into the thumbnailPhoto attribute. The attribute’s maximum size is 100Kb, however the Exchange commandlet Import-RecipientDataProperty puts a 10Kb limit on it. In addition the recommended size for images in Outlook/Exchange is 96 x 96 pixels.

So when the thumbnail option is used for PhotoExport, it first checks to see if the image size if over 10Kb and if it is, it then resizes the image so the longest side is 96 pixels. How large the image file size actually is will depend on it’s format of course. With the images from the Sims test database a 96 x 96 bmp is about 22 Kb while the same size Jpeg is only about 3Kb. As the file format required by Outlook/Exchange is Jpeg, then that works out as a good size.

The switch to export thumbnails is /thumbnail, so to export thumbnail jpegs for staff the command would be

PhotoExport username password outputFolder /format:jpg /thumbnail /staff

Here’s a screen shot showing the difference in sizes