I’ve added a property to Salamander My Sites so that you can now filter the site list by a regular expression on the site url.
When the Site Name RegEx is set it checks the sites’ urls and only shows links to those that match the regular expression. In the case pictured only those sites with urls such as
http://moss/classes/Art1A
http://moss/classes/Art-b2
etc
This was prompted by a request from a school who wanted to link to a subjects class sites from their departmental site.
They wanted to keep all the class sites under the classes sub-site, as per the default Microsoft Learning Gateway set up as that’s the easiest way for students to get to them.
I’ve had several conversations with several schools about MOSS My Sites. A lot of people are finding that they are too powerful and the pupils have too much control over what they can do in them. Personally I think that they are a great tool for collaboration and would let them loose with them, possibly after some modification to the default (see my previous post) and trialling it with a subset of the school, but I don’t actually work in a school and deal directly with the problems that might cause.
However, for those who don’t want to do this, an alternative would be to create sites for the pupils within your normal SharePoint structure, just like your class sites under the Classes tab in MLG. You’ve then got all your normal permission levels and restrictions you can use, and generally tie it up a lot tighter. You can even define custom permission levels. I’m working with a few schools on implementing this for pupils and staff using Salamander SharePoint.
Taking it to another level, a request I’ve just received from one school is:
I am quite interested in developing a
SharePoint site, similar to the class sites for every teacher.Giving them a kind of My Site where they could post resources, links and a profile etc. I would need the script to create a site for each member of staff based on a template and then assign permissions for the teacher and then for all the students that the teacher teaches.
This is actually quite powerful and really easy with Salamander SharePoint. It sets up collaboration sites and also the community which can use them, and automatically keeps this community up to date. It’s requests like these which can add another level to how SharePoint is used in your school.
I’ve been asked a few time about how to customise the MOSS My Sites. Unlike SharePoint 2003, the reality is that it’s not easy. It may seem like a retrograde step, but as they are so powerful, adding a facility to modify all of them becomes difficult.
The easiest and most obvious way, altering the templates, is not supported as they are considered a core part of SharePoint. It will work, but Microsoft do not guarantee that they won’t be overwritten in any upgrade.
That leaves the only way is by running some custom code. This isn’t great for anyone who isn’t a developer. If you want how it’s done, Steve Peschka has some great information on how to do this on his blog. Even better than this, he has wrapped it all up as part of the Community Kit Project for SharePoint on CodePlex and released it as MySiteCreate.
What MySiteCreate allows you to do is specify a different master page for the My Sites and also specify web parts and their properties in an xml file. No more messing around with code, just a great tool to let you get on with the job.
I had an interesting request from one of my customers asking if Salamander My Sites could filter the sites returned by the roles the user has on the sites. I was interested enough, and it was easy enough that I added it straight away.
I’ve added a new property “Permission”, which you set to one of the permissions/roles in SharePoint e.g. Contribute. The web part will then only display sites on which the user has that permission/role.
The only limitation that I’m aware of is that the role name is case-sensitive. If the role is not present then the web part will display an error message.
The web part remains free and can be downloaded from http://www.salamandersoft.co.uk/webparts/mysites.zip.
