May 04
If you hadn’t noticed Microsoft have started a PR campaign to highlight the next SharePoint Conference, which will be held in Las Vegas.
As with last year you can access the SharePoint Conference website and sign up for regular updates, that way you will know exactly when the registration will open so you don’t miss out on a place.
If you missed last years conference then you can also purchase full access to the conference content from the site as well.
May 02
In education involving the parents in the learning process goes a long way to deciding the success of the child, but how do you effectively provide information to parents that they need and want so they feel that they can have an influence.
There are a number of data areas that parents should now about in my opinion
All three of these areas can be presented to the parent through one unified interface – SharePoint
Provide your parents with logins to your SharePoint environment and then present all the data to the parent from one place
If parents know what their children are doing in School then they are in a much better position to help out, so giving them access to student timetables is a must
From the main SharePoint page they can click on a link that will open up a live view of their child’s timetable
After logging onto SharePoint the parent can navigate to view their child current attendance data
All of this data is live and updated as new lesson registers are taken
Homework is a massive part of any students education, so therefore if parents have a better view of what homework is being set and when its due they can have more control on the completion of said homwwork
Using a proprietary system parents can view the homework for their children from the main page of SharePOint
This shows homework that is still due but using a link the parents can view all homework that has been set over the academic year
Reporting on students is a regular process in Schools and providing access to those reports for parents is quite simple in SharePoint
Again using proprietary web parts reports can be presented to parents for download as PDF’s
If you would like to know how you can reproduce the same functionality in SharePoint then please get in touch and we can have a chat
May 01
If you have read any of my posts before then you will know that SharePoint 2010 is at the heart of nearly all of my education based solutions. The latest one which has been in use since September 2011 is a homework setting system.
The screenshots below show you how the system is accessed by teachers, students and parents.
The teacher launches the form from the navigation menu of SharePoint and is presented with the form shown below
As you can see most of it is filled in apart from the Assign To: section
This uses a simple person picker and the teacher assigns the homework to a specific Homework Teaching Group which they can search for using the search facility on the person picker control
Once the homework group has been selected then the teacher just clicks on Submit
The first port of call for any student is the SharePoint based Learning Gateway and this is where they see their personalised view of the homework set
Here they get a sorted list showing them a quick summary of their homework, sorted by due date
Any homework past its due date does not appear in this list but the students can view a full list by using a navigation drop down to view their School data & Homework
All parents have access to the SharePoint site and when they login they get a similar but slightly different view to the students
As you can see, they can see the homework list of their child or children
Plus using the links on the main screen they can view all the homework that has been set not just the current homework
Because all of this homework is stored within SharePoint it allows senior managers to run analysis on it and reports showing what , who and how much homework is being set
It also makes it very easy for staff to search by student and find what homework has been set for a student, great for answering those queries from parents
This system has been running well since September and the next steps are to introduce two new features
Apr 24
In two previous posts I detailed a method of using partial text in a search filter on a data view web part. You can find the posts here:
Up until now I have always created one page per search, but some of my users started to complain that this meant more time was taken up keep changing pages so I started to look into how to create multiple searches on the same page.
So my page has a data view web part and a three text searches added.
The next step is to add the parameters that I will use to filter the list
To do this highlight the data view web part and select Parameters from the ribbon
The image below shows the 3 parameters I have added, in each case the source is a query string and the variable should match exactly the title of the column you will be searching on
I now need to add the filters to the data view web part
To do this highlight the data view web part and from the ribbon select Filter
The filtering uses a series of And/Or options to filter the data that is presented in the data view web part
The image below shows the criteria that will be used to filter the data view
Using the Or option means that the filter will look for any one of the first 3 criteria AND the final criteria, so for example it could filter the data on Year AND ARCode or any one of the 3 combinations
I now need to connect the text filters to the data view web part
To do this right click the first text filter and click Add Connection
Select Send Filter Values To and click Next
Leave the default selected and click Next
On this screen select the data view web part you want to connect to, set the target action to Get Parameters From and click Next
On this screen you need to match the text filter to the Parameters you set earlier in the process. If you title your text filters to match what they are going to filter on it makes it a lot easier
Now click on Next & Finish
So that’s the text filter setup, you only need to repeat the process for each text filter on the page changing the setting for the last screen
If we now navigate to the page we can test out the filters
Lets start with a surname that is in the data
As you can see it brings up data of a user with Smith in their name
So what about the other searches
So that’s the tutor group search working as well
And finally the year search
Apr 17
Last year I was not only lucky enough to attend the European SharePoint conference in Berlin but also to deliver two presentations.Next time around the conference is being held in Copenhagen in February 2013.
The conference is one of the best I have attended and the calibre of speakers exceptional (I’m not just saying that because I was one !!). So if you have some interesting stories to tell about your use of SharePoint or you just think what you do is worth sharing then get you speaker submission in now, mine are already in and with any luck I will see you there. Click the image below to go to the speaker submission page.
