SP2010

Annoying Navigation in Search Centers

Andy Burns, , , 3 Comments

I had two of my colleagues come to me with the same complaint – that the Basic Search Center site template in SharePoint 2010 doesn’t have any navigation to get ‘back’ to the rest of the site collection:

I pointed out to them that there are good reasons to consider having the Search Center separated from the rest of your content. I’d even suggest a separate Site Collection if using the Enterprise Search Center. (This uses the publishing features, and you might not want them turned on in your existing site collection).

However, my colleagues didn’t need all that, and really did just want a simple search center in the same site collection as their content. For example, a departmental site collection needed its own search center and search experience. But they’d really like users to be able to navigate back to the rest of the site collection.

So, I set forth to fix this dire state of affairs for them. Continue reading “Annoying Navigation in Search Centers” →

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Annoying Navigation in Search Centers

SharePoint 2010 Certifications

Andy Burns, 2 Comments

A bit of a glory post, but I’m now SharePoint 2010 Certified:

Regarding the certifications, I was, to be honest, a little disappointed. I felt that the 2010 exams were actually easier than the 2007 ones. I suspect that this is due to the significant expansion of ways of developing with SharePoint 2010; the exams did feel like they were ‘shallow but wide’ rather than ‘focused but deep’. Certainly it seems like a big jump from this to Certified Master.

I do like the new two tier certification structure (Technical Specialist, then Professional developer), and the streaming into Admin/configuration and Development makes sense too. I just wonder if there needs to be further breakdown in these aspects, perhaps so a greater depth of knowledge can be tested.

Still, I’m offically not a total muppet.

SharePoint 2010 Certifications

Silverlight in SharePoint 'Hello World' demo

Andy Burns, , , 2 Comments

I’ve not used Silverlight, and I though it might be interesting to try the Silverlight Web Part from SharePoint 2010, so I came up with a little ‘hello world’ project. Using Silverlight, I wanted to:

  • Query a SharePoint List for data
  • Display that data

Not exactly complicated stuff, but I figured it would be a start. I decided to query a Picture Library, and display the pictures in my web part, changing the displayed image every few seconds. All of this is very achievable with JavaScript or jQuery and the Content Query Web Part (as some sort of variant on the CQTWP I built), so I thought this would be a good comparison. Continue reading “Silverlight in SharePoint 'Hello World' demo” →

Silverlight in SharePoint 'Hello World' demo