Projects - Table of Contents Web Part

Question

Hello,

We have a SharePoint Server 2007 environment.  I used the Seamless Teamwork book to get some ideas on how to organise SharePoint sites.

A couple of the ideas which I like from the book is

• content is visible to all by default, hidden only if necessary
  • that way, you help break down "silos"
• keeping sites as a "corporate memory"
  • content remains discoverable and searchable

One of the things I've done is create a "projects" site, then subsites for each project.  I've then added a "Table of Contents" web part to list the projects.

"Everyone" can see all projects, whether they are participants or not, but their rights change as they navigate down (each project has a "public" site at the top, then subsites for Board and Team, where your rights lessen).

This also works well in Microsoft Office; in File>Open, navigate to the "Projects" site, and it lists projects subsites.  Hence you can navigate quickly, easily and intuitively to a project - via a browser, or rich client.

So far so unremarkable.

The number of projects has grown, and some are completed/inactive or otherwise no longer current.

I'd now like it to show active projects "most prominently", yet continue to provide access to non-active projects.

• when you go to projects site, you're immediately presented with a list of active projects
• however, you can still access completed projects if you wish
• in Microsoft Office, when you navigate to the "projects" site, you somehow see active projects, but can see all projects if you wish

Unfortunately I don't know how to achieve this.  You can create views of lists, but not views of sites.  I don't want to

• create a custom list that has to be manually maintained; I'd rather use the self-maintaining "table of contents" web part; it would also not be consistent with the experience in Microsoft Office.
• I don't want to move sites between an "active" and "completed" parent folders (that would change URLs, etc, be unwieldy, etc

I can see you can set parameters on sites in SharePoint Designer 2007, so possibly you could set an attribute of a site (eg status), but I don't know how you would then use this in the "table of contents".

Apologies in advance if this is a noddy question.  It doesn't seem like a remarkable request, but I don't know how to achieve this.

Kind regards,

Anwar

Answer 1

Hi Anwar,

Thank you for your question.
I am trying to involve someone familiar with this topic to further look at this issue.

Thanks,
Lhan Han

Answer 2

Hi,

 

At a high level you probably can do this on the web interface by using a custom webpart that scans each sitesub for a common list that indicates if this site is active or not.  This list can be updated by a workflow so you don’t have to manually do it.  For SDK information please see: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms473633(v=office.12).aspx

 

This can be expensive and can be a performance hit on the site when it gets very large.

 

Now on the rich client side (Word, Excel) it is hard coded to enumerate all sites (spwebs) that you have rights to when you do the open operation.  So you will have to find a way to overcome this. 

 

You have also mentioned "Projects" many times in your post.  Are you running Project server?  If so we'll need to check with that team for input on this.

 

 

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Regards, Savoeurn Va Microsoft Online Community Support

Answer 3

Hi Savoeurn Va,

Many thanks for your reply!

Your proposal sounds intriguing.  I'm not a programmer, and was hoping to avoid code for something *apparently* so straightforward... (doesn't that apply to everything you try to do in SharePoint...? sigh...)

I am eager for any solution to be "transparent" - works intuitively whether through Internet Explorer, Office 2010 (which is Sharepoint-aware), apps which will show a "SharePoint" GUI in the file>Open dialogue window, or humble Notepad which isn't SharePoint-aware but will happily interact with SharePoint as a generic http/WebDAV target. That way, colleagues who may be sceptical of SharePoint vs a "dumb" file share have less reason to grumble (for example, using Notepad, then having to go into the site/library via IE to add the additional metadata just isn't going to happen!).

Thanks again for your suggestion!

Kind regards,

Anwar