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(For more resources on Microsoft Sharepoint, see here.)
Let’s get started with the discussion of SharePoint communities by taking a look at blogs.
At this point in the 21st century, everyone is familiar with what a blog is. In SharePoint, a blog is a site that is characterized by entries of content being listed from newest at the top of the page to oldest at the bottom. Content is determined by the author and can contain metadata such as the author, date, and keywords or tags to designate the categories in which the content belongs.
A blog site can either be the root site or a site contained within another site. This is consistent with all site types in SharePoint. The reason this is pointed out though, is that when creating a new SharePoint engagement, it is important to truly think of the overall goal of the website as a whole. If the website will essentially be a blog with other content thrown in from time to time, then it makes sense for the root site to be of the type blog. Otherwise, it makes sense to make the root site something else like the team site or a blank site and then add a blog site within that root site.
This is important to think about because to add a blog to an existing site is fairly straightforward. Simply, carry out the following steps:
At this point, SharePoint will create a new blog site. The new blog will contain some seed data to get the blog going. There are three categories named appropriately:
The new blog site will also have a location for archives containing the one entry that was seeded in the site titled Welcome to your Blog! This can all be seen in the following screenshot:
Although this blog site is ready to go right now, we will probably want to customize it for our usage scenario. There are several places to customize it, which are as follows:
When new readers reach a blog they look for information about the blog so they can get a high level overview of what to expect from the content of the site. This is usually found in the “about this blog” section of the site. In the SharePoint blog site, the About this blog section is a Wiki Web Part found in the right column. Although we will learn more about Wikis in the next section, for now just know that this web part allows us a what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) editing surface to enter any content we want. To get into this editing mode, carry out the following steps:
The next section to customize on this blog site is the list of categories. When creating a blog entry, we can categorize the contents with a tag. The default categories for a new blog are as follows:
The following steps show how to customize these categories:
(Move the mouse over the image to enlarge.)
Repeat these steps for all three of the default categories. To add more categories, click on the Add new item link below the list of categories. To delete a category, carry out the following steps:
Now that we have a blog, how do we manage the content? This is where the Blog Tools section comes into use. There are 4 links to help us manage the blog, which are as follows:
Clicking on the Create a post link will open a modal dialog with a form to fill out to create a new blog entry. The fields include the following:
The preceding fields are shown in the following screenshot:
Blog entries, like most things in SharePoint, are items in a list. Clicking on the Manage posts link will display all the blog entries. From this list, we can perform many management functions such as the following:
All of the comments are managed in a separate list from the blog entries. Clicking on the Manage comments link will display all of the comments for all of the blog entries in this site. From here we can view, edit, or delete the comments, as well as manage permissions.
Managing permissions on comments and posts is a lot like managing permissions elsewhere in SharePoint. By default, the list items inherit the parent permissions, but occasionally we will want to have specific permissions for special cases. We could have a blog entry that we only want a small group of people to see, or maybe we want to save a comment, so that only we can see it. The manage permissions section is how we can deal with these cases. More information on managing permissions can be found in the online help or on TechNet at the following URL:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc721640.aspx
Although creating a blog entry in the web browser works well, sometimes we may want to use a more powerful tool to create entries. The Launch blog program to post link will open Microsoft Word 2007, or a newer version, to edit a new blog entry.
There is a link in Blog Tools to launch Microsoft Word 2007 or newer, to create a new blog entry. Although Word does a pretty good job of creating new blog entries, there is a free tool from Microsoft, named Windows Live Writer (http://explore.live.com/windows-live-writer) which is true genius when it comes to editing blog entries. Using this tool can make most, if not all, blog posting tasks much easier within SharePoint. Configuring Windows Live Writer for a SharePoint is simple:
That’s all there is to it. The Windows Live Writer interface also displays a preview of what the blog entry will look like in the site by clicking on the Preview tab at the bottom, as shown in the following screenshot:
Finally, the links section allows us to add hyperlinks to the page for easy access to anything. The default entry is to a photo library named Photos. Adding a new link is as simple as the following steps:
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