Portal Owner QuickStart Guide

I'm currently setting up a common component repository using SharePoint and was looking at a few ideas for it. One thing that I've always found rather interesting was the Portal Owner QuickStart Guide that gets installed by default when you setup a new portal. This rather lonely web part goes practically unnoticed because it is there as a guide when you setup a portal and, once used, is usually deleted. However it's a powerful user experience tool that you may want to take a second look at.

When I said it was a web part, it is. It's a very specific web part buried deep inside of the Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls namespace in the SharePoint assembly. It's not just a simple content web part or a data view. It's a full blown web part that can be customized for your use. The problem is that it's undocumented, not very user friendly to configure and even harder to customize.

Basically the web part has a custom property called "LinkHtml" that contains pseudo-HTML that will do three things:

  1. Render the text for your link
  2. Send the user to the link when they click on it
  3. Popup an additional link that you can use for help or information

Here's how you customize the content of your web part:

  1. With the web part on your page click on "Edit Page" from the navigation menu
  2. Select the QuickStart web part and choose "Modify Shared Web Part"
  3. On the tool pane you can specify all the typical web part properties like title, size, etc.
  4. Down at the bottom of the tool pane, expand out the Miscellaneous section
  5. There you'll find the HTML for links field. This is where the magic happens.

The HTML for links field contains pseudo-HTML that is processed by the web part. Here's a sample that produces one link in a group:

<TABLE class="ms-ls">
<TR>
<TD colspan=2 style="padding-top: 6px;" class="ms-smallheader">
<SPAN class="ms-announcementtitle">Sample Group</SPAN>
</TD>
</TR>
<TR>
<TD valign=top><IMG SRC="%LSTBULETGIF%" alt=""></TD>
<TD width="100%" valign=top class="ms-lsmin ms-vb">
BEGINPOPUP /SamplePopup.htm ENDPOPUP
BEGINNAVIGATE /SamplePortalPage.aspx ENDNAVIGATE
BEGINTEXT Sample Text ENDTEXT
</TD>
</TR>
</TABLE>

The magic that happens are the following keywords:

  • BEGINPOPUP [insert link to your popup content here] ENDPOPUP
  • BEGINNAVIGATE [insert link to where you want the user to go here] ENDNAVIGATE
  • BEGINTEXT [insert text to show the user here] ENDTEXT

Note: All three must be present in the HTML for links for the web part to work. Specifying a blank value will render the text incorrectly.

Another thing the web part does is inject the following javascript onto the page when the portal renders it. This provides the popup window that you specify in each BEGINPOPUP/ENDPOPUP pair (don't worry, you don't have to write this it's included when the web part is added to your page but here for reference):

function PQSDI(helpUrl)
{
  window.open(helpUrl,
    '_blank',
    'scrollbars=yes,
    resizable=yes,
    fullscreen=no,
    channelmode=no,
    status=no,
    toolbar=no,
    menubar=no,
    location=no,
    directories=no,
    width=200,
    height=571');
  return false;
} 
</Script>

Once you setup the HTML for links content, the web part will parse it and render out the right HTML to the end user (creating an ONCLICK event to call the PQSDI function when the link is selected).

Yes, it's ugly to edit and no you cannot change the size/position of the popup window but this does provides a nice alternate facility to present information to the user. Also be careful when editing the content. It's very picky about the formatting and sometimes you'll get it, other times it displays nothing or not quite what you want (I haven't had it invalidate my page or anything). Caveat emptor.

So you may want to export this thing to a DWP file and save it for later use if you have something new to introduce to your users and want a way to provide a sort of self-training guide. Hope this helps!

No Comments