Expanding Sharepoint on the Web

In a previous article I talked about how we, at CCM, have taken our Internal WSS 3.0 (Sharepoint - Free Version), and are now publishing the Church Calendar to the Internet in a live fashion using Web Services.  Yesterday was a great day for us when our programmer completed our second Sharepoint on the Web project.

One of my big pet peeves is that data should always be current and we shouldn't have to enter it more than once.  Our staff directory on the web always seemed to lag far behind all our other systems.

So enter Sharepoint.  We had already been keeping all our staff contact information in a WSS list, so to me it's only natural to connect that data to the web site as well.

After some frustration and little work we now have a fully functional staff contact list that is searchable, and always up to date on the website.  Thanks to Richie the programmer (who I am encouraging to start a blog and share more howto) for getting this all online.

Check out our new Staff Contact List on the CCM Website!

Taking Sharepoint Calendars to the Web

There are many times in my career that I have ideas, and this is no exception. About a year and half ago, I had an idea... An IT guy idea. Lets get the data in one place, and then connect everything to that. As a truly lazy computer person, I hate, abhor the idea of repetitive tasks...That's why I like computers.

About a year ago, I shared an idea with my programmer about publishing a Sharepoint calendar to our website live...embedded in the page with no visible links back to Sharepoint.

About a month ago, my programmer, Richie, came back to me and wanted to tackle the project. About two weeks our beta went online, and last week we went live with a new breed of calendar.

http://www.calvaryccm.com/community/eventscalendar.aspx

This link takes you to a Flash Calendar that is reading it's data from Sharepoint WebServices on our back end Sharepoint site (our Intranet), and pumping in to the Flash App as an XML Document.

What is so totally cool about this is that it allows all of our ministries to publish their calendar information through standard methods (ie Sharepoint), and not have to learn something new. We are working on expanding this idea to include Categories (Each Ministry) and some of our larger venues as locations. We are also incorporating some really cool filtering so that each ministry can have their own calendars still based off the original idea.

When I found out that there were 12 calendars that all needed to be kept current...Well that blew my mind.

Thanks Microsoft, Thanks Sharepoint, Thanks Richie.... My hat is off to you for making this happen.

More to come on the Publishing Sharepoint Idea.