SharePoint List Rotator - Rotate More than Just Images

One of  my primary responsibilities here at Bamboo is to keep the team active on our blog.  Fortunately, we have a lot of excellent writers around the company, and most folks are happy to contribute whenever they have time.  Still, I always believe we can do more, and I'm pretty constantly encouraging and prodding co-workers to come up with new content for the blog.  To be honest, I've come to suspect that there are people who dodge me in the hallways to avoid being harangued regarding the benefits and joys of blogging.

When I do manage to corner a hapless co-worker on the subject, the excuse most often given for having not blogged more recently is "I don't know what to blog about."   Yes, I am fully aware that this is often just a polite excuse.  What people are too kind to say is that they are 120% occupied with their core responsibilities, and making time to blog is tough.  I get it, I really do, it's hard for me too.

Still, it's my job to push, eliminate obstacles and make it easy for people to contribute.  I think it's completely fair for a prospective blogger to ask for a list of ideas and to look to my team to provide a prioritized list of topics that would most benefit our readers.  If we can minimize the effort to blog by eliminating the work of brainstorming for topics, we need to do that. 

I think it was pretty natural for us to look to our company SharePoint portal as a repository for suggested blog topics.  We already keep the editorial calendar for our site in a standard SharePoint list.  It was a trivial effort to add a new topic type "Pending Blog Post Ideas" to that list.  Whenever a promising blog topic occurs to us, we simply add it to the list and categorize it appropriately.  We created a custom view for the editorial calendar which lists only these suggested topics.  The idea was that well intentioned individuals in need of inspiration would visit that list, select the appropriate view, pick a hot topic and commence blogging.

Unfortunately, I have to admit that this solution has been largely unsuccessful.  I'm sad to say that this resource still probably requires too much effort on the part of the blogger.  The author has to navigate to my department site, drill down to the editorial calendar, remember to select that custom view and then read a long list of topics in hope of finding a subject of interest.  As a writer, I should have known that this just isn't the way people work.  The motivation to blog comes from inspiration and the joy of sharing a discovery.  It's about serendipity, not process.  To do this right, I need to expose my potential authors to a steady stream of random ideas.  In that stream I'm more confident that they will spot a priority subject, connect it to their recent experiences and find the inspiration they need to commit to an act of creation.  Will this approach completely eliminate the "I don't know what to blog about" excuse and generate a month long backlog of new posts?  Probably not.  But I really do believe it's an incremental improvement.

So, how to execute?  Well, as blog-worthy topics go at Bamboo, there's no better place to start than our product portfolio.  With more than 50 SharePoint Web Parts and Solution Accelerators, we always need to be writing about our products.  Even the simplest of Bamboo products have a myriad of configuration options and an even greater number of potential uses and applications based on those settings.  As a rule of thumb, if we don't have five supporting blog posts for a given product, we're probably not doing everything we can to communicate the value proposition.

With this as a starting point, I generated a report providing me with a list of Bamboo products that had been blogged about less than three times.  The next step was to come up with a creative way to present this list to prospective authors.  I found my own inspiration in that list of "neglected" products, Bamboo's SharePoint List Rotator Web Part.

What is a List Rotator?  It's a very simple Web Part that pulls items from a SharePoint list and displays each item dynamically.  I think for the most part, people think of List Rotator as a way to rotate or flip through images creating a basic slideshow in SharePoint.  Bamboo's List Rotator provides a variety of fun effects for this purpose, including Gradient Wipe, Pixelate and Dissolve, which can be combined with a variety of rotation styles, including Random, Smooth Scroll and Slideshow. 

However, Bamboo's List Rotator Web Part enables you to spin much more than just images.  With a little bit of extra configuration, you can put together a display that rotates list items from any type of SharePoint list, choosing data from whatever columns you choose. 

For my application, I created a standard Picture Library.  I then uploaded a batch of icons to my Picture Library corresponding to the list of products I wanted to represent.  Next I added a couple of new columns to the Picture Library so that I could associate SEO keywords, priority and suggested blog topics for each product.

Configuring the display required a little bit of custom HTML and some minor adjustments to CSS.  Don't be initimidated by either of these tasks, Bamboo List Rotator ships with some nice basic starter code snippets.  Following instructions provided in the online Application Notes for Bamboo List Rotator Web Part, virtually anyone can customize these snippets without serious knowledge of HTML or CSS.

The only part of this process that was the least bit difficult was tracking down SharePoint's internal column names for the fields I wanted to include in my display.  In case you ever need to do this for any reason, I learned two pretty straightforward tricks for finding these otherwise obscure field references.  1) Internal column names are exposed in the HTML under the Display Form of any list item.  If you View Source for this page and search for the string "FieldInternalName".  You'll quickly discover the internal column names for every column in the list.  2) The other trick I found for tracking down the column name came from Martijn Molegraaf's post on just another sharepoint blog.  In his post CAML - requires internal column name, he shares the the tip that [the] "Best way to find the internal name of the filed is to edit the field and it will be found in the end of URL"  I found both approaches to be useful.

After pulling this all together, I ended up with a very satisfying new addition to my department team site, behold:

This little panel now randomly flips through all of the items in my list.  Thanks to the cool animated effects (mine is currently set to random dissolve), you can't help notice this any time you visit my department team site.

Well see if this approach really helps to stimulate increased blogging at Bamboo.  But for your purposes I would recommend you consider this application in your SharePoint environment any time you want to expose users to the depth and breadth of content stored in a SharePoint list.  I can imagine this being set up to create an interesting "Did You Know" feature on top of any document library.  It's inexpensive, easy and quick.  Give it a try.

As always, I'm bound by law to remind you that Bamboo List Rotator Web Part and all Bamboo products are available for download and a free 15-day trial.  Try it today!

Finally, although you already know there are not nearly enough blog posts about this Web Part, do check out Emmanuel's post How to Configure Custom Style in the List Rotator Web Part.  You'll find his tips very helpful if you want to dress up and personalize your own instance.