One evening earlier this week, my manager sent me an email with the subject line, "Task for the Day." Having spent a portion of his own day spending some serious quality time with a number of Bamboo products in our team's Test environment, he wanted his teammates to share the love. Hence, the following assignment's arrival in my inbox on Monday night:
Please download and install List and Forms Extensions Toolkit to our team's Test site.
Once the Web Part is successfully installed to our instance of MOSS, go in and create a list that includes an instance of each component of the custom column pack.
Submit the final product for review when complete.
Now is probably a good time to mention that the List and Forms Extensions Toolkit is a product package which consists of Bamboo's four custom-engineered list columns: Bamboo Lookup Selector, Bamboo Rich Text, Bamboo Visual Indicator, and Bamboo Column Level Security.
Our team isn't a technical team in the strictest sense, so my manager helpfully included the relevant links that would be necessary for me to accomplish the task, and invited that I come to him with questions as necessary. Of course, regular readers will have already guessed by now that I relished such an assignment, as I knew that I'd come out of it not only with some new SharePoint knowledge, but that it would also be blog-worthy knowledge as an added bonus. (Regular readers will also know that I selfishly consider blog-worthy knowledge to be the very best kind of knowledge.) And I found the task to be every bit as rewarding as I'd hoped.
Since I have administrator permissions on our team's Test system—and thanks to the links and basic instructions with which I'd been helpfully provided—I was able to successfully perform an install of the product(s) to the server, without any with only the tiniest bit of help required.
Once installed on the server, and I was back in my natural habitat of the (Test system's) portal environment, I then created a Custom Column test page, and it was shortly thereafter that I encountered an unexpected curveball. You see, I was looking for the Custom Columns in the Web Parts gallery and, despite the fact that I knew they'd been successfully installed on the server, I wasn't seeing them listed there.
Since I'm blessed with first-rate colleagues here at Bamboo, however, Angela Dillon from our Sales Team heard of my consternation, and was good enough to light my path with a well-timed tip. That tip was that the Custom Column Pack isn't a Web Part and, once installed, the columns will simply appear amidst the available Create Column options within any list for the site on which they were installed. Sure enough, and as you can see in the accompanying picture, clicking Create Column under the Settings menu within my test list revealed all four of the custom columns as having been added to the available options on the Create Column page.
And that seems like a natural end point for part one of this look at the Custom Column Pack. Tune in Monday for the exciting conclusion part two, as our intrepid hero continues his quest to successfully complete his assignment, to the cheers of the gathered throngs.
(Note: Gathered throngs exist soley in the mind of our erstwhile hero.)
Getting to Know the List and Forms Extensions Toolkit (collect all three!):
Posted
Mar 06 2009, 06:00 PM
by
John Anderson
Filed under: SharePoint List, Custom Column, List and Forms Extensions Toolkit, Rich Text, Custom Column Security, Visual Indicator, Lookup Selector, SharePoint Dashboards, SharePoint Columns, SharePoint Dashboard, SharePoint Encryption, SharePoint List Lookup, SharePoint List Drop Down, sharePoint Rich Text, SharePoint KPI, Encrypt SharePoint, SharePoint Lookup Column, SharePoint Field Level Security
John Anderson joined Bamboo Solutions as Manager of Content & Syndication in May 2008 after a 12-year career at AOL. New to SharePoint at the time of his hiring, John was tasked with creating a new blog for the just-launched Bamboo Nation community in which he would document his daily SharePoint learning process. Thus was born the end user-centric SharePoint Blank, for which John authored 200 posts within a year, and which he continues to write today. Today, John writes SharePoint Blank in addition to his responsibilities as Managing Editor at Bamboo and, while he learned much about SharePoint in his first two years, he gleefully celebrates the release of SharePoint 2010 and the reset button that the new platform represents for SharePoint Blank.