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Countdowns, and generally speaking comparisons with Today’s date, have been a recurring theme on my blog.
SharePoint 2010 hasn’t brought much improvement to the “Today” issue, so the workarounds published on my blog in 2008 remain a good reference, either the one I wrote for Data View Web Parts or Alexander Bautz’ follow up article for list views.
A year ago, I blogged about two other solutions, one relying on jQuery, the other on Flash and ClockLink.com (the demos are not active anymore).
Today I am showing two new examples that are much simpler than the previous ones. The live demo is here:
http://sp2010.pathtosharepoint.com/Portfolio/Pages/Countdown.aspx
Why much simpler? Because the only thing you need in the page is my Text to HTML script – the exact same that is used for color coding calendars. The calculated column will take care of all the rest (for example the formula to calculate the difference between target date and Today, or the color selection).
Note that there’s a key difference between the two examples: the “Countdown” column relies on the local time of your computer, while the “TimeAndDate” column pulls today’s time from TimeAndDate.com. In the past, I have already highlighted this important choice (for example, don’t use the local computer time if you’re building an auctions site!).
The drawback of this new approach is redundancy - the current date is calculated for each item. So I would recommend to only use it for views with few items.
You’ll notice that the column filters also render the HTML (cf. above screenshot). That’s because the page uses a custom version of my Text to HTML. It is still work in progress, so please don’t copy this script!
I have been asked by someone working for Microsoft if I could relay the information about the SharePoint Journeys contest.
I am happy to oblige, as I like this initiative for a couple reasons.
First, this is another move from Microsoft to listen to the SharePoint community. Reinforcing the links with the community is something Microsoft has been pushing in the past year, for example on social networks with people like Eric Ligman.
Another reason is that the contest is not limited to technical folks with years of SharePoint experience. Even if you have just started your journey, the SharePoint team would like to hear about your collaborative experience.
To enter the contest, just create a short video (approximately 2 minutes) explaining how you use SharePoint to support the work being done by your organization in one of three contest categories. The closing date for submissions is February 16, 2011.
There will be three winners, one for each category:
- Ramping Up: Early use of SharePoint using a few of the workloads for part of an organization to improve how people share information and work together. Examples include building team sites or MySites, deploying Intranet sites or portals, or implementation of an extranet to collaborate with partners.
- Building Momentum: Consolidation of content management and collaboration infrastructure on SharePoint to drive broad adoption across an organization and beyond. Examples include using multiple workloads, implementing dotcom sites, and end user adoption success.
- Driving Business Value: Building applications on SharePoint that integrate back end data in documents, business processes and web experiences. Examples include building custom applications, business intelligence solutions and FAST search for Internet sites.
For more details, please visit the SharePoint Journeys site.
Happy New Year 2011!
I have several projects for this year, and I’ll detail them in future posts. For now, I just wanted to announce the main one.
In the past couple years, I have been working mostly online. This has been a fantastic experience, especially as I got to work with amazing people who gave me their trust, even though they had never met me in person.
In 2011, I’ll continue my online activities, but it is also time for me to start working again in real offices, and show up in SharePoint conferences and user group meetings. Yes, I am back to Earth! This is a strange feeling, as I’ll have to get reaccustomed to things I haven’t done in a while - drive a car, wear a wrist watch, get myself a mobile phone…
My first step this month is to start my company, in San Diego. I’ll attend SharePoint Saturday San Diego on February 26th, and hopefully other events in the area in February-March. I also plan to visit other places, in California (San Francisco, LA), Texas and Florida. Then we’ll see… wish me luck!
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