In the past two years, I have published multiple solutions for site owners, allowing them to enhance their SharePoint sites without the need for server side deployments.

These solutions, however, can’t be used by the majority of the SharePoint population: end users who only have read or contribute rights. To remedy this, I am going to release in the next months solutions open to all SharePoint users.

How do these solutions work?

All browsers allow you to save URLs. This feature has different names: favorites in Internet Explorer, bookmarks in other browsers like Firefox and Safari. What is less known is that these Favorites/Bookmarks can also include code. In this case they are called bookmarklets (or favelets).

If you select a bookmark, the browser will load the corresponding page. If you select a bookmarklet, the browser will remain on the current page and run the script. It is as simple as that.

Warning! Bookmarklets can contain malicious code. Only use bookmarklets from trusted sources.

The first bookmarklet I am releasing today allows you to add expand/collapse buttons to the Web Parts present on a SharePoint page. It works in both SharePoint 2007 and 2010. I compacted the code to less than 500 characters, to make it compatible with older browsers.

Try it, now!

First, you need to grab your bookmarklet. Go get it on my SharePoint User’s Toolkit:
http://sp2010.pathtosharepoint.com/SharePoint-User-Toolkit/Pages/Bookmarklet-Expand-Collapse-Web-Parts.aspx

Once you have your bookmarklet, head out to a SharePoint home page and apply it. Again, you only need read access, so you can try it out on the home page of the Chicago User Group (SP 2007), or the San Diego User Group (SP 2010), as I did:

For site owners, I’ll publish a slightly different and more robust version that can be included in the page ( it won’t have the 500 character limit constraint). Actually there’s already one available on my blog, but, as the code is already two years old, it is time for a new release.

Have fun!