Category Archives: Graphs

This week’s workshops: visualization, Gantt and Sparklines

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I am presenting three live online workshops this week, with Mark Miller from EndUserSharePoint.com. As usual, each participant receives a sandbox to try out the solutions we provide.

March 23, 2010 – Inline Visualizations in SharePoint
An entry level workshop where you’ll learn how to add color and other effects to your SharePoint lists. Here is a live demo:
http://www.pathtosharepoint.com/Lists/TasksVisualization/AllItems.aspx

March 24, 2010 – SharePoint Gantt Chart Enhancements
The participants will receive 6 snippets of code. The centerpiece is the dynamic timescale (month/week/day), as demonstrated on this mockup:
http://www.pathtosharepoint.com/Pages/GanttTimeScale.aspx

March 25, 2010 – Dynamic Feedback through SharePoint and Sparkline Charts
Sparklines are a fascinating, relatively new way to communicate. More compact than traditional charts, richer than traditional indicators, they are very popular in dashboards that require to synthesize large amounts of data.
jQuery and Google will come to the rescue to help us integrate these mini-charts in SharePoint. But of course we’ll also share some homemade recipes!

For more information and to register, follow this link:
http://eusp-chartsandgraphs.eventbrite.com

Explore your SharePoint network on Twitter with Mentionmap

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Well, I think the easiest way to understand this is to see it in action!

1/Go to this page:
http://apps.asterisq.com/mentionmap/#hashtag-sharepoint

2/ Watch the graph build itself and start interacting with it
and/or
3/ Enter your Twitter id in the green text box, on the top left

How it works (source Asterisq): Mentionmap loads each user’s Twitter status updates (tweets) and finds the people and hashtags they talked about the most.[…] In this data visualization, mentions become connections.

Now, here is the reason why Mentionmap immediately caught my attention: the idea is not new to me, this network graph is something I already thought about in the past. I never blogged about it, but back in January I was in contact with Daniel McLaren, the author of the application, and built a proof of concept, based not on Twitter but on Technorati:
http://www.pathtosharepoint.com/Pages/constellation_roamer.html
Click for example on endusersharepoint.com to see which blogs linked to it (remember, the data is from January).

I dropped the idea because it didn’t work out so well with Technorati – the data was too scarce to be meaningful.

So, let me know if Mentionmap works for you! Does the graph help you discover useful connections?

And for Lord of the Rings fans: check out this experiment on timeline visualization, also by Daniel McLaren.