Fantastic article in the latest ITNow magazine in regards to Social Networking ‘in the business’. Simon Morris of Pentura lays down some great pointers on how best to manage and secure such systems against their use in collaborative and strangely ‘Social Networking’ activities.

Do look back to a post here: Building an online community organisational Intranet where a discussion on ‘Social Networking’ within your own organisational Intranet establishes collaborative activites enabling your business rather as hindering!

Further articles are available at http://www.bcs.org/socialmedia

Having wrangled a little with JQuery to obtain data from SharePoint lists I stumbled across SPAPI; a fantastic library to aid you in development. Do check it out over at darrenjohnstone.net 

The ajax function of JQuery had meant toying around with the SOAP packets one was trying to send to get them to work correctly. Tiresome and really not that productive! Big relief that Darren had actually gone through all the pain to create this library as I could see the mountain in front of me and wasn’t personally that keen!

Combining the SPAPI library with JQuery to deal with the returned web service XML however, has proved to be a very successful marriage. To extend this, the below prototyped function has allowed me to only require one hit to the server per request to play with the returned XML. The UI in how its presented to the user is down to your artistic flair ;)

Do note you are required to update your access to your uploaded SPAPI files and JQuery + you’re going to have to write the CAML query you want and add in your own column names etc. to display per item. It’s there, but not for your particular list ;) Enjoy.