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.

From a quick scan of the blogosphere its become pretty apparent I’m not the only one questioning what exactly Microsoft have been up to with Sharepoint?!? Have their software architects been sitting completely siloed and at the last moment bolted together various ‘bits’ to make the overall “Sharepoint” product.

Don’t get me wrong – it’s a fantastic application, but when you see time and time again how people use it “out-the-box” you baulk! It can most definitely be twisted into something more than a very expensive semi-website-thing or ‘fancy’ collaborative shared drive – that is its power.

Though when dumped out as purely an “out-the-box” solution one really has to explain Sharepoint: “Please suspend your understanding of what a shared drive is and also please suspend how you understand you might navigate through a website – neither of these learned concepts are going to suffice here, sorry!”

Breadcrumbs for one thing. Eh? Breadcrumbs here and breadcrumbs there and they all point to different areas and change strangely depending on what you happen to be viewing at the time. Not that intuitive to the average joe punter especially when the screen jumps between lists and webpages.

At least thats where the SharePoint consultancy comes in I guess?! Maybe Microsoft do know what they’re doing ;)

I was passed a fantastic link to Joel Olesons’s blog post on the Microsoft Developer Network at:

http://blogs.msdn.com/joelo/archive/2007/03/16/information-architecture-and-the-information-architect.aspx

Though Joel’s post is essentially discussing the deployment of Microsoft Sharepoint in an Enterprise environment its essentially questioning the very core of what is an Intranet environment for any content management! Not only deloying technology but past/current Intranet structures too on whatever CMS!

Noted painfully is the central question missed time and time again of  “Who actually owns an Intranet?”. Large organisations inherently contain internal power struggles between various departments as a matter of course, but to miss the potential glue between these with a misconfigured and misunderstood “Intranet” is not only costly in technology itself, but also collaborative and  potential productivity that can be gained from having one in the first place. Siloed information architecture and strategy is the exact opposite of these key tenants.

Why do companies have an Intranet? Mostly because someone somewhere managed to convince those with the purse strings that it would increase these key tenants of collaboration and productivity or simply just in having a centralised communicative point. “Rhetorically” … why then are these points in their entirety lost and never fulfilled?