Dec 15
My Links
Mark Jordan
I have had passion for computers since the day I removed a controller board from my father's Apple II Plus computer, and fried the mother board because I did not power down first (sorry, Dad). From my first bouncing ball around the screen, to today's business solutions, each software development effort is a joyful challenge.
I have been involved with Microsoft technologies for the past 10+ years, and have architected small, one-person efforts as well as lead 15-person teams over the course of years. Recent efforts have primarily focused on using Microsoft SharePoint as a solution platform.
For personal enjoyment, I love golfing, but admit that it has given way to more time spent with my growing children and my wife – you cannot beat the value of an hour picking cherries with the whole family, regardless of how beautiful a golf course is. Any chance anyone out there needs a business solution about golf?
More about Mark
Articles by Mark Jordan
Are you missing the My Links feature from SharePoint 2007? Many have expressed disbelief that Microsoft would deprecate a feature that was used dependably and ritually by so many users. You can see references to some of these expressions at http://sharepoint911.com/blogs and http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/.
Microsoft is trying to justify the removal by indicating that the still-existing My Links collection can be migrated over to “tagging”, but many are not ready to add that on top of the bigger SharePoint 2010 environment learning curve.
And since clients have told us My links is still desired, we at C/D/H have recreated the My Links menu.
“My Links” in SharePoint 2007 (see Figure 1) allowed the following from a drop down in the page header:
- Viewing a list of sites for which the user was a member, and instant navigation to a site by clicking on one of the items
- Adding the current page to the collection of links
- Viewing the collection of links, categorized by group, with fly-out submenus, and instant navigation to a link when clicked
- Navigation to Manage Links for adding, editing, and deleting links in the collection.
Figure 1: Screen shot of My Links in a SharePoint 2007 environment
Because this feature is missed by many, we recreated it using SharePoint 2010′s development framework. When activated, a “My Links” menu item is added to the “User” (see Figure 2) drop down menu, and the SharePoint 2007 “My Links” menu hierarchy is faithfully replicated.
Figure 2: Expansion of the “User” drop down menu in SharePoint 2010, showing the new My Links submenu.
Figure 3: The My Links management page, allowing the user to add ad-hoc links, and modify or delete existing links.
C/D/H provides this solution and more for SharePoint 2010. If it’s of interest to you, contact me via email or at 616.776.1600.