RSS Feed
Last week we released "Tagged Links", a solution that brings Social Bookmarking to SharePoint (WSS/MOSS). Today I would like to take you on a walk-through of how it works and the capabilities it provides.
What is the one thing you should know about the "Tagged Links" solution?
Well, that it has everything the "Links List" has, but a lot more! Take a look through the walk-through below, email me at daniel@zevenseas.com for more information, or try it yourself:
As you can see a "Tagged Links" list looks like any other SharePoint List, the only exception is the text appearing just above the view.
To create a browser button for quickly adding links to this list, right-click the below link, select 'Add to Favorites...' and select the 'Links' folder in your favorites: Add link to MyDemoSite - Tagged Links
This will appear above all "Tagged Links" lists and provides you with a way to add a shortcut to your browser that quickly adds useful websites you find to the list.
This is how it works:
1) Right click on the "Add link to Tagged Links - Tagged Links" link, and select "Add to Favorites"
You may be prompted with the following:
If so, select "Yes" because the "Tagged Links" list is a trusted source.
2) When prompted by your browser, place the shortcut in the "Links" folder:
3) After clicking "Add", notice that a new button has been placed on the "Links" toolbar in your browser (if that has been turned on):
4) Finally, lets see what this shortcut can do for us. Browse to a page, for example my blog http://community.zevenseas.com/blogs/daniel, then, lets pretend (yes I know it is difficult) that you wanted to add my site into your tagged links list. With a standard links list you would have to copy the URL, browse to your links list, create a new item, paste in the URL and then enter a title. With a "Tagged Links" browser shortcut we do that for you!
Click on the "Add link to MyDemoSite - Tagged Links"
Notice that the URL and Title fields are already completed for you and that you are taken directly to the "New Item" form from the web site you were viewing when you clicked the button. All you need to do now, is tag it.
While you can tag information in SharePoint with "Choice" or "Lookup" fields, it's not quite as easy as we wanted it to be, so we have introduced a new "Tags" field. Behind the scenes it is a standard "Choice" field with a "Fillin" option, however, unlike the standard Choice field with the Fill-in enabled, when you enter a new fill-in value, it's automatically added to the list of choices in the field itself. This means that next time you save a link, that tag is already available and just a checkbox tick away.
Lets see it in action.
In this example lets say we wanted to tag my blog with our company name "zevenseas". Unfortunately this value has not yet been added to the Choice list. In a standard links list this would mean going into list settings, modifying the "Tags" field, adding the choice and then refreshing my page. With "Tagged Links" we just type it in, along with any other Tags separated by a "," or a ";".
Now watch what happens when I save the item, and then go back in to edit it:
Notice that those new tags are now Choices defined in the choice list, just to confirm lets take a look:
So that is a real time saver, and it means that your Tags can be kept more consistent.
Keeping tags as consistent as possible across your "Tagged Links" lists is going to make the information you store there easier to find. To help you do this we have introduced the concept of "Global Tags". These are a set of tags that you define at the Site Collection level, and are then available to any "Tagged Links" list, in any site, within the Site Collection.
To define these Global Tags open site settings and then click on "Global Tags" under the galleries heading:
This will take you to the following list, where you define Tags by simply entering them in:
When defined these are available via your "Tagged Links" list toward the bottom of the form:
Of course all this information is useless if there is not an easy way to find what you are looking for. So in addition to standard SharePoint views, we have included two specialised views, the Tag Cloud and the Tag List. These are shown below, and provide a simple way to one-click filter the information you are seeing.
This concludes the tour, I hope it has been informative, any questions please mail me at daniel@zevenseas.com and if you would like to have a play around yourself, then feel free to log on here:
Site: Tagged Links Username: Coral\DemoUser Password: DemoUser