d.SharePoint - gimme a widget
Soooo, Business 2.0, among others, has declared 2007 to be the year of the widget. Funny really, 'cos the whole bruhaha about portals back in 1999 was the idea of using 'widgets' to bring various applications together on a single page. Widgets back then were often called nuggets, gadgets and iviews, before portlets became the ABM standard (ABM = Anyone but Microsoft, Microsoft renamed nuggets to web parts in 2001 and have stuck with that phrase ever since... until the Live initiative came along and started referring to them as gadgets, as does the Windows Vista Sidebar...)
Anyways, for arguments sake, we'll stick with the phrase 'widget' to refer to a self-contained snippet of an application that can be dropped onto a web page.
If you are a portal user, the year of the widget may sound like old news. But the newer widgets are a little bit different, in that they've sacked their parents - they don't actually need a portal anymore. For an example, check out the widget at Gaping Void - a single line of code is all that is needed to embed Hugh's cartoons in your web page.
This is a nifty improvement that makes widgets much more (re)usable than their portal ancestors.
But this is a post about making SharePoint behave a little more like Web 2.0, so we won't sack the portal parent today. Instead, if you are a SharePoint user, then you can create pages and pages containing lots of widgets. You can even connect them together, so when you select a piece of information in one widget, it will automatically filter the results of another widget. And best of all, you can take any widget from the Internet and drop it into a web part. Simply open a SharePoint page in Edit mode, drop in the HTML web part (one of the defaults that ships with SharePoint) and then copy/paste the widget code inside the web part, along with any formatting HTML such as paragraph tags. (Note: some widgets may not function depending on how your SharePoint, web server and firewall are configured, e.g. if running scripts is disabled)
Now, remember, this is SharePoint's dirty little twin we're discussing here, so no boring corporate applications. Have a little fun, create a Dilbert web part, track the league position of your football team, organise the next not-so-secret Friday lunchtime drinking contest, compare notes on Technorati ranks or Myspace popularity. Go on, scare yourself. Let people have some fun and share their interests, ideas, whatever makes them tick. I'll bet productivity and knowledge-sharing will take a turn in the right direction as a result. Think I'm bonkers? Listen to Richard St. John on TED Talks - Why do people succeed (3 minute webcast, hat tip to the Presentation Zen blog for the link)
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Technorati tags: SharePoint, SharePoint 2007, MOSS 2007