A Matter Of Degree

How to use Google Analytics with SharePoint (MOSS 2007)

One of my clients wants to use Google Analytics for their SharePoint (MOSS 2007) intranet.

There's some good information out there about how to set this up, but I wanted to clarify a few points in the hope of saving others some time.

The basic steps are:

1. Obtain the Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) for your MOSS site.

2. Create your Google Analytics account (see detail below). FYI, You don't need to pass any authentication in order to track hits to your site.

3. Add the GA tracking code to your site's master page within the HTML tags, which will allow you to analyze all the sub-pages, not just the home page. 

With regard to step 2, when you set up your new account, you need to enter your FQDN in the URL field, and you need to enter it the way they specify:

However, to work with MOSS, what really needs to be entered for the Website URL is the full URL with the /pages/default.aspx ending.  Thanks to this post for this information!  So you need to go back into the settings once you've created the account, and change it.  Finding your way into the settings to change the URL is not the most intuitive thing in the world, so I've shown it below:

From the home page of your Google Analytics account, click Edit:

 

Then, in the Profile Settings window, click Edit at the upper right:

At this point you can change your website URL.  For the example I'm using, you would enter:

http://mossserver.development.domain.com/pages/default.aspx.

After 24 hours, you should be able to review results on your GA account page.

Tip re: Modifying the Microsoft Fantastic 40 Templates for SharePoint

I could not find a lot of information out there about modifying or customizing Microsoft's Fantastic 40 application templates, so I thought I'd share some basic lessons learned:

I have a client who wants to use the IT Help Desk template from the "Fantastic 40."  The prebuilt site has everything the client needs, with one small exception - this client has several offices around the world, and they want a "location" column added to the list so that the end-user can select their office.

What I learned is that you can add the field to the list all day long, but it won't show up on the form (either the New form or the Edit form).  I tried with site columns and regular custom columns to no avail.  I couldn't add it to the form using SharePoint Designer, either; it behaved as if the data in the list and the column I wanted to add were coming from two different sources.

Thanks to "Callahan's" reponse in this discussion thread, I understood that it is possible to add a field to one of these prebuilt lists - it's all about the content type.  However, I still got stuck for a while trying to find the content type to modify - it didn't appear in the Site Content Types Gallery either at the top level of the intranet or on the IT Help Desk site itself. 

In the end, these are the steps I took to get the desired column on the form:

1. On the Service Requests list settings, in the Advanced section, I checked "Allow management of content types."
2. This revealed the Service Request content type within the list.  I was then able to click on the content type name and add my "location" site column -
3. - But not before I had to go back to the list and delete the "location" site column that I had already added.  It did not show up in the list of available site columns for the content type until I did this.
4. Following "Callahan's" advice, I moved the column up in the order, and it appears on the New form (I admit I did not test first to see if the column appeared on the New form regardless of the order).

Workaround for the MOSS 2007 This Week In Pictures Web Part Slideshow Function

Most of my clients want to incorporate a rotating-image web part on their intranet home pages, and most of them dislike the MOSS 2007 out-of-box This Week In Pictures web part because when you click the link for "View Slideshow," the slideshow opens to display the first picture in the image library, not the image the web part currently displays. Aside from developing your own web part or purchasing one from a third-party vendor, there is no way to make that slideshow link point to the currently-displayed picture (There is no view choice field on the web part, and changing the sort order of the "all items" view has no effect on the slideshow).

One of my clients recently designed a workaround to this issue. She asked me to put a workflow on her Picture of the Week image library which would move past pictures to a second picture library. This workflow is a simple one to build in SharePoint Designer; see screenshot below. When she adds a new picture, she changes a metadata field on the previous picture from "Active" to "Past." This change kicks off the workflow, which automatically copies the previous picture to the Past Pictures library and then deletes it from the current picture library. The result is that the "view slideshow" link always points to the picture that is displayed.

This way you can upload multiple photos that are associated with the main picture (for example, a series of pictures from a company outing), and they will be shown together in the slideshow. We put a "View Past Pictures" link under the web part so that employees have easy access to the archive of previous pictures.

How to make the SharePoint I Need To web part sort alphabetically

If you have implemented the I Need To… web part on a SharePoint page, either using the Sites list or your own list of links, you may find that the topics appear in the web part in the order they were created, and there is no GUI-based way to control this order. My colleague Florin discovered this way to make the topics sort alphabetically (and until he gets a blog of his own, I blog this on his behalf):

1. Export the web part to your desktop.

2. Open the web part file in Notepad.

3. Find this piece of code:

          <xsl:param name="Rows"/>

          <xsl:for-each select="$Rows">

          <xsl:variable name="GroupStyle" select="'auto'"/>

4. Edit the code as follows:

          <xsl:param name="Rows"/>

          <xsl:for-each select="$Rows[@Title]" >

                        <xsl:sort select="@Title"/>

          <xsl:variable name="GroupStyle" select="'auto'"/>

5. Save the web part file and close it.

6. Import the modified web part back to your SharePoint page – Choose Site Actions / Edit Page

7. Click the "Add a Web Part" bar

8. Click the link for "Advanced Web Part Gallery and Options"

9. In the "Add Web Parts" pane, click the Browse drop-down and choose Import:

10. Browse to the web part file on your desktop, upload it, and then drag it onto the page. (You will need to delete the I Need To web part which is already on the page.)

Your list should now sort alphabetically.

How to display lists and libraries at the top of the “Add Web Parts” menu

MOSS 2007 has improved its "Add Web Parts" menu by showing lists and libraries for the current site at the top of the menu – no more need to scroll through the alphabetical list to find the site-specific web part you want to add. However, this is only the case for team or "system" sites. The web part menu for Publishing sites displays "Suggested Web Parts for Top Zone," which means you have to go to the Advanced Web Part Gallery and wade through the list of all web parts for your list or library, just as in SPS 2003.

This functionality is coded at the Zone level (in the same way that the Chrome Type default is set at the zone level) and cannot be changed in Site Settings; but there is an easy change you can make in SharePoint Designer so that the web part menus on publishing pages will act the same way as they do on team / system sites.

Open the home page in SharePoint Designer (check out if necessary), and change the property "QuickAdd-ShowListsAndLibraries" from "false" to "true." You may want to change this for more than one zone, in which case you could do a find and replace for the property for all zones. The code section where this property appears is shown below. Just save your page (and check back in if necessary), and you're done.