PEI has been using SharePoint for a couple of years now. Until last week I only used it to store, edit, and share all of our company documents. I decided to e-mail our infrastructure engineer to gain access to be able to edit the marketing departments SharePoint Site. In just a matter of a few clicks I was able to create a marketing status update blog, shared status lists, and a fully customized homepage with announcements! I am going to show and tell you how and what I used to make all of this happen. I am NOT technical and I was able to do all of these customizations by myself, SharePoint is really that easy to use!
1. Marketing Status Update Blog- A SharePoint Customizable Site
I decided to create a blog to post all of the marketing meeting agendas and announcements. To do this all I had to do was navigate to sites in SharePoint and click create and choose blog.
From there I was able to customize different categories, colors, and content. You also have the option to have your new site show up on the navigation bar on the left. Here is a picture of our new blog:
2. Shared Status Lists- SharePoint Custom List
This is my new favorite functionality of SharePoint. How many of us have excel docs with all kinds of lists on our computer? SharePoint has an EXCELLENT list capability that allows for multiple people to be editing it at the same time within the SharePoint screen.
For a new list you navigate over to lists and press create, just like you did with the blog.
This is the part that gets really awesome. You have the ability to create columns and choose what inputs you want. For this example I made a list of web content that needs to be created for our new website. You can pick from several different outputs including, dates, radio buttons, check boxes, numbers, etc. Once you click create you can now add new entries. Here is an example of one of our new lists:
This form will now create a new entry for your list. After you press save you can also go in and edit these as much as you like. The second part of custom lists that is neat is the ability to modify and create any views from the data. You have the option to filter views, hide, columns, etc. to customize different views for different purposes. For example: I want a view of my website content status list of all the entries that have been listed as 0% not started. I can create this view and it will save it for me.
3. Announcements- Customized Homepage
I decided to create important announcements on our marketing homepage. All you have to do to customize your homepage is edit your web parts. Here are just some of the web parts available to you:
I chose to use announcements on our homepage to display blogging schedules and important meetings or events that were going on that week. Here is what our marketing homepage looks like now!
I am going to continue to play with our SharePoint site and I will keep you filled in on any new capabilities that I find useful! I hope that you can start playing around with your SharePoint site too!
-Andrea Leonhardt, PEI
