Building A Sharepoint Event List

We've seen the Announcement list in a previous article. One of the other great list is the Event List - a list that lets you show calendars for your site.

Let's review a scenario and see how Sharepoint Services can help.

Let's assume that you are planning a series of meetings within your office and you want to have a central place to show the meetings and the times that they occur.

The basic site shows an Events List that shows upcoming items. If you click the "Add New Event" link on the homepage to insert a meeting entry.

Notice again that there's a red "*" beside the title - this means that you have to put something into the text box or Sharepoint will not let you save the new event.

So let's enter "Weekly meeting with Supplier A" as the meeting title and we'll set the date for next Monday by clicking on the icon to pick the date from a calendar. Since this is a repeating event, we can click the repeat icon and enter "Weekly". Let's pick a time of 9am - our first appointment of the week!

Now, when you are ready, save the event by clicking the "Save" icon. You will be taken back to the homepage and you should see your new event on the screen. Notice the green "new" icon to show that it's been newly added.

For a more detailed view click on the "Events" title bar. You will go to the full Events List.

Notice how you get to see more information than the summary shown on the homepage.

Different Views of Your List

Sharepoint lets you see lists in different formats - known as Views. On the left of the screen you can see some pre-defined views. Select "Calendar View" to see the upcoming events as a calendar. You can see that the repeated meeting shows up each Monday.

Viewing all the Announcements

On the homepage you get a summary view of the Announcements. If you click on the title bar of any list you will be taken to the full screen showing the list in detail. Try it now by clicking on the "Announcements" list heading.

The Announcements List Heading

Now you can see the complete Announcement. Notice that you see a more detailed view.

When you added the announcement you would have seen that there were other data items you could add - fields such as Expire Date. In this view many of those fields are shown on the screen.

The Sharepoint Announcement List

As we have seen, Sharepoint Services comes with a series of great lists to kick-start your intranet. In this section we'll look at one of these lists - Announcements - as an example of how Sharepoint list works.
On the home page, the Announcement list sits as the first item on the page. Click the small graphic below see the list in more detail.

On your Sharepoint site, click on the link labelled "Add new Announcement". This screen allows you to add an announcement on the site.

OK, Let's make the Announcement title "Great Sharepoint Sites".

Notice there's a red "*" beside the title? That means that you have to put something into the text box - it's a required field and WSS will not let you save the Announcement without something there.

Follow this with the body of the announcement- maybe - "This is my new site to explore Sharepoint Services".

Notice that you have a simple editor with toolbars like your favorite word processor. The toolbar lets you make words bold, or format them. Take a moment to try it out. Go ahead and play.

Now, when you are ready, save the announcement by clicking the "Save" icon. You will be taken back to the homepage and you should see your new announcement on the screen - right below the original one. Notice the green "new" icon that shows everybody that this is a recent addition.

How easy was that!

So now you know how easy it is to add content to a Sharepoint Services site.

Reviewing the Default Sharepoint Intranet

When Sharepoint Services has been installed, it will set up a default site for you to use straight away. The site consists of a series of areas - called Lists - for document storage, calendar, to-do lists and more. Lists are the basic building block of Sharepoint Services so we'll be looking at them in detail later.
Let's explore the areas and get to know the site.
Click on the small graphic below to show the default intranet site.

Click on the small graphic below to show the default intranet site.

Notice the site is very well presented - it's a fully fledged intranet - right out of the box.
Let's look at some of the features. We'll start from a high level review and drill down.

The helicopter view of the Site

Over on the left side, there's a "Quick Launch" Section. This is a shortcut panel to all the lists that Sharepoint Services Builds. For the default site these are

• An Announcement Page
• An Events Diary
• A Document management area
• A Contacts list
• A Task list
• A Discussion group
• A List for Web Links

In the next section we'll have a look at the Announcement Page as a sample of the power of the Sharepoint Services solution.