Note on terminology: now that the SharePoint 2010 Beta, (pronounced for the most part as “Twenty-Ten”) has been released, I will systematically refer to the version of SharePoint I am talking about as either SharePoint 2007 or SharePoint 2010. I will only refer to MOSS when necessary to distinguish enterprise features of 2007 from the basic WSS functionality (which will be known as SharePoint Foundation in 2010).
So on to the subject of my next series of posts; the tricky question of running slideshows from within SharePoint. With the advent of the Slide Library, which is ideal for storing in one centralized location, sets of PowerPoint slides which can then be copied to individual presentations, one would have thought that it would make sense to be able to run slideshows direct from a slide library. Unfortunately, in SharePoint 2007, this is not possible out-of-the-box.
What is possible is to run a slideshow direct from a picture library.
Again, it would have been nice to be able to use metadata around pictures to decide what is shown in the slideshow, but this is not provided for. Instead, it is necessary to organize pictures in folders, and then run a slideshow from within a folder.
If you want to provide navigation to particular slideshows then this involves linking to the slideshow page, which is called slidshow.aspx (note the 8 character name), and is in the path /sitename/picturelibraryname/forms/slidshow.aspx – you will need to complete the URL with ?ViewStyle=slideshow&RootFolder=%2F Sites%2F SiteName%2F PictureLibraryName%2FFolderName
Using this technique, you can quickly organize slideshows using SharePoint 2007 functionality. But what if you want more control over how your slideshows appear and more importantly, what if you want to centralize your slides in one location, to prevent duplication of effort and resources?
These questions will be answered in part two of this series of blog postings, coming soon.
Highbrowse 