SPPostIt - The Beginning

A short time ago, I asked a few folks their opinion on an idea that I discussed in this post. I received very welcomed feedback and set to work on what I hope will be a great tool that people will want to use. As you may guess by the post's title, I have currently opted to call my tool SPPostIt. It will start as a fairly simple messaging tool that would be used in SharePoint to send messages to other users on a site. The cool part is that all the functionality is held in a jQuery plugin. So the two requirements so far is that you have jQuery and SharePoint.

I will tell you that this is being created for many reasons but the main drivers for this currently are:

• No HTML email option. All emails look icky .(technical term!)
• Users have multiple email accounts for security reasons.

There are other reasons as well, but these 2 are probably the biggest. Once I got the idea however, I saw a lot of potential for future growth and use. I will discuss more of that later. I wanted to go over what I have created so far and let you get a peek at some screen shots of what it looks like as of now.

Currently in my environment, I have to use Visual Studio 2008 to create solutions and I also have to use VSEWSS. I unlike most, however, actually like this set as it was just easy for me to pick it up and use. So what I did was create an empty SharePoint solution and went from there. As I am putting the functions in a jQuery plugin, you would not be required to deploy a solution per se, but there is a css file, and some images. My solution also deploys two lists. One to hold the messages and one to hold message categories. Fairly simple solution and I hope to have it up on Codeplex soon.

Enough Talk Let's Have Some Screenshots!

When I activate the feature the jquery plugin is loaded via an ascx control into the masterpage. This is not the only way to do it, just how I did it. It adds an option to ECB menus and  to all the "Actions" menus for list/library views and looks like this:

After clicking this, it will open a popup dialog that looks like this:

Of course, you could change this, but why would you want to ;-)

This is just the beginning and I hope it is well received. Please feel free to provide feedback of any kind!