Web Part Development and Customisation
Web Parts come in many flavours and are at the heart of most SharePoint implementations. They are important to help present content in usable, but attractive ways, and integrate applications into SharePoint portals.
Our past projects have necessitated the development of many specialist and bespoke web parts, covering items as diverse as:
- Password Resets
- Active Directory User Management
- Private ‘Twitter’
- Silverlight People Search
- Media Player
Aside from true custom web parts, a lot of content can be delivered by customising the standard Microsoft Web Parts (Content Editor, Data View, Search Results) and ‘Web 2’ technologies such as JQuery, Ajax and Silverlight.
Examples of these include:
- Scrolling Image Library
- Search As Type
- Tabbed News Articles
Where possible, we like to take the approach of customising the Microsoft Web Parts rather than writing full custom web parts –this avoids both future management / support issues and allows web parts to be used on sites where customers do not have access to the server – e.g. hosted platforms.