| This chapter will discuss how a dashboard consisting of a series of Web Parts can be customized so that it represents the information your users desire in a single, integrated view. Therefore we will take a look how the actual Web page shown by the browser is being generated, and which properties are available to influence this generation process. Finally, we will discuss various options to create new Web Parts. You can create and customize your own dashboards or Web Parts without writing a single line of code using the SharePoint Portal Server User Interface. For more advanced tasks , you can customize and extend Web Parts using tools such as Office XP Developer. The SharePoint Portal Server Dashboard architecture allows building customized solutions that can consolidate personal, team, corporate, and external information, presenting it to the user in a single integrated view. For example, a Research and Development department can show information on the various ongoing projects, as well as important industry news. Corporate information, such as the current stock price, as well as personal information, such as the user's calendar, can be added, providing the user with relevant information from a variety of sources ”all in one place using a common technology, the Digital Dashboard. This Digital Dashboard technology is based on reusable User Interface components which are called Web Parts. Web Parts are the core building blocks of the dashboard, generating Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) that the browser can render. This HTML may get generated through technologies, such as Extensible Markup Language (XML) and scripts in Active Server Pages (ASPs). Dashboards can be nested. A navigation bar on top enables users to select a sub-dashboard, to make use of other functionality. The Document Library, for example, will allow navigating through documents and folders stored in SharePoint Portal Server. Figure 14.1 shows the out-of-the-box home dashboard for a new "Development" dashboard. Throughout this chapter, you will see how this dashboard gets customized to the needs of a Research & Development department. Figure 14.1. The out-of-the-box home page for a new development workspace.  |
