Exercises

1.	You get an email from marketing informing you that the executive team would like to add a list of key contacts to the main page of the corporate intranet. What do you do?
2.	It’s requested that you move the main news Web Part from the small right column to a more prominent section of the home page of the human resources team’s collaboration site. How can you make this happen?
3.	Sales makes a change in its division so that all current tasks displayed on the home page of the team site via a Web Part must also display which of the two team leads is responsible for the task. How can you modify the Web Part to display who the team lead is?
4.	During a meeting, an executive asks if you can display a listing of all upcoming events for the organization. What is your answer?
5.	The creative department recently analyzed their team site and think that the site would be more appealing if they added some background colors to the list Web Parts. How do you achieve this?

Answers

1.	Each time you create a list or library such as a contact list, SharePoint creates a corresponding Web Part that you can add to a Web Part page, subsequently exposing its contents. To add a list of contacts to the main page of the corporate intranet, you browse to the site and create a contacts list. After entering the key contacts into the list, you expose the contacts on the home page by adding the Contacts List Web Part to a zone on the page.
2.	You can only add Web Parts to a special type of page called a Web Part page. These pages have zones where you add Web Parts. You cannot add a Web Part unless it is contained in a Web Part zone. Moving a Web Part from one zone to another is a simple drag-and-drop process. To move the News Web Part from the right zone to the main left zone, you enter the page editing mode via the Site Actions tab and then drag and drop the Web Part to a more prominent location, such as the center zone on the page.
3.	Many areas of this book talk about the importance of metadata columns on lists and libraries. Metadata is information about a list item or document, such as the document owner, date of creation, or team leader. In this chapter, you learned that by using views, you can expose metadata columns. You can create a metadata column to store team leader choices and then add this column to the selected view that the List Web Part displays. You can display any view that is available on the list from within the List Web Part.
4.	You answer “Yes.” Using the Content Query Web Part, you can display a listing of all upcoming events for the organization on the main page of the portal. You do this by running a query based on all Calendar list items. You can further refine your query by specifying certain content types or filtering based on metadata properties.
5.	While you can place list data on a Web Part page using a List Web Part, this data is relatively flat and unreceptive to customization such as background color changes. However, you can use SharePoint Designer 2007 to convert your List view into a Data View Web Part. The Data View Web Part takes the code behind a list view (CAML) and transforms it into a more customizable template-based format (XSL). After converting to a Data View Web Part, you can then use Design view to modify things such as the background colors.