Announcing ShUIE (SharePoint User Interface Extender)
It’s with great pleasure that on behalf of Pcubed I’ve been able to take a utility that we have been using to great success internally and with our clients, and offer it to the SharePoint developer community.
Which means what exactly? Well ShUIE is a utility that provides a single and rather-dull purpose:
ShUIE enables the developer to insert JavaScript and CSS into SharePoint pages dynamically.
What makes that simple statement so exciting is what becomes possible when you can include JavaScript and CSS wherever you want, whenever you want. Not only can you insert JavaScript anywhere, but we also give you jQuery and contextual information about the page you’re on. Using simple fragments of AJAX and jQuery code so many possibilities open up…
- Do you want to fetch information from other SharePoint sites? Sure… use the jqSoapClient jQuery Plugin.
- Do you want to be able to change the navigation within SharePoint so that it becomes a menu that hides and shows itself based on keyboard shortcuts? Easily possible.
- How about improving the print format of specific pages?
- Add a Table of Contents to a Wiki page?
- Create multi-field validation of SharePoint ListItem Fields?
Even the possibilities listed there are pretty simple. Those are just the icing on the SharePoint cake, but using ShUIE it’s possible to go even further and to create rich applications that fundamentally extend what SharePoint can do so that you can offer great pieces of business functionality that used to seem impossible, right on top of a vanilla installation of SharePoint or MOSS.
At Pcubed we’ve been using the ShUIE concepts to create rich and valuable business focused extensions to SharePoint since Autumn 2005. We have extended Project Server so that it is now able to fully accomodate the processes of a Program Management Office. We have many government, financial, media and manufacturing companies already running substantial customisations to their SharePoint installations.
We are sharing this piece of IP to the SharePoint developer community in the hope that community customisations are generated that we can all take advantage of and re-use and to help establish a strong platform for creating AJAX customisations, applications and enhancements on top of SharePoint.
Jans Tielens has demonstrated the power of embedding jQuery into SharePoint on his blog, and the reaction to his posts has been exciting to watch. As Pcubed hold a mature version of this concept that already enables SharePoint customisation to be dynamically loaded based upon context from a centrally manageable store, we feel that we can offer a leap over what has been demonstrated so far and enliven the SharePoint developer community to release and share openly re-usable customisations that will help increase the capabilities, user-acceptance and market share of SharePoint to the benefit of us all.
We would very much welcome contributions from other developers on all fronts, but especially in the creating of Customisations that others can download and use.
To show the power of ShUIEI’ve had a bit of fun and spent a couple of hours earlier converting Jans showpiece, the integration of jqDock… and you can find that code published within the documentation here:
Should anyone wish to contribute customisations, improvements, etc, please let me know and I can add people to the Code Plex project.
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