In/Out Board Blog

Today I’m going to show you a simple (yet very effective) means of integrating OfficeStatus electronic in/out board software with Microsoft SharePoint.

Specifically, we’re going to expose the OfficeStatus “public view” (a read-only view that doesn’t require authentication) to SharePoint users. For the purposes of this walk-through we’ll be using SharePoint 2010, but the steps will be similar for other versions of SharePoint.

Enable the OfficeStatus Public View

If you haven’t already, first enable the OfficeStatus public view feature (which is disabled by default). You can do so by logging into the OfficeStatus web interface as an administrator and navigating to Administration | System | Enable or Disable Features. Ensure that the Enable Public View setting is set to “Yes” and save changes if required.

Create a New SharePoint Page

Once you’ve decided where you’d like your read-only in/out board view to reside within SharePoint, create a New Web Part Page at that location. This step is, of course, optional – you might elect to add your OfficeStatus view to an existing SharePoint page (in which case you can skip to the next step).

Creating a new page in SharePoint

Give the page a name, and choose your preferred layout. In the screenshot above, we’re just using the “Full Page, Vertical” layout to keep things simple.

Add a Web Part

After adding a new page, you’ll be looking at the SharePoint page editor. Click on the Add a Web Part link.

Adding a SharePoint web part

Scroll down to the Media and Content category, and select the Page Viewer web part.

Choosing a web part page type

Configure the Web Part

Now click on the “open the tool pane” link to edit the new web part’s settings.

Configuring the web part in SharePoint

In the Page Viewer category, leave the default “web page” selected and enter the link to your OfficeStatus public view. The link will be the same one you use to access your OfficeStatus web interface, only with “/public” appended to the URL. For example:

http://my-server/OfficeStatus/public

You can also elect to add one or more URL query parameters in order to control the default appearance and filtering of the OfficeStatus public view. These parameters include:

• Dept: Enter the specific department you’d like to see in the public view.
• Location: Specify the location you’d like to see in the public view.
• Status: Specify the status you’d like to see in the public view.
• ShowUserImages: Turn this off (“true” or “0”) to disable the display of user images.

Here’s an example URL that uses query parameters:

http://my-server/OfficeStatus/public/Default.aspx?Dept=IT&Status=In&ShowUserImages=false

The above link will, by default, show only IT department members with a status of “In”. User images will not be shown.

You may also want to assign the SharePoint web part a specific height (something like 500 pixels, for example).

With configuration complete, click the OK button to commit the changes.

Final Result & Summary

Now that you’ve established a SharePoint page that contains the OfficeStatus public view, you can configure your SharePoint installation to link to that page in whatever manner best suits your needs.

OfficeStatus view within SharePoint

Microsoft SharePoint is an incredibly flexible collaboration tool, and having a read-only view of your OfficeStatus in/out board contained (and easily accessible) within it can be very helpful to users.