Dragging and Dropping files to and from MOSS 2007 from home

A lot of our teachers prepare lesson plans etc at home and want an easy way of adding them to the school portal, rather than having to go through the process of opening up internet explorer, browsing to the school portal, logging on, then browsing to their site, then uploading their documents... PHew! There is an easier way. You can give them folder on their desktop that links directly to whatever site on your portal that you want, they simply drag and drop their files into or out of this folder.

To accomplish this, when the teacher is at home, they need to open up the school portal site in the usual way and log on as they normally would. They then need to navigate to the document store they wish to use, this may be located on their own personal site, or a faculty saite, wherever.

Within the document store, you will see various options along the top (providing your tech people have given you the correct permissions), 'New', 'Upload', 'Actions' and 'Settings'. Click on 'Actions', then 'Open with Windows Explorer'.

Vista Users: Within the window that pops up, in the left pane, right-click on the folder name and select ‘Send To’ desktop.

XP Users: In the folder that opens, click on the little icon that navigates up a level (next to the back and forward buttons), then right click on the folder icon you want to link to and select ‘Create Shortcut’. Say Yes to the prompt asking if you want it to be created on your desktop.

You will then see a folder on the desktop that you're able to add files to, when you then navigate to the portal via a web browser, you'll see all the documents have been added to the relelvant document store without you having to go through the Upload process. Please bear in mind that you will still need to enter your username and password the first time you access your folder.

Adding a News Feed to your personal site

Many of our staff have found it useful to add news feeds (RSS Feed) to their personal site or 'My Site'. This is very simple to do:

It is possible to add an ‘RSS News Feed’ to you personal site on sharepoint (the ‘My Home’ tab within ‘My Site’).

News feeds can be added from any external website where you see the red/orange RSS logo.


To add a feed, firstly you need to browse to the website you want to take the news from, and then click on their RSS logo, this takes you to their news feed. See the example of the BBC News site below:

http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/sportonline_uk_edition/front_page/rss.xml


Once you have clicked on the logo, you’ll be taken to the page containing their news feed, the address of it should end in ‘.xml’.

The BBC News one for example is ‘http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_uk_edition/front_page/rss.xml’

You need to highlight this address in your browser, then right-click on it and copy it.

Browse back to your ‘My Site’ and navigate to the ‘My Home’ tab.


This page is your personal space and can contain whatever you want. To add the feed, you need to click on ‘Site Actions’ which is in the top right corner, then ‘Edit Page’.

From here, you need to select which area or ‘zone’ on the page you want to the news feed to display, the top zone for example. Click on ‘Add a Webpart’.

This brings up a window in which you can select which webpart you want to add. You need to expand ‘All WebParts’, then scroll down to ‘Default’ and tick ‘RSS Viewer’.


Click on the ‘Add’ button.

The RSS Viewer webpart will appear on your page and display the following text:

Web part is not bound to a feed. Open the tool pane to set the feed Url.

Click on the ‘Open the tool pane’ hyperlink.

This opens the properties of the webpart on the right of the page, in the box labelled ‘RSS Feed URL’, you need to right-click and paste in the address you copied from your chosen website (BBC News for example).


If you expand the ‘Appearance’ section, you can also give your webpart a name, this can be anything you like e.g. ‘BBC News Feed’.

Finally, you can click on the ‘OK’ button at the bottom of the webpart properties pane, then click on ‘Exit Edit Mode’ at the top right of your page, below ‘Site Actions’:

You should now see your news feed each time you access your page.