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How I personally use SharePoint

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In my previous post When the heck did you find the time to do all this music, I mentioned that I created indieopolis.net initially to develop a platform for independent artists.

Since I was a SharePoint Escalation Engineer, I had a grandiose plan to develop all kinds of cool web parts and an infrastructure based on SharePoint to allow artists to do the following:

  • Upload their raw material (Audio and Imagery)
  • Manage their “Packages” of music content
  • Publish material and allow samples, in various formats,
  • Blah blah blah.

I soon realized I just didn’t have the personal time to do all of this J and it would be very challenging with all the other indie related music sites out there. But I still felt SharePoint was a slick platform for me to use to just “Publish” information about my music etc

When you navigate to www.indieopolis.net , it redirects you to my SharePoint site wss.indieopolis.net (In hindsight, I wish I would have just branded the SharePoint site with www, and I am in the process of migrating everything there, but alas)

Anyways, I use the basic web part infrastructure and Content Editor web parts to publish my main content. This allows me to change the location of these text parts pretty easily; but it turned out that I didn’t change this very often. There’s also a pretty plain list at the bottom where I list individual artists that take you to their individual artists sites (Some just other site collections under the /artists managed path, some just links to the artists home page).

Where it really get’s cool is within my private side where I have various Lists that I use to keep track of everything related to the music.

This site isn’t used for publication but rather for me to keep track of things.

As you can see from above, I have a list of:

  • “Digital Distributors” (Used to keep track of the various digital distributors that my music gets sent to)
  • “CD”s (Used to keep track of the various products I have created
    • Pretty basic List stuff on the above too, so I won’t bore you with their details
  • “CDTODD” (Used as a join between the two lists to show me which CD’s were sent to which digital distributor
    • This is the list I use to keep track of everything J

Using the CDTODD list, I’ve created various views on the data. I can break down and group and sort on the data in various ways such as:

  • By CD (Shows me a status of each digital distributor, grouped by CD)
  • By DD (Shows me a status of each CD grouped by digital distributor and is what is shown above)
  • Time to Check Availability (This one is used to filter and only show items that “Should” be live already, but have crossed the time threshold and I need to act on to see what the delay is)
  • By CD Available (A view on the data but filtered on items that are already available and live, grouped by CD)
  • By DD Available (A view on the data but filtered on items that are already available and live, grouped by digital distributor)

On Saturdays, I generally visit this list and select the “Time to Check Availability” link, and for each one that shows up here, I check the respective digital distributor to see if the release is available, and if not, report the problem back to CD Baby.

I then edit the entry appropriately such as the following:

I note the problem reported (In this case, it was sent to MSN Music on 04/03/2006, but after 3 months it is still not available there, and this takes it out of my “Watch” period for about 1 more month beyond the Problem Reported Date. When I get a response back from CDBaby, I update the note field with the response.

This view is keyed off the “Date to Check” column in the list which has a calculated value of [Date Sent]+90 and then the filter consists of the following:

“Available” is not equal to “Yes”

And

“Date to Check” is less than [Today]

Or

“Hard Report Next Date” is greater than or equal to “12/31/1900”

And

“Hard Report Next Date” is less than [Today]

“Hard Report Next Date” is another calculated column with the formula [Problem Reported Date]+60

So basically, if I’ve reported a problem, I’ll wait another 60 days before complaining again J.

Once an item does come available, I put in the direct URL in the Available At URL field, and the description, then export this content to the live site for the various CD “Available At” web parts.  

That’s how I keep track of things…Pretty simple, but I find it to be very effective for me and helps me concentrate on what I need to concentrate on.

In my next post about my music site, I’ll detail how I construct the individual CD pages, such as the one for The Maestoso Interstellar Suite. They use a combination of Content Editor web parts, and dataview web parts for the list items.

Keith

Comments

  • Anonymous
    August 29, 2006
    How about a WSS community site template?   ;-)
  • Anonymous
    August 29, 2006
    Which WSS Community site template?   If I wanted my private data to be shared and used by the community, I would certainly use something like that :)