- Posted by acxede on March 6, 2008
Until the enhancements to Office Live Small Business were unveiled last month, most of you've been building static web sites. Only Office Live Premium subscribers could add dynamic content to their web sites. With the new release, that feature is now available to everyone.
If you're not sure what dynamic content means, let me give you an example. Let's say you're a Realtor. Naturally, you'd like to publish the list of employees - the agents in your office - on your web site. The first option, of course, is to type their names in on the About Us page. In fact, that's what you've probably been doing till now. There's nothing wrong with the method really, but it's a bit of a pain to go and edit HTML every time an agent joins or leaves your office. A better way would be to edit a list of employees in a database somewhere and have your About Us page pull the information out of that database. That way, you won't have to worry about fonts, alignment, background colors, and other such mundane stuff.
That's exactly what the Business Applications let you do. One of the components that make up Business Applications is a list. Lists are similar to Microsoft Access tables or Microsoft Excel spreadsheets - they have of rows and columns. An employee list, for example, would have a row for each employee. Each column in the row would represent a single piece of information about that employee, such as her first name or her job title.
Office Live has several built-in, or as Microsoft likes to call them, pre-provisioned lists. If those aren't good enough, you can build your own. One of the simplest pre-provisioned applications is Employee Directory which consists of a single list - Employees. If you plan to use this application for maintaining employee information, it stands to reason that you'll update this list when you hire or fire employees. Now if only there were a thingamajig that you could use to connect the About Us page on your web site to this list, you'd be all set.
You'll be happy to know that such a thingamajig exists. It's called the List Publisher Module. All you do is drop this module on your web page and associate the Employee list with it from it's property window. Let me walk you through the process.
The first task is to enable the Employee Directory application. To do so, follow these steps:
- Log in to you Office Small Business Account and click Business Applications in the left navigation pane. You'll arrive at the Business Applications dashboard.
- See if Employee Directory is already listed in the left pane. If it is, click on the link and skip to Step 6.
- Click Add Application in the left navigation pane. You'll arrive at the Add Application page, shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Add Application Page
- Click on Manage Your Business category. A new list of radio buttons pops up at the bottom, as shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2: Adding the Employee Directory Application
- Select Employee Directory and click OK. Office Live will ask you to supply a name and a URL for the application, as shown in Figure 3.
Figure 3: Fill in application settings
- Actually the details are already filled in. You need to alter them only if you want to. We'll let them be. Just click OK to accept the defaults. Office Live does its magic behind the scene and then brings you to the Employee Directory's dashboard, shown in Figure 4.
Figure 4: Employee Directory dashboard
There are several things to note here. First, the list already has sample data. So you won't have to create imaginary people for our demonstration. Second, the Sharing pane on the right has a section called Connect to Web .... The section has two entries, Forms and Lists. Lists, as you already know are used for publishing data from the business applications on to your web site. Forms, as you might imagine, are used to collect data on your web site and populate lists in Business Applications. Actually there are quite a few other links on the dashboard, but I won't dig deeper into them right now.
Let's go publish this list on your web site in the next part of this tutorial.
- Open the About Us page (or any other one, for that matter) in Page Editor.
- Pull down the modules menu and select List Publisher. The List Publisher module's properties window, shown in Figure 5, appears.
Figure 5: List Publisher property sheet
- Select Employee Directory in the Application drop down, and Employees in the List drop down. The columns in your list will become visible. It's possible to customize this list of columns but that's not what we're concentrating on here. So just click OK to accept the default view.
- The properties window will close and and you'll return to your web page that now displays the list of your employees as shown in Figure 6.
Figure 6: Employee data on your web page!
And now here's the fun part. Go back to the Employee Directory application and change some employee information. Add an employee or two. Then go back to the About Us page. You'll see that all your changes are reflected on the page.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. You can use Office Live's lists to store and publish virtually any kind of information.