Problem: Organization X needs a way to track a variety of information about events going on in a large number of geographic locations. There is one event per location, but many locations. Examples of the information that needs to be tracked per event are location name, event dates, details about the people competing, and the organization’s notes and tasks for the event.
There are many ways to solve this problem. One that leverages the goodness of SharePoint and involves no work in Visual Studio is this:
Create a site collection. In the root site, create a list that stores the list of events. For each event, create a subsite for that event. Turn on the publishing features to give you better control over the navigation and let you more easily have multiple web part pages per site.
To create a subsite for each event, create one “event site” that serves as a template for all of the event sites. Use PowerShell to handle anything repetitious, such as turning off Publishing, saving the site as a template, and turning publishing on again, or such as looping through the list of events and creating a subsite for each event.
I’ve got a Data View Web Part that sits in the event site, and pulls data for its event from the parent site’s list of all events. When this web part is copied to a new site, I have a PowerShell script that will update the web part so that it is pulling the correct row from the parent site’s list.
I thought this was an interesting way to build the solution. It uses more of a composition/configuration approach than a coding approach, which I believe will enable me to deliver this solution faster and with less risk.
One of these days, I have to publish more examples of the PowerShell scripts I have been working with. I have one that will report on the version settings of all doc libraries in a web application, for example. Another enables a feature, and another updates a web part.
In addition to my CodePlex project http://codeplex.com/psbb, there is also http://sharepointpsscripts.codeplex.com/ that looks to be a great PowerShell for SharePoint resource.
More eventually,
Michael
PS, the other thing I have been doing is playing with SharePoint 2010, the Technical Beta. It’s all NDA though, so I can’t talk about it. Just know that Magenic will be fully ready to help its customers with all their 2010 needs when the product RTM’s.