Building Ad Management Tools for SharePoint Public Website
Customer
The Customer, SteelCity, is a consulting company.
Challenge
The Customer’s corporate website was operating on the SharePoint platform. An important part of the website was dedicated to various advertisements that were unseen on the home page. The Customer wanted to draw visitors’ attention to the advertisements by featuring them on the home page.
Solution
To get the needed functionality, the Customer turned to ScienceSoft’s team well-versed in SharePoint development and customization. ScienceSoft offered to solve the task using two customized SharePoint Web Parts.
The first Web Part was designed to show multicomponent advertisements on the home page. The Web Part included the following elements:
- an advertisement title
- a thematic image
- a blurb
- a short story
- a hyperlink to a complete story
- a hyperlink to related stories
- intuitive navigation to view the previous story or the next one
This Web Part used the information stored in native SharePoint data structures, e.g. lists from different site collections and libraries.
The second Web Part was customized to aggregate and automatically sort ad stories in a GridView so that users could select a story from drop downs at the top of the Web Part. This Web Part used the same data source as the first one, i.e. took data from SharePoint lists and libraries.
Both Web Parts were released with their installation packages. The Customer was provided with a user manual explaining how to install the implemented Web Parts.
Results
The developed Web Parts enabled the Customer to make advertisements more eye-catching for the website users. The Customer reported that since the Web Parts were implemented, the number of customers’ requests has raised significantly.
Technologies and Tools
Microsoft SharePoint 2007, Microsoft Visual Studio 2007, Team Foundation Server, C#, ASP.NET, HTML, CSS, jQuery, MS Project, Jira, Photoshop.
