Friday, September 28, 2012

On SharePoint


You’d think embedding content in a SharePoint page, even their bastardized “wiki”, would be a relatively simple, refined feature… I mean it’s all about content management… they have picture libraries, right?!  Sure enough, the steps involve adding an image to a picture library, no problem there.  But then go to embed an image in the page and you get this beauty:


Seriously.. WTF?! Is this 1990 and MS-Access? Was this “feature” just introduced in SharePoint 2007? I gotta wonder because that dialog box is the kind of thing you build when your boss says “Can we have a feature where we can embed an image?” and you stub something in to verify it will work. Then you’re *supposed* to replace it with a more polished, and functional feature! I.e. options to select an image from an image library, or upload an image. (auto-creating a default image library) Something…. ANYTHING…  This is, as Chris Pebble is credited with the coining the phrase, “Protoduction”. (@CodingHorror)

So now all I need is the URL to the image I added in the image library… Now where do I find that… Click on my image in the library to view the item… name, preview, title…. No URL. Right-click on the preview and bring up properties: http://server/teams/IS/WikiImages/_w/Announcements_png.jpg ?? On the previous screen it is http://server/teams/IS/WikiImages/_t/Announcements_png.jpg. Ok, so just how many JPEGs does it need to render of my original PNG? 

Finally, clicking on the preview image itself brings up a browser window containing actual PNG file to get the actual URL… It would have never crossed my mind that a “copy URL” button or slapping it in text field might remotely have been useful especially when faced like idiotic dialog boxes asking me to type in the URL.

So now I finally have an image link in my wiki pointing to a PNG in an image library that has at least two mug-shot JPEGs taken of it. 

SharePoint: Content mismanagement at its finest.

No comments:

Post a Comment