Not NDA
I'm up in Seattle watching the rain and thankful I bought a nice Patagonia jacket this year (or, rather, my husband thought kindly enough to buy it for me because I would never think to purchase an actual jacket). I can't talk about all the cool things I'm checking out this week BUT I learned something new today that I have to share. In any other time I might be scared to publically acknowledge that I had no idea this feature existed but the 3 developers sitting to my right also did not know and I'd consider them some of the best developers in this business. Therefore I'd like to be the first to unveil this, apparently, obscure feature of Outlook.
Did you know that you can type text into the appointment times for an Outlook calendar feature. For example, if you need to schedule an appointment for two days time, you can just type in "two days" and Outlook will automatically find the date for you. Even more entertaining, you can type in "the day before Christmas" and you'll get presented with 12/24/xxxx. Note, however, that "the day before Easter" does not work but "the day before New Year's" does. Clearly only non-moving dates work (ie., Easter isn't always the same date). This is pretty cool actually. I'm ashamed that I didn't know this was a feature of the Outlook control; however, quite proud that I beat out the other bloggers next to me in announcing (or, rather, publically shaming myself for not knowing) this feature.
I've been diving pretty deep into Sharepoint customization and branding. I've now officially completed and implemented a branding stylesheet for a major local Southern California company. I banged my head for awhile trying to figure out the best way to develop this stylesheet. It almost seems like there are too many choices. Do you use Sharepoint Designer, use the file system. Do you overwrite styles, create your own styles, use alternate CSS setting?
In the end, the only way I could get it to work AND be passable to a client without a high level of expertise with Sharepoint 2007 was to use Sharepoint Designer. I don't particularly like this option since the file no longer resides on the file system and you have issues related thereto (please see Heather Solomon's great design blog for more on that. I own up to hitting her blog 50,000 times a day while getting through this project -- and her cakes are fairly fantastic too!). Initially, for clarity sake in handing off this stylesheet to my client, I wanted to create my own styles but this is a bad idea. It is a bad idea because no matter how great you make your default.master look, subsites will wrap classes into their own styles/divs and therefore screw up your design (this explained why I had a little blue square that I couldn't make go away in the top right of my screen with this method -- I was near coloring the right color onto the screen with a pen and hoping no one noticed). I redid the stylesheet using default style names and this works great but bear one thing in mind. You must make sure you know what the default styles are doing BEFORE you overwrite them. For example, if you are changing a default style with a background image to a plain color, you not only need to set the background color but you must also explicitly set the background image to nothing. In the end, once I understood all the loading issues related on Heather's blog and the various ways the default styles can take over, I managed to successfully override default.master with my custom styles and make it look damn good....
With one exception. The blog site. The blog site uses a different div class for the QuickLaunch bar and I was never able to fully get a handle on all the styles therein. Thankfully, my client isn't planning on using the blog template and so it was one scenario I could give up worrying about. I have now added Graphic Designer to my collection of hats (albeit, it is a little cap with a propeller on the top).