A Quick Mention – My Top 5 Custom Features for New Sites

 
Overview

I don’t spend all my time in site design, but I am responsible for a quite a few of SharePoint sites with Dashboards, Reports and Forms.  Here are the Top 5 Custom Features that I use when designing a new website.  Most of these can be found at Codeplex.

Top 5 Custom Features for New Sites

1.  ChartPart (http://www.codeplex.com/ChartPart)

ChartPart inspired this blog entry.  A lot of times I will user SQL reporting services, but sometimes you need something fast for quick KPIs and this is definitely the tool to add a nice graph to your site

2.  The Up Folder button (http://blog.thekid.me.uk/archive/2008/11/03/adding-an-up-folder-button-to-a-sharepoint-list-view-webpart.aspx) 

Especially Essential for working with large lists in data view mode.  I utilize many folders for large lists and I heavily recommend that everyone utilizing SharePoint read the whitepaper on large lists http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262813.aspx

3. Unique Column Policy (part of SharePoint 2007 features http://features.codeplex.com/)

The Unique Column Policy Feature adds an option to Information Policies to require that one metadata column be unique.  This is vital for certain lookup operations and great addition to SharePoint.

 

4. Tool Bar Manager (another great one that is included in SharePoint 2007 features on CodePlex http://features.codeplex.com/)

Remove misleading actions from the toolbar to help lock down a process.

5. Expand and Collapse all Groups at http://www.endusersharepoint.com/?p=1167 from Paul Grenier

I recommend following JQuery for Everyone, Quite a few awesome tools.  Overall I have always been highly selective with adding code into Content Editor Web Parts.  You have to maintain good documentation and development and staging environments to deploy these tools.