Recovery.org rebuilt on MOSS

Recovery.gov

Recovery.org  was very recently re-developed on SharePoint and is another good example of how different branding approaches, functionality and integration can be applied to SharePoint sites.

Recovery.gov is the U.S. government’s official website providing easy access to data related to Recovery Act spending and allows for the reporting of potential fraud, waste, and abuse.

The impetus for the move to MOSS was:
- Users were not able to follow the recovery funds from beginning to end as the Obama administration had envisioned — and promised.
- Nor could site administrators use the site to handle the approval process needed to collect, sort and display spending data being collected from recipients of the funds.
- As a result, the site became a target and verbal punching bag for watchdogs, open government advocates and lawmakers who were underwhelmed with the content and capability of Recovery.gov.

I don’t see this as any shortcomings with Drupal, as an enterprise technology MOSS is designed to peer into a multitude of databases and surface data to the web, Drupal is fantastic and in many cases Gartner regards it as a leader in social web technologies.

The following article details the reasons behind the movement away from the  open source platform Drupal to SharePoint:

Recovery.gov revamped with an unexpected helper - SharePoint
 
Word from the SharePoint 2010 conference in Vegas as that it took approximately 9 weeks to develop, which is a very good effort. Run through validation it brings up a number of errors, which means it’s having a bit of trouble meeting web standards compliancy, but good effort all round.

SharePoint 2010 Related Lists and how to get this happening in MOSS 2007

I am super stoked that SharePoint 2010 has related lists, I got to try this functionality out just before I left London in September with my previous company Content and Code Ltd, (if you’re in UK and EMEA and you need SharePoint work done, the team there are fantastic, tell them I sent you) I managed to build a SCRUM Backlog site with all the relevant lists looking up each other and displaying their related child items in less than a lunch hour, I can’t wait to see this in action in the real world and to see how this will transform information management within organisations.

There’s a big hole in SharePoint 2007 when it comes to Parent Child lists relationships, I won’t go into why this is and what it all means as there’s lots of articles about it online but I will plonk down a few links that I gathered together that walk through in very good detail how to get Parent Child relationships working in MOSS, hat’s off to the authors for taking the time to put these together.

Mark Rackley’s 3 posts on Endusersharepoint.com – well written and followed up by Mark, nice work mate.

Creating a SharePoint list parent child relationship out of the box

Setting SharePoint form fields using query string variables without using javascript

Passing multiple query string varibles using SharePoint Designer – follow up to the above article

Greg Chan, Program Manager in the SharePoint Designer team put together a very good post and has the big little workaround where the filter doesn’t quite work and you need to add ‘LookupId=’TRUE’ into the mix, tricky to fix, watch out for case sensitivity issues which is where I got caught out a couple of times:

Building a SharePoint Designer mashup

Hope these resources help those out there that won’t be seeing 2010 for a while yet.

Happy relationship building.