The Peace Parks Foundation SharePoint experience

“The Peace Parks Foundation is a non-profit organisation that facilitates the establishment of transfrontier conservation areas (peace parks) and develops human resources, thereby supporting sustainable economic development, the conservation of biodiversity and regional peace and stability.” (http://www.peaceparks.org)

 

I was really happy when I was received with open arms by the people of Peace Parks – they made me feel like I belonged with their friendly and welcoming ambience and working in peaceful environment made my work that much easier.  The work that they do is inspirational and I support them all the way.

 

The Problems:

1.       Peace Parks Foundation wanted a SharePoint site that would assist them with their document management, since they are always travelling and have many departments.

2.       The SharePoint site had to have the exact style as their actual website to facilitate the users’ comprehension and usage.

3.       The site had to be fully searchable.

4.       When a new page or site is created within the SharePoint site, the theme had to be the same across all pages.

5.       Some pages had to add the voyager GIS that they always use for their work.

6.       Each department had to be able to add staff pictures of their respective department.

 

The Solutions:

1.       A strong knowledge of SharePoint, C# and Aspx was required.

2.       I modified a pre-existing site, which with all due respect required a lot of alterations – firstly, I had to modify the template which required changing the many style sheets and making one big one to which all the pages connect to, thereby ensuring style unity across all the pages.  Secondly, I had to modify all the images to suit the style – I used Adobe Photoshop.  The standardisation of the pages allowed for greater speed as all images are now optimised for web and only one CSS is accessed.

3.       The search engine was one of the most challenging sections to create.  The biggest problem was that the installation of MOSS 2007 was not implemented properly and therefore quite a few functions were not working as they should have been.  A few modifications to the installations and to the registry files fixed that.  Thereafter, I had to create content sources that crawled (indexed) the whole site.  And then it was just a matter of creating scopes for the search and ensuring that the search centre connected to those scopes.

4.       *View point 2*

5.       Adding the voyager GIS was one of the easiest requirements to implement.  All it required was the addition of a page viewer web part and the voyager GIS link!

6.       To allow for the ability to add departmental staff photos, I created a content editor web part and inside that web part I added a few html and J-query codes that showed the staff photos and allowed emailing the staff in question just by clicking on a button right below the picture.