Often when I’m demonstrating things like SharePoint document libraries, I find I need to create a new Word document and quickly fill it with some placeholder text, ideally real text rather than the usual “asdadsadasdasda” that you end up typing otherwise.

For a long time I’ve used a little feature in Microsoft Word, whereby you can type =rand() and hit enter to generate some placeholder paragraphs, or =rand(paragraphs,sentences) to specify a number paragraphs and sentences.  Even though this feature has been around in Word for several versions now, most people still don’t know it exists.  One thing that has changed in Word 2007 is that the generated paragraphs are a little bit of Word 2007 help, like this sample -

On the Insert tab, the galleries include items that are designed to coordinate with the overall look of your document …

In previous versions of Word, using =rand() generated multiple paragraphs of The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog which is a pangram containing all letters of the alphabet.  Well, thanks to this post on the Microsoft Word Team blog I’ve discovered you can still use the “quick brown fox” version – you just have to use =rand.old() instead. 

The Word Team’s post also mentions another function (new to me) which can be used in Word to generate Lorem Ipsum text, using = lorem() – again, quite useful for generating placeholder text in documents, web pages and SharePoint web parts.

A while ago I wrote about Balsamiq Mockups and since then I’ve been trying it out on a couple of specification jobs.   On the Balsamiq Mockups to Go site I found this very handy set of pre-built SharePoint elements – so many thanks to Gordon MacLeod of Navantis for that.   Following a quick download of these elements It was possible to create mock-ups like this (click image for a larger view):

So definitely worth considering if you need some quick SharePoint mock-ups for a presentation or proposal.  By the way you can now link Mockups together, also useful when presenting to an audience.

I also just heard about Visio Shapes for SharePoint, basically three different collections of stencils and shapes covering SharePoint UI prototyping, architectural design and conceptual views of your SharePoint implementation.   I haven’t tried this one myself yet but looking at the screenshots on the site you get a very comprehensive set of design elements.  I plan to take a look soon – if anyone reading this has worked with this product please leave a comment and let me know – I’m keen to hear what it’s like.

So the rumours about SharePoint Designer 2007 being free to download from April have turned into reality, and you can now download a free copy here.  At the bottom of the download page are three videos covering SPD and future directions.  Haven’t watched these yet but could be worth a look.

But don’t forget Peter Parker’s famous quote, which is also true for SPD – With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility!

Often I get called upon to produce some kind of user interface mock-ups as part of the initial design phase of a project.  I definitely believe that a showing your customer a mocked-up version of what the finished user interface will look like as early as possible is a good thing.  No matter how much detail you go into with words and flowcharts, a picture of what the user is going to see on screen helps a lot.

Now I certainly don’t claim to be a graphic artist.  In the past I’ve prepared this sort of thing for users in a variety of ways.  Visio has some UI template components “out of the box”, and there are add-ons out there which extend it’s capabilities.  I’ve even roughed things out using lines and boxes in MS Word and PowerPoint before now. 

I’d heard good reports about Balsamiq Mockups, a tool developed using Adobe Air and available as a desktop or web-based product.  Balsamiq deliberately use hand drawn user interface components – the idea being that when you present your design you can focus on the functionality, and not, as they say “that pretty colour gradient”.  As they also say, you aren’t giving the impression of a polished UI with code behind that’s already to use.

For my first attempt, I thought I would put together a mocked-up page for an online books/CDs/DVDs/whatever store (you may have already seen some of this functionality elsewhere ) -

I was pretty impressed with how little time this took me to put together – in total, including downloading and  installing the trial, less than half an hour.  I really liked the way you can do stuff like add images to the mock-up, then quickly get Balsamiq to turn these into sketches.  Again, this gives the user a good representation of what’s going on without too much distraction.  The UI components they make available are pretty comprehensive, and extensible as well I believe.  Also I notice they’ve already added iPhone UI components, as you can see below:

So far I have to say I like Balsamiq Mockups a lot.  It’s very refreshing to work with a tool that lets you be very productive very quickly.  And at $79 per desktop licence it seems to be a bargain.  I’m planning to spend more time with it over the coming months and will report back on how it works out.

Update 5 April – I changed the example mockup image -  for some reason the original wasn’t always rendering in my WordPress theme.

A little Friday afternoon light relief for anyone struggling with a SharePoint re-branding exercise:

Got those H1 curly bracket property colon value semi-colon curly bracket blues…

I make a fair amount of screen-capture images, for documentation, training notes and presentations.  Until recently was using any one of Alt-PrtScn, screen clippings in OneNote, and the Vista Snipping Tool, depending on which computer I was using and whether I needed to capture a Window or screen area.

A few months ago I spent $49.95 on SnagIt from TechSmith and was very impressed with what it could do – not only capturing windows, areas and menus but also capable of capturing the entire contents of a scrollable Internet Explorer window.  More recently I upgraded to Snagit 9.0, which also features an excellent version of SnagIt Editor with an auto-store feature, as you can see below (SnagIt also lets you add the special effects by the way):

This makes it really simple to capture a set of shots for training notes or manuals as the captures can easily be stored and categorised.  It’s a real time saver if you are involved in software or web site testing and need to illustrate bugs or other problems while you work through the test plan.  Highly recommended.

This could be interesting – the UK government is sponsoring a Show Us a Better Way contest.  Basically they are running a contest where you can submit ideas to which make better use of public information in the form of mashups, KPIs, visualisations etc.  The site points you to a variety of public data which you can use for your prototype and the how-to post gives example of some of the development frameworks you might use, for example Popfly or Yahoo Pipes. 

And there’s a £20,000 prize up for grabs! According to the site faqs the closing date is end of September 08.

Even if you are using SharePoint or WSS for your in-house intranet, chances are you still want to make some changes to the look and feel of your sites.  If you plan to use MOSS as an Internet-facing content management system it’s likely that your requirements will be even more complex.

So where do you start if you want to tackle this subject?  Well, there really is only one starting point I think – Heather Solomon’s site and blog.  There is a huge amount of information here.  For example there is a CSS Reference Chart for SharePoint 2007, where Heather has documented the major styles used in MOSS and WSS 3, and has even recently added a “copy to clipboard” option for each style.  There are also Base Master Pages to download, and a series of articles on branding, the latest of which has some great info on customising web parts.

There’s a useful chapter in the Wrox book Real World SharePoint 2007 (which I’ve recommended before) on Customising and Branding the SharePoint 2007 Interface, written by Heather and Shane Perran.  Also I see that Wrox have another book out in September called Professional SharePoint 2007 Design.  The cover blurb for this says:

“This book is a quintessential addition to any SharePoint developer’s bookcase. It outlines all of the steps and considerations a developer should understand in order to design better looking and more successful SharePoint implementations”

so may well be worth looking at if you need to get involved in SharePoint customisation…

Ian Morrish has posted a nice “top 100″ list of public internet sites hosted on SharePoint.  When showing how SharePoint can be branded it’s great to have a resource like this, and Ian has  put the list in a  dataview with thumbnails of each site as you can see here.   He’s also use the Highslide Javascript Thumbnail viewer so you can pop up a larger image.   Well worth a look.

I read about Plebble.com in the Times yesterday.  The site’s aim is to provide a forum where users can share ratings and reviews based on good or bad service that they’ve received from companies.  This idea isn’t entirely new, but their approach is. 

The site founders used to work in the city, and Plebble has some similarities with the trading screens used to monitor stockmarket movements.   Their dashboard shows latest ratings, with best and worst performers listed based on user submissions, as you can see in the screenshot, 

They aren’t generating revenue from advertising, instead the intention is to charge business for access to data.  There are of course ways in which companies (or individuals) can skew the results by posting misleading reviews, but it’s an interesting idea, and the site looks really nice.

At various stages of my career I’ve been involved in lots of different Customer Service and Customer Relationship Management applications, and it’s one area where the Web 2.0 idea of a social network being used for customers to air their frustrations or praise has really taken off.  So I wish Plebble well, I hope it succeeds.