What's Up

Users love the promoted links feature of SharePoint 2013 as it provides an interactive experience with a contemporary look and feel. However, standard promoted links are not very flexible in that they:

• Only show tiles in a single row

• Only show 5 tiles before users need to scroll

• Are cumbersome to set up

• Have a fixed tile size of 150px by 150px

And of course you only get the tile based UI with the promoted links list type.

What’s Up addresses all of these limitations and more. The solution is a provider hosted App Part which is hosted on Microsoft Azure. The App Part can be attached to any SharePoint list type (but not document libraries in the current release) and is used to provide a tile based interface to list items which seamlessly integrates into your SharePoint environment.

You can use What’s Up just like a promoted links list by hooking up App Part properties with Image and URL columns but with the added advantages that you can choose to display tiles in a matrix with a specified number of rows and columns. You can make the tiles any size and they don’t have to be square either, they can be rectangular if you like.

This makes What’s Up ideal as a product catalogue viewer where tiles can be linked to detail pages. The items displayed and the order in which they are shown is controlled by standard views defined on the associated list. You can optionally show users a view picker control so they can interactively select the items in view.

If there are more list items in the selected view than can be displayed in the tile matrix then you can also choose to display a pager control. This means that What’s Up performs well as it only pulls data when needed.

Using What’s Up as a product catalogue viewer or as a navigation tool is cool but when the App Part is attached to standard list types such as a Task list then it really begins to add business value. SharePoint list column values can be used to set tile color. So for example low, medium and high priority tasks might be colored blue, orange and red respectively (or any color of your choosing).

Better still you can hook the App Part up with a Due Date and Percent Complete field and have it change color based on an offset of the date and time when viewed by users. So, for example you might want to implement something like the following business logic:

• Any task which is completed, color green

• Any task which is not yet completed but the Due Date value has been exceeded, color red

• Any task which has not yet been completed but is due in the next 72 hours, color orange

• Any task which has been started but not yet completed, color light blue

• Any other task, use the theme default color

This provides an immediate visual picture of the current status which users get immediately. You simply can’t do this with standard SharePoint but with What’s Up it’s a breeze.

You can also:

• Make tiles interactive so that users simply right click on a tile to mark items as complete

• Show a slider control which users can simply drag to set a % Complete value

• Link the tile to the list items edit or view form

• Show a call out when a user hover’s over a more info icon

• Customise what is shown in the call outs

And everything is security trimmed.

We have a business policy of never charging more than $100/month in total for subscription based products. As such we are licensing What’s Up at $3.99 per user/month up to a maximum of 25 registered users. In other words, if you use What’s Up for a project team of just 10 users then you will be charged a total of $39.90 per month but if you have 10,000 users then they can all use it for a flat fee of $99.75/month. We think that’s a fair deal.

Please take the free 30 day trial, you have nothing to lose.