Wednesday, July 29, 2015

Create your own carousel on the PWA home page!!

Hi,

The PWA homepage is really user friendly and pleasant to use since the carousels and tiles have been introduced in Project Server 2013 and Project Online. But wouldn't it be nice to create your own carousel integrating for example your own corporate links, or anything which might be relevant for your users? We can think about BI Center report librairies, document librairies, external links. This could look like this:
Figure 1: PWA homepage with your own carousel

So how to achieve it? The procedure is quite straight forward:
  1. Create a new "promoted links" app,
  2. Add your links in the "promoted links" list,
  3. Add the app to your homepage.
No more than this!! So here are some more details.

1. Create a new "promoted links" app
Click on the gear icon and select "add an app". Pick-up the "promoted links" app.
Figure 2: add the "promoted links" app
Give a relevant name to your new app since it will appear (if configured accordingly) as the title of your carousel on your PWA homepage.

2. Add your links in the "promoted links" list
Before adding your links to the list (actually this promoted links app is a list containing links), you need to add the pictures that will be used for the title. Try to use a square picture, ideally PNG format, knowing that 110*110 is the standard tile format. I personnaly used for the example the "Shared Documents" librairy.
Figure 3: add the picture for the tile
Once the picture is added, you can proceed and add the link in the promoted links list.

Figure 4: add a new link to the promoted links list
You will have some properties to fill, such as the path (URL) of the link and picture. You can previously copy the picture path to paste it at the right place. You also have to add the title and description of the link. 
Figure 5: promoted link settings
Note that you can also specify the order of the tile in case you add more than one tile in the carousel, as well as the laucn behavior (new tab, page navigation, dialog box).

3. Add the app to your homepage
Once you app is configured with your link, you have to add it to your homepage (or anywhere else where a webpart can be added, such as a project site, the BI Center...). Click on the gear icon, then "edit page", "add a webpart, select the promoted links app in the "apps" section and add it.
Figure 6: adding the promoted links app to the homepage
Finally, you can edit the webpart properties to adjust some settings, such as displaying the app title above the carousel.
Figure 7: tile added to the PWA homepage
And with a few more tiles:
Figure 8: some more tiles added to your new carousel on the PWA homepage
Et voilà!!

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6 comments:

  1. Hi
    How to create tiles with calculating number of tasks or timesheets instead of built-in?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. You have a default tile in the "track your work" carousel which displays the number of new tasks. But I think that you cannot create just by configuration a tile with a badge counting a number of items. It would be custom development.

      Delete
  2. Guillaume - is there any way to edit the existing Track your Work Promoted Links web part? I would like to add an additional tile to it rather than add a new Promoted Link Web Part which will take up vertical space on the screen - at the moment we display Projects but none of the Approvals sub-set, we also don't display Timesheet tiles so we have plenty of horizontal space that could display additional tiles that we define.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Guillaume - is it possible to edit the existing "Track your Work" web part - I cannot see where it is located but can see in the Edit Web Part panel that it can be edited directly - I don't want to add a new Promoted Links web part to our Project Online home page as it would occupy too much vertical space - at the moment we have edited the default web part to display Project but none of the approvals subset of options, we also do not display the two Timesheet options - as a result we have plenty of horizontal space where we would like to display our own tiles and links in the same web part.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi,
      As far as I know, it is not possible to customize the default "trakc your work" webpart, except by playing with the available options you already saw in the webpart settings.
      But as a workaround, you could change the layout of your homepage, having 2 webparts next to each other on the same line, so you can have more content horizontally. See this article about customizing PWA home page layout: https://marqueeinsights.com/take-control-of-your-pwa-home-page-with-4-clicks/
      Hope this helps.

      Delete
  4. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete