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!!