Easy Tabs Rock – v5 Beta is looking really good

Yippee! Easy Tabs 5 is out (in Beta, your mileage will vary) and looking good. I’ve actually deployed it in house, in production as I plan to simply replace the textfile holding the script with the final version when he has finished his masterpiece – one upload, all tickety-boo.

So What?

Easy Tabs is a brilliant bit of thinking outside the box by Christophe Humbert (blog: http://blog.pathtosharepoint.com/). I used it heavily in SharePoint Services 3 (and MOSS) sites and have been anxiously awaiting the SharePoint 2010 version (better still, his latest version, version 5 supports both) so that I could continue to leverage the power (and reclaim dashboard real estate). The simplest description is this… In the space it takes to show one List View or Web Part, I can now display many, separated by tabs. This is huge, for a busy desktop/dashboard that evolves as quickly as our business grows (and dreams).

I’ve captured several examples of Easy Tabs in action further down in this post, to hopefully help surface some ideas and approaches to how it can be leveraged in your sites. As well, I’ve illustrated with some screenshots what each setting does, to save you some time with experimentation.

Now What?

• Get it here – http://www.pathtosharepoint.com/sharepoint-user-toolkit/Pages/Easy-Tabs-v5.aspx
• Learn more about it here – http://blog.pathtosharepoint.com/2010/07/26/easy-tabs-version-5-is-out/

All told, I’ve had great success with v5. There is a calendar bug but if you read his notes, it appears we may need to wait for Microsoft to make some changes, before that one is easily overcome.

Just Tell Me How…

The steps to implement are pretty simple:

Most of the above is pretty straightforward, but here are some quick tips…

• Where to get/configure Easy Tabs and download the text file from – http://usermanagedsolutions.com/SharePoint-User-Toolkit/default.aspx
• Place the text file in a document library and get the link to that file, see the example below where I use the “copy shortcut” option in IE to get the full path to the EasyTabs script

Figure 1 : Get the path to your uploaded Easy Tabs Script/File

Then you’ll want to add a Content Editor Web Part to your page:

Figure 2 : Insert a Content Editor Web Part and position it BELOW the web parts you want the tabs to manage

Finally, paste your link into the Content Link field, add an appropriate title for the web part and set your Chrome Type to None

Figure 3 : Connect to the script and set the title and chrome

That’s it. A couple of things you should know (straight from Christophe, always refer to his documentation for any changes):

• Once you have created the first web part, you could export it as a file (the web part), and then upload that web part to your Web Part Gallery so you can reuse those settings
• Web parts below Easy Tabs will not appear as part of the tabs (Sometimes this is beneficial, I’ve used this in several cases to get exactly the result I want)
• Web parts without a title won’t be included in the tabs

On to the Sampler…

Before, a dashboard with three lists and no Easy Tabs

Figure 4 : Sigh, look at all that wasted dashboard real estate

No Frills Easy Tabs 5, in SharePoint 2010

Figure 5 : Chose this…

Figure 6 : Got this…

Lots of Frills in Easy Tabs 5

Figure 7 : flipped on just about every feature…

Figure 8 : And here is the result

Figure 9 : The result of clicking on Expand All

Figure 10 : And the result of Print Preview

Finally, a gallery of some tabs in action, complete with colour modifications to suit

This is some snapshots of our portal today, with Easy Tabs in place, incorporated in various areas

Figure 11 : My tuned settings…

Figure 12 : Rocking our Client Quick Reference Dashboard

Figure 13 : Jazzing up our primary support dashboard

Figure 14 : Narrowing more information, reclaim your dashboards!

Figure 15 : Multiple views of a single calendar (with columns filtered)? No problem…