Posting Announcements in Microsoft SharePoint Hosting Sites with WSS 3.0

SharePoint hosting sites have a feature called announcements which is available within the WSS 3.0 once the SharePoint site has been created. Hosted SharePoint web sites make use of announcement lists to post short items of information such as news and status that they wish to share with team members. Creating a hosted SharePoint web site, by default creates an announcement list. A view of this appears on the SharePoint hosting sites home page. Additional views of the announcement list may be created in WSS 3.0 and accessed on the “Documents and Lists” page. Only the latest five announcements will appear on the actual hosted SharePoint web site, they will still be available to the user in the “All Items View” contained in the announcement list inside the SharePoint Portal site.

SharePoint WSS 3.0 hosting allows the user to set an expiry date for any announcement, when this date is reached the announcement will automatically be deleted from the home page. Posting announcements in SharePoint hosting sites with WSS 3.0 is highly functional. Setting up an expiry date for the announcement means that the hosted SharePoint user does not need to go back and clean up the announcement area. The announcement gets deleted from the WSS 3.0 SharePoint hosting site on the day it is set to expire.

You can add thumbnails to each announcement in the SharePoint hosting site. This is easily done in hosted WSS 3.0 by going to the “Announcements List”, point and click on “Settings” then on “List Settings” and the body column. The SharePoint WSS default setting is rich text so this needs to be changed to “Enhanced Rich Text”, once this has been changed you will be allowed to insert thumbnail images into the announcement. The text will wrap right or left.

Adrian Gates (Adrian@apps4rent.com) is a Business Manager with Apps4Rent (http://www.apps4rent.com); which offers premium hosted Exchange, Microsoft SharePoint Hosting Services and Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services.