Last few days we were developing 2 new web parts, both are calendar related, and use similar infrastructure:

• SPElements Mini Calendar Web Part – a mini calendar web part that allows adding a calendar in any existing page without taking all the space like SharePoint’s built-in calendar.
• SPElements Color Calendar Web Part – It’s based on SharePoint’s built-in calendar but adds colors.

Both web parts support coloring & multiple calendar sources. You can select several different calendar lists to show in a single web part and give a different color for each source list (or use multiple views from the same calendar list and color each view differently). Since the mini calendar is very small only one color is selected for each date in the case there are few events with different coloring in the same day.

SPElements Mini Calendar is a small, resizable web part. When pointing on a specific date all the events in that date are displayed in a tooltip box. Clicking on an event in the opened box will open the view form of the item. Smallest recommended size is 180px*180px, although it’s possible to resize to even smaller size but scroll bars might appear on some browsers (Firefox).

SPElements Color Calendar integrates nicely into SharePoint calendar look and feel with a gradient filling of the events as shown in the image to the right.

From time to time I need to find information about SharePoint server internals for the various product developments. There’s one very popular product called SharePoint Manager 2007 which is very good but requires to be run from the SharePoint server. I was looking for a simple tool, without server installation, that will get the information. I found few tools:  without running on the server. I found few (free) tools such as SharePoint Explorer Client 2.0 add-in for IE (but I use Firefox).

After looking a bit I’ve decided to try and write something quickly, and so came SPElements Remote Explorer for SharePoint – a simple tree navigation tool thats uses SharePoint standard web services to browse SharePoint internals. As a side effect, it can also browse SharePoint Live since there’s no server side installation.

The privileges needed from the user are minimal (read access & remote interfaces access) with anyone with standard role as contributor or above got them (you can even add it to the ‘Read’ role). You can open the tree directly in a specific site so there’s no need to have the permission for the entire farm, just for a specific site.