Jan Tielens was a speaker at the European SharePoint Conference
2011. Why not see if you can expand your knowledge from
reading Jan's amazing blog post!
I'm pretty sure everybody who is using SharePoint has sent a
link to a document in a Document Library to somebody else (in an
email message for example). So you probably know that links to
documents (or list items) can become pretty long if the document is
located in a Document Library on a site deeply buried in a
hierarchy. SharePoint is of course not the only platform having
this "issue" and the internet already solved it quite some time ago
with URL shortening. From Wikipedia:
URL shortening is a technique on the World Wide Web in which a
Uniform Resource Locator (URL) may be made substantially shorter in
length and still direct to the required page. This is achieved by
using an HTTP Redirect on a domain name that is short, which links
to the web page that has a long URL. For example, the URL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL_shortening
can be shortened to http://bit.ly/urlwiki or http://tinyurl.com/urlwiki.
This is especially convenient for messaging technologies such as
Twitter and Identi.ca, which severely limit the number of
characters that may be used in a message. Short URLs allow
otherwise long web addresses to be referred to in a tweet. In
November 2009, the shortened links on one URL shortening service
were accessed 2.1 billion times.
So to make a long SharePoint URL short, you can copy the URL to
the clipboard, got to a URL shortener, past the long link over
there and copy the short URL you get in return back to the
clipboard. Works perfectly, but there are quite some tedious steps
to go through. Already a long time ago, when SharePoint 2007 was
still the rage, I
posted some code that automates all these steps. Finally I
found some time to update the code to SharePoint 2010 and nicely
package it in a Sandboxed Solution, so it works both for SharePoint
2010 deployed on premises as in the cloud on Office 365. The result
looks as follows, in the Documents tab of every Document Library, a
new item is added to the Share and Track group (the button gets
enabled when one document is selected):
When the Get Short Link button is clicked, a call to the Bit.ly
URL shortener is made. The short URL is returned, together with a
QR code, in a dialog for easy copy/pasting:
You can download the solution (.WSP) from the Get Short Link for
SharePoint CodePlex site for easy deployment. Over there you
can also find the complete source code, so feel free to enhance and
improve! If you feel like sharing back, let me know and I'll try to
include your enhancements in the project. A couple of remarks:
1) I used the Bit.ly URL shortener because it has a nice API and
some cool features (like the QR code generation). You can adjust
the source code to use your own Bit.ly account or even another
shortener.
2) The code uses the jQuery
Javascript library (because I'm still a lazy developer and I still
love jQuery a lot). The latest version of jQuery is included in the
solution and automatically deployed.
3) The solution and the source code are provided "as is" and
without warranty of any kind. So please test before you deploy it
to your mega big and important SharePoint site. It works on my
machine(s). :-)
Side note: if you still follow this blog after a long period of
blog-silence: thanks for your patience and welcome back. I won't
make any promises but I really would like to pick up blogging and
start contributing again to the fantastic SharePoint community.
Feel free to send some comments to encourage me. :-)
Why not keep up to date with Jan's brilliant
work by joining our community
or by following us on twitter or facebook!