Scot Hillier's SharePoint Stuff

I will be presenting a breakout session at Tech Ed 2009 on Thursday, May 14 at 10:15 am in room 501C. This session presents a replacement for the out-of-the-box web part picker designed to create a "web part marketplace", which includes tags, ratings, and user reviews. This is a code-intensive, 400-level presentation. You can download the code for the session here and bring it with you. Below is a screen shot of the browser and the session details follow. See you there!

Custom Features that Enable Users to Develop, Share, and Rate Content with MOSS 2007

In this session, we will examine several advanced custom features for MOSS 2007 that support the development, sharing, and rating of content. This will be a deep dive into the creation of enterprise solutions using multiple features working in concert. The end result will be an internal marketplace for SharePoint content presented in a manner similar to downloading music titles for a Zune.
To begin, we will present a custom feature that replaces the normal Web Part picker with a custom picker that surfaces the content marketplace. The custom picker allows for the sorting, filtering, and searching of available web parts by category, job role, geography, organization, and site.
Additional features also allow users to create content and upload it into a farm-wide web part gallery. Content can be created and previewed without knowing anything about web parts and then saved to the content marketplace. Along with creation and browsing, we also give the users the ability to rate the web parts and write a review. The ratings appear when you are browsing available parts. 
Going forward, we plan to add functions like "Recommended Web Parts" that would scan your page and recommend parts that look like a fit based on the other parts on the page.
Attendees will exit the session with a complete understanding of how the features were created and plenty of new ideas for creating features that build community in SharePoint.