For information on real-world, hands-on SharePoint training please visit: http://www.aspe-it.com/sharepoint-training/ In this SharePoint Demo, SharePoint Institute's own Executive Director, Tom Robbins, gives a step-by-step tutorial for Creating Promoted Links inside the SharePoint 2013 Promoted Links App to promote use interactivity. Transcript: Greetings everyone! Tom Robbins here with SharePoint Institute and this week we’re going to talk about a really cool new app. It’s called the Promoted Links App. You’ve probably seen the Promoted Links App before if you’ve ever created a site in SharePoint 2013. An example of that is the “Getting Started with Your Site.” Each of the tiles displayed can be used to link to some URL. Each of the tiles has a title and some sort of description. By clicking on the tile we can actually link to something. That’s probably an example you’ve seen before. I’ve also created and end user site just as a sample site where I’ve done the same thing. I’ve created all of these promoted links/ tiles to focus users in on, for example, an announcement for the team, or take a survey, etc. It’s a really cool feature that adds some spice to your site. It makes your site a little more pleasant and inviting to your users. It also can drive them to very specific items in your site. You can certainly provide links over in the Quick Launch but those are a lot more boring than the great graphic images here. The best size for each of these icons is about 150x150. That’s a good size and you can actually specify the image sizes in a Google search. To get started creating this, I’ll just recreate this exact same Promoted Links App just by going up to the tools button (the one that looks like a gear) in the top right and clicking “Add an App” and then we can search for Promoted Links – it’s just a list app. We’ll call this “PromoDemo” and then click Create. When you open it up its just a list with a few different views. It has a tile view and then the standard list view. You can see some of the metadata that’s used for some of these Promoted Links. There’s obviously a title, this is what you see in the bottom of the tile. There’s the background image location. There’s a description, or what you see when you roll over the tile. Link location is what it takes you to – the URL that is opened when you click on the tile and then launch behavior determines whether it opens in another window or opens up in the same browser window. First of all, you want to make sure you have all of your images uploaded to a site asset library. Here in my site assets library I have a couple of icons and these are just uploaded from my computer from the internet. If you click on the names of the icons you can see what they look like. I need to know the link location of each of these icons. So as I create each of the promoted links I can point to the location. I’m going to right click on one of these an copy the shortcut so that I won’t forget or lose the location. So I’m going to go back and open the PromoDemo. I’ll go ahead and create a couple for you to show you how this works. We’re just going to add a new item to the list just like we do with any standard list. And I’ll call this “Announcements.” This will be the title that will show in the bottom of the tile and then we’ll put the URL of the background image location. And then we’ll put in the rollover description of the image. Then we’ll give a link location of where the actual tile should link to when you click on it. Launch behavior determines what happens, or how the link opens. Does it open in the same page, does it open in a new tab? And then we can specify order from left to right. So that’s the first tile. And to verify that it works, I can switch into tile view to make sure the image is there, the title is there and that the rollover text is there. I always want to click on each of these to make sure they navigate to the correct link. So this is a really cool way to create some really nice user interactivity and then you simply place this on a page using the App Web Parts. So let’s just create a quick page. We’ll call it Promo Demo Page. And it’ll just be a blank page for now. And we’ll just insert the app web part for the promo that I created. So there’s the web part and we simply save the page. Of course we could add other things to the page but that’s how quick and easy it is to create a really good looking way to focus your users in on specific links and things that you want them to have access to within your site.

• published: 05 Nov 2014
• views: 3605