leogodin.net

** Note before reading this it would be helpful to read Taming Cubicle Nation to understand my motivation for creating this solution.

Where I work we use many Microsoft SharePoint websites.  SharePoint allows you to quickly create sites to organize your team, perform meeting management, task tracking, and other common tasks that allow collaboration.   I often make custom lists to track lite processes.  With all these abilities SharePoint has become an important cog in many corporate environments.  One of the major drawbacks to using SharePoint is that it is generally very slow.  Every click requires a post back to the server (unless using Data Views).  In my environment simply loading a team site or custom list may take 5 - 15 seconds.  Other sites I access also have similar performance problems.

One common solution to solving this problem is to open multiple Internet Explorer windows open to the sites you most commonly visit.  This can really clutter your task bar and desktop.  Another solution is to open tabs for each instance of a site you commonly access.  While not a bad solution it is often difficult to know what is in a particular tab.  Clicking on a tab moves your focus from the web page.  The solution I decided on utilizes several iframes on a single Web Page to load and display the common websites that I access.  I use the JQuery library to hide and show iframes when I click on the appropriate link.  What makes this nice is that I can give the file to a co-worker and they can type in the links that they want to use.  No coding or design is needed.

To use this solution download JQuery from http://jquery.com/ and rename the downloaded file to “jquery.js”.  Then save this file to your hard drive http://www.leogodin.net/MultiLinkLoader.html.  Edit MultiLinkLoader to add the links you want and make sure it is in the same directory as jquery.net.  From there you can double click the file and enjoy faster access to slow intranet sites.

This is not an elegant solution but it works well in my environment.  I’d like to hear how other people are solving similar problems.