A little while ago my friend and Product Manager Donna Remillard (whose writings you often see in this blog) remarked with some exasperation: “Why is it so hard to manage a web site?”  And then she promptly left on vacation.

What she was trying to do, which prompted this remark, was approve a customer review in our out-of-box CommerceLive site.

To provide a little background: we make use of SharePoint’s native functionality wherever we can in CommerceLive – ranging from email templates to site settings as well as the managing the actual pages of your site.  This includes customer submitted reviews and ratings, which are held in a SharePoint list with an associated approval process.  There are a number of advantages to this approach, including taking advantage of content management capabilities as well as being a good citizen within SharePoint.

The disadvantage of this approach, as it turns out, was that it was easy to get lost in the number of menus and links that you needed to go through to get to the task you wanted to accomplish.  In Donna’s case, to get to the approval list for reviews and ratings, you’d have to navigate through a set of administrator-type options to get to the list, involving as many as 5 clicks and 4 separate pages filled with choices, where you’d have to remember which path you’d need to go down to get to the right list.

At this point, you could approve a review.

As is often the case, once this “flaw” was articulated, a number of us realized that we were also annoyed with this same problem, but we were just living with it.  Once we did come to that same realization, we realized that this wasn’t that hard a problem to solve. 

Enter the CommerceLive Admin Menu.

In a nutshell, the CommerceLive Admin Menu is a specific sub-menu added to the SharePoint Site Actions menu (which anyone familiar with SharePoint will have some experience with), and which holds links to CommerceLive management functions:

What we’ve done here is gather up the common management tasks for a CommerceLive based site, and placed them in one easy-to-access (and easy to remember) location.  So, for example, it now only takes two clicks to go directly to the Reviews and Ratings approval list.

Since we expect CommerceLive to be extended, we’ve also made it easy to extend the CommerceLive Admin Menu.  In addition to the tasks that we’ve baked in, you can also add your own additional tasks driven off of – you guessed it - a SharePoint list - which will be presented to anyone who is able to manage your site.

Adding new management tasks is as easy as following these steps:

1. Select Site Actions->CommerceLive->Advanced->Menu Items

2. This will take you to the Menu Items list

3. Click the New button, which will display the New Item form

4. Fill in the information for the new menu item

• Title: The title for your management function
• Description: A short description which will be displayed along with the menu item
• URL: The URL that you want this menu item to link to
• Icon: Optionally, the URL for an icon to display along with the item
• Submenu: you can group a set of management functions in a submenu by specifying the same name here for each item

I’m going to create two new menu items, and group them in a sub-menu:

5. Try out your new menu items:

That’s really all there is to it.  You can now add quick, descriptive task oriented links for any of your common (or uncommon) management tasks within your CommerceLive site.

But wait, there’s more…

Let's say you have some third party integration in your CommerceLive site which has (as most third party integrations do) some sort of web based administration functionality.  Wouldn’t it also be handy to be able to access that from CommerceLive Admin Menu within the context of the site?

For advanced users, you can make use of a new SharePoint page (known as the CommerceLiveAdminPage), which can host arbitrary web content using an iframe, adorned with a header to maintain context and to give you access to that SharePoint Site Actions button.

To make use of the CommerceLiveAdminPage, you need two pieces of information:

• The URL of the site which you want to host
• Optionally, a title for the hosted page

As an example, we’ll walk through adding the AddThis.com analytics site to the CommerceLive Admin Menu (we make use of AddThis.com in our upcoming Bookmark and Share web part, so this is a real example).  The URL for AddThis.com’s analytics site is:

http://www.addthis.com/myaccount

For a title, we’ll use:

Bookmark and Share Analytics

The URL for the CommerceLiveAdminPage needs two parameters - “pageurl” and “pagetitle”.  The full URL with the information above looks like this:

/_layouts/CommerceLiveAdminPage.aspx?pageurl=http://www.addthis.com/myaccount&pagetitle=Bookmark and Share Analytics

Using the same flow that we walked through earlier, we can add a new CommerceLive Admin Menu item, making use of the URL above:

Which gives us the new menu item:

Which, when clicked, takes us to the third party site (still within the context of our CommerceLive site, and still with the SharePoint Site Actions button available to us):

Again, that’s all there is to it – this is a little bit more advanced, since it requires some construction of URLs, but is still an incredibly easy way to make all of your CommerceLive management tasks available quickly to your users.

A quick note for Internet Explorer users – if the site that you’re hosting within the CommerceLiveAdminPage doesn’t set a privacy policy (this is indicated by picture on the bottom toolbar in Internet Explorer), IE will refuse to allow cookies within the iframe we use (or any other iframe, including SharePoints Page Viewer Web Part).  In most if not all cases, this will prevent you from doing things like logging in.  In this case, assuming you trust the site, simply double-click the picture, click on the link for the site, click the Summary button and choose the Always allow this site to use cookies radio button.  Once you’ve done this, click OK and then Close.

Finally…

We hope you enjoy this feature as much as we do. The new CommerceLive Admin Menu will help streamline access to management tasks such as Review & Ratings approval, as well as third party admin features. Look for it in the upcoming CommerceLive code-name “R2” release.