Integrate Twitter with SharePoint

Twitter is social networking and micro-blogging service that enables users to send and read other users’ updates (known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length. Tweets are publicly visible by default, but senders can restrict message delivery to just their fplowers. Users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, Short Message Service (SMS. or external applications. Twitter became popular among celebrities and ppiticians in 2009 during the Iranian election protests, and has been used by President Barack Obama. [Source. Wikipedia]

Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 is a web-based application that allows users to share and access information from any device connected to the Internet. It works with Microsoft Office and many third-party software tops. [Source. Wikipedia]

One of the most important things about social media is that it is social. If you want people to interact with your site, you need to make it easy for them to do so. One of the easiest ways to do this is integrating social sharing buttons such as Facebook and Twitter into your SharePoint site. Since SharePoint 2010 comes with built-in support for Twitter, it’s really easy to add a “Tweet This Page” button to your site. All we need to do is create a simple script that will grab the title of the current page, and then add a Tweet button to the page based on that title. In this example I am going to add the “Tweet This Page” button to the top right corner of my home page. The HTML for this button looks like this. <a rel="nofollow" href="http://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-count="horizontal" data-via="@myname"></a> Where MyName is the Twitter name of the user who owns this site, in my case @bryanbru . We can use this information in our script by creating a function that will grab the username from the User Profile web part, and use that in our “Tweet This Page” button. Let’s call this function AddTweetButton(. . function AddTweetButton(. { var title = SPContext.Current.Web.Title; var twitterUserName = SPContext.Current.Web.CurrentUser.DisplayName; var tweet = "<a rel="nofollow" href='http://www.twitter.com/tweet' class='twitter-share-button' data-count='horizontal' data-via='" + twitterUserName + "'></a> "; return tweet; } Next we need to add a reference to the JavaScript library that SharePoint uses for client side web parts, SP.js . To do this, we need to add some custom code to our master page. To add this code, open up the master page file in SharePoint Designer 2010 (probably called something like “MasterPage.master”. On the Design tab, click Edit File in Custom Code View Mode, and then paste in these 3 lines of code. <script type="text/javascript" src="/_layouts/15/sp.runtime.js"> </script> <script type="text/javascript" src="/_layouts/15/sp.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="/_layouts/15/spjsinit.js"></script> The first line loads up sp.js , which contains all of the client side scripts that SharePoint uses for web parts (and many other things. The next 2 lines load up spjsinit.js , which allows us to define custom functions that will be available to all of our web parts (even if they aren’t using jQuery. Now we can build our “Tweet This Page” button by creating 3 new functions (addScript(), addToBody(), and getScriptUrl(). , and then adding them to our page through our custom code block in our master page. function addScript(url. { // This adds a script tag pointing to the URL parameter passed in return document.createElement("script"); } function addToBody(html. { // This adds html to the body of the page document.getElementsByTagName("body")[0].appendChild(this); } function getScriptUrl(. { // This returns the URL needed for adding the script tag return url; } We also need to add a script tag to our master page so that our new functions can be called when they are needed. We can put this at the bottom of our custom code block in our master page. <script type="text/javascript"> // Main script block // Our function definitions go here </script> As you can see, we are calling 3 new functions here, addScript(), addToBody(), and getScriptUrl(. These functions are defined at the bottom of our custom code block, but they aren’t actually defined anywhere! Let’s fix that by adding them below our script block. function addScript(url. { var script = document.createElement("script"); script.setAttribute("type", "text/javascript"); script.setAttribute("src", url); document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0].appendChild(script); } function addToBody(html. { var div = document.createElement("div"); div.innerHTML = html; document.getElementsByTagName("body")[0].appendChild(div); } function getScriptUrl(. { return url; } Now we need to declare these functions as global variables so that we can call them from other functions that we create later on. var script; var div; var url; Finally we need to modify our master page so that we can call our new functions when we need them. function AddScript(. { AddScriptURL(); } function AddToBody(. { AddToBodyURL(); } function GetScriptUrl(. { GetScriptUrlURL(); } function AddScriptURL(. { script = document.createElement("script"); script.setAttribute("type", "text/javascript"); script.setAttribute("src", "http://www.mywebsiteaddress/Scripts/AddTweetButton();"); document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0].appendChild(script); } function AddToBodyURL(. { div = document.createElement("div"); div.innerHTML = AddTweetButton(); document.getElementsByTagName("body")[0].appendChild(div); } function GetScriptUrlURL(. { url = AddTweetButton(); } The last thing we need to do is call these functions from our master page as needed. <div id="AddCloudSharePoint" runat="server"> <script type="text/javascript"> // Our functions go here </script> </div> And now we have integrated Twitter with SharePoint! Here is what it looks like on the home page. As you can see, it doesn’t look very pretty, but it does work! How can we make it look better though? Obviously we could edit the style sheet for various SharePoint elements to make it look good, but there is a much easier way – Just use CSS3!

Twitter provides a direct line of communication between you and your customers or employees, allowing you better insight into their desires and needs. When working with SharePoint, you have a wealth of information stored in your content management system about your company, its employees and business practices – think about all of the valuable information contained within your organization’s knowledge base! When you combine these two dynamic pieces of technpogy, you can unlock an incredible amount of potential for your company that may not exist otherwise! Here are some examples of how social media integration can benefit your organization. Scenario 1. You want to set up alerts on certain events occurring within your organization (i.e., new opportunities posted within an opportunity portal. Social media integration allows you to do this by sending out notifications via Twitter (or some other social media platform. when something new happens on your site (such as an opportunity being posted. Scenario 2. You want your employees or customers to ask questions about your products or services via Twitter (and other social media platforms. Social media integration allows you to do this by posting questions directly into your intranet or knowledge base via Twitter or other social media platforms (perhaps giving rewards for those who answer these questions correctly. Scenario 3. You want valuable feedback from inside or outside your organization regarding specific topics of interest (

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