Hi everyone! I wanted to share with you the really awesome enhancements to the Chatter for SharePoint solution. Your feedback has been terrific and has helped make this solution even more useful. Version 1.0.0.6 will be posted shortly on the blog is now available! Get it right here. Existing users can retract and add the new solution to get all of the updated features.

So – what’s new?

SharePoint Ribbon Integration

You can now share pages, list items, and documents within SharePoint from the ribbon! For sharing pages, click on the ‘Page’ tab and you’ll see a Chatter icon in the ‘Share & Track’ grouping:

For Lists and Libraries, the Share on Chatter link will appear in the ‘Share & Track’ group in the Items/Documents ribbon:

When clicked, a modal window will appear with the selected object to share and a space for your comments:

And the result is visible in the Chatter feed:

Browsing within the Chatter Web Part

Prior to this version if you clicked on a user or group name within the feed window it would open a new browser session to SalesForce Chatter. Now, you can browse and post across groups and users within the web part!

A new breadcrumb trail shows your current feed location and gives you one-click access to the All Chatter feed. Also new is the ability to refresh the feed by clicking on the feed in the breadcrumb trail.

New Progress Animations

When you post or update feed items you now get progress indictors while the server is processing the request:

The animations will appear for the following actions: refreshing the feed, posts, like/unlike, and comments. The animations also appear relative to the item being updated – cool.

Web Application Settings

The solution now stores default properties in the web.config AppSettings. This was necessary to support the Ribbon Integration and allows any instance of the web part to use the configuration and license information so you have less to configure when adding the web part to other sites/pages.

Other Stuff

This version also includes a bunch of fixes and tweaks to the user interface, including:

• Fixed issue where posting to group was being sent to the All Company feed
• Fixed issue where jQuery undefined message would appear on some browsers
• Fixed issue where posts on user feeds would appear with a group icon in the All Company feed
• Fixed alert banner colors
• Tweaked feed parent/actor display properties
• Updated some help text and debug messages

Still in Progress

I am still working on the SharePoint Foundation version of the solution as well as Search integration — wanted to get the usability improvements done first. Look for these and more updates in a future release.

Thanks to everyone who contributed ideas – helps me make better solutions for you.