Good evening everyone. I wanted to share with you the latest new features and some additional screenshots of the Chatter for SharePoint solution. Version 1.4 is shaping up to be one of the most significant updates to-date. I was just about finished with the scheduled updates for this version when an idea came to me in the shower (seriously. I have a lot of my ‘eureka’ moments in the shower for some reason).

As useful as the web part is – it’s still just a web part on a page. If you’re not on the page with the web part, you can’t use it. Since the purpose of this solution is to provide integration points from SharePoint to Chatter, I’ve come up with a new one: a way for the feed to be accessible from any page without any additional configuration. I’ve achieved this with the addition of a custom web part page and a custom action in the user-control:

Users can now click on the user-control at the top of the page and choose ‘Chatter Feed’ to instantly collaborate on Chatter:

A new modal window will appear with the Chatter Feed web part. This integration will allow for even greater collaboration as it doesn’t require users to be on a given page to view or post to their feeds.

In addition to the new Chatter Feed action, I’ve also added a new feed filter to the navigation: ‘To Me’. This filter will show feed items that are targeted to you.

Also squashed a number of bugs, including one big one where under certain conditions users would get an Access Denied message when opening the modal windows from the ribbon if they did not have read permissions on the root site.

I am hoping to have the new version ready by the end of the week – if time permits.

Thanks for all of the feedback!