Gift-wrapping Web Applications with the Page Viewer Web Part

With the Holidays upon us, everyone is putting things in boxes. Boxes are very convenient – they let you just drop something into them without having to change anything about the item being packaged.

As you start to deploy SharePoint in your organization, you will often find people wishing that they didn’t have to bounce from one web site to another all of the time. With Data Views, Search Federation, and other tools, you have seen how easy it is to get the information from other systems and applications into SharePoint. However, there are times when you just want to be able to get to another application directly within your SharePoint page.

Fortunately, there is a web part made just for such a situation – the Page Viewer Web Part. The Page Viewer is nothing more nor less than a box in which you can place and display content from another location.

You add a Page Viewer to your page just like any other Web Part.

The initial web part doesn’t have anything in it except instructions on how to add content:

Once you click the link to open the tool pane,

You can select a web page, a folder (file share), or specific file. Unlike some other web parts, this file is NOT accessed by the SharePoint server as an intermediary. It is retrieved and rendered directly by the user’s browser. Because of this, make sure you are specifying a location that is accessible from your expected users’ client PC’s.

Note: Technically, what you are doing is feeding an “iFrame” – essentially a browser within a browser.

You will probably want to adjust the settings of the "Appearance” section in order to make sure the web part is big enough to show the critical parts of the page you are selecting.

Then, once you hit “OK” and exit page edit mode, the external page is living happily inside your SharePoint site!

Of course, it is helpful if the site you are embedding in the Page Viewer offers a mode without a lot of extraneous “chrome”. Some applications offer a “portal mode” page, just for such usage.

So, that’s it. Very “back to basics”, but also potentially quite useful.

I hope you enjoy this little gift, in a little box, from SharePoint.

I wish you all a Merry Christmas!