Free Third Party Tools we use on our Intranet Homepage

Following my session today at the Southeast Asia SharePoint Conference here in Singapore, I decided to write a brief summary on the different free third party tools (both JavaScript code and Web Parts) that we use on our intranet’s (SharePoint 2010, but also works on SharePoint 2007) homepage and on some other related sites (webcasts, news archives) and provide links to the respective sites.

SPServices  (1)
We’re using SPServices for a few things, on the homepage we grab 3 top stories from a specific list, and “feed them” to AnythingSlider (see below) as content
URL: http://spservices.codeplex.com

AnythingSlider (1) 
With the content provided from a Pages Library, we simply provide 3 different articles as content to AnythingSlider, which rotates them (animated!) within a specified timeframe
URL: http://css-tricks.com/examples/AnythingSlider/

JavaScript Poll (2)
Created by Alexander Bautz, I made a few smaller modifications to make it more suitable for our environment. Setup was done within minutes.
URL: http://sharepointjavascript.wordpress.com/2010/11/23/poll-for-sharepoint/

Flowplayer (3, used in individual webcast page)
For our webcasts, we are using Flash-based videos (.flv) and play them with the help of Flowplayer. Flowplayer allows you to easily play a Flash-video on your page, and if wanted you can do a lot of customisations (preview image, controls, autostart, .).
URL: http://www.flowplayer.org

MiniCalendar Web Part  (4)
This Web Part is available on CodePlex for both SharePoint 2007 and 2010. We had to make some smaller changes to the design (only show the days within a month, colours), so I had to update the source code a bit and recompile it.
URL: http://minicalendarwebpart.codeplex.com/

Paging Content Query Web Part (used in news archive pages)
One requirement that we had was to show paging numbers in our news archive, so that you can navigate backward and forward within the current news archive page. OOTB this is not available, but with Waldek’s web part it’s extremely easy to set up and integrate.
URL: http://blog.mastykarz.nl/sharepoint-2010-content-query-web-part-paging/
URL: http://sharepointyankee.com/2011/07/11/imtech-content-query-web-part-for-sharepoint-2010/ (I used this article by Geoff Varosky to set up our implementation, helped a lot).