Contents tagged with YASR
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YASR: Editable List/Document Library Pages
One of the more common things to customize in SharePoint 2003 (both WSS and SPS) are the pages that display lists or document libraries. Users end up on those pages when they click on the list/document library in the Quick Launch, or on the web part title that’s displaying the list/document library data. Those pages can be customized but you need to build your own site definition or you need to use FrontPage.
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YASR: User Account Look-Ups in SharePoint 2007
Sometimes a very small feature in SharePoint 2007 can mean a big relief for SharePoint users. Do you know the “pain” to add a user to a SharePoint site for example: you need to know the exact account name or the email address. One small typing mistakes will result in an unrecognized user. In the next version of SharePoint this scenario is drastically improved, and resembles a lot the experience that you get in Outlook.
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YASR: Alerts in SharePoint 2007
One of the more popular quirk in SharePoint 2003 (remember the YASQ’s?) was the alerting mechanism. The alerts in SharePoint 2003 are OK at first sight: you can create an alert for a complete list or document library, or just for one item. The problem is that you can only create an alert for yourself. This makes sense if you think of alerts as ‘RSS-avant-la-lettre’. But lots of people would like to create alerts for other users as well. Unfortunately this was not available out-of-the-box, although you could customize SharePoint by installing various (free) web parts to overcome this issue.
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YASR: RSS In SharePoint 2007
RSS feeds are great to keep you up to date without the hassle to go and look if information is updated; the new/updated stuff is pushed towards you. In the previous version of SharePoint, there was no support for RSS feeds out of the box. Although it’s possible to add RSS functionality to SharePoint 2003 by installing add-ons, it’s not very straight forward. Luckily in the new SharePoint 2007 RSS feeds are available, and the good news is: it’s enabled by default! When you navigate to a list or document library, you can select the View RSS Feed item from the Actions menu.
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YASR: Navigation in SharePoint 2007, Part One
[Yet Another SharePoint Relief Series] One of the pain points of SharePoint 2003 (especially Windows SharePoint Services), is the lack of navigation possibilities. It’s quite hard to find out which sub sites are created under a WSS site. Also when you’re on a WSS site, you don’t have any clue or way to navigate to the parent site hierarchy. With a small amount of customization however, it’s possible to solve these issues. In my SharePoint classes I always show how to create a breadcrumbs web part and drop-down navigation web part. For a pre-fabricated solution, check out Tom’s tree navigation web part. In SharePoint 2007 these web parts become obsolete, navigation is available everywhere. First of all, breadcrumbs are everywhere! Take a look at the screenshot below; it’s displaying a Contact list on a site. Notice the breadcrumbs to navigate back to the site.
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YASR: Forcing Check Out in SharePoint Document Libraries
[Yet Another SharePoint Relief Series] Document Libraries in SharePoint are great for doing document management. Once of they key concepts in document management is the ability to check out documents while editing the document. This will prevent other users from making changes at the same time. Check out functionality is available out-of-the-box in SharePoint 2003 Document Libraries. The only problem is that users are not forced to check out a document when making changes. There is however a workaround, but it involves editing the ows.js JavaScript file. (for more information see the MSD2D tip).
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YASR: SharePoint 2007 Versioning
[Yet Another SharePoint Relief Series] In SharePoint 2003 you can enable versioning for a Document Library, so SharePoint will store for each document in that library previous versions when the document gets edited. That’s nice, but that’s about it what you get out-of-the-box. Since each version of the document is in fact a complete document (it’s not the delta that’s stored for a version) big documents can take up more space than desired. Just imagine that you have a 1MB Word document for which you have 15 versions, the total size that the document item will use, is 15 MB (15 times 1 MB). So a very common request is to limit the number of versions that is stored in a document library. In SharePoint 2003 there is no out-of-the-box functionality to do that, although it’s quite easy to write a Document Library Event Handler to accomplish this, but you do need to write some code and deploy the solution.
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YASR: SharePoint 2007 Site Columns
[Yet Another SharePoint Relief Series] If you know a little bit about SharePoint 2003 you probably are aware of the fact that you can add custom columns to a SharePoint List or a Document Library. For example you can add an Importance column to a Document Library so each document in that library can have an Importance value. Probably if you want to do this nicely, you create Choice column so users can select the value for the Importance field from a couple of predefined values (e.g. Important, Very Important …). So far so good, this works fine in SharePoint 2003. But suppose you would like to have this Importance column also in another Document Library or in another List. The only option that you have in SharePoint 2003 is to repeat the creation of the field for the other Lists or Libraries (including defining all the different Importance values). In SharePoint 2007 you can avoid this repetitive work by using a new feature called Site columns. When you navigate to the Site Settings of a site, you’ll see a link called Site columns.
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SharePoint 2007 Goodies: the YASR Series
If you have been working with SharePoint 2003 you probably know the abbreviation YASQ which stands for yet another SharePoint quirk. Those quirks seem to be insignificant at first sight, but they are so important to be aware of if you don’t want to run into serious problems. Just imagine that you (or your sales person) have sold document level security in a content management system built on top of SharePoint 2003. :-)