Archives
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Practical Tweaks: creating a Social Security Number column
Many people find SharePoint to be somewhat limiting in its out-of-the-box functionality, but really, a creative approach can take you pretty far. Say, for example, you need to create a column to hold Social Security numbers (assuming you've worked out all the relevant security issues). You have a field that requires numeric validation, but it has a specific length requirement, which sounds more like string validation. Here's what I came up with off the cuff:
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Backup horror stories: Rendering error in the global navigation tab
Chances are that if you're restoring a site collection from backup, something has gone seriously wrong. Naturally, at this point, you've had just about enough of unexpected glitches, and you REALLY don't want anything to look weird once you restore and load up the site again. Oh, but Mr. Murphy is there laying down the law, and all you see on the global nav is a big "Error" tab. Terrified, you mouse over it with a morbid curiosity, only to discover the following error in a tooltip:
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Why my MOSS search doesn't work today (Reason #316)
Earlier this week a client called. Our beautiful MOSS installation had been running beautifully, and then several days after a reboot... their Search completely stopped working.
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The Great Divorce: Separating site hierarchy from navigation
(apologies to Clive Lewis)
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Hyper-V fun fact
Have you ever needed to back up a VHD with a script? If you have, then you've probably wanted to make sure it copied successfully.
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My favorite new quick fix: MS Office Diagnostics
Rebooting cures a multitude of ills.
Over the past two years I've come to realize that the SharePoint server equivalent is to run the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard (what a mouthful that is). However, my latest discovery is that there is a client equivalent as well.
If a user complains of JavaScript errors (e.g. "Library not registered"), of Excel 2007 documents opening in Excel 2003, or a handful of other SharePoint-related client-side issues, I now point them directly to the MS Office Diagnostic Tool. Here's the basic procedure:
1. Open Word 2007 (or Excel 2007).
2. Click the Office button.
3. Click the Word Options (or Excel Options) button on the resulting menu.
4. Select the Resources tab on the left.
5. Click the Diagnose button.
6. Start the diagnostic tests and follow the prompts. -
Hiding the Recycle Bin
The SharePoint Recycle Bin is a very useful feature, but due to the lack of a separate permission structure, sometimes product owners want to hide it from their users. This can be done in a variety of ways, but I've found that the simplest is to create a new master page (usually from a downloaded copy of the one you currently use on your site) and find the following tag:
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SPTraceView: One step closer to unscrewing the inscrutable
We still don't have good SharePoint debugging, but today I came across a tool that gets us closer. Essentially it works off of the SP logging mechanism, and alerts you when messages come up that meet your predefined filters. This has the advantage of (a) keeping you from having to go through the log files line by line, and (b) filtering at a higher level, allowing you to keep all that log information rather than excluding some events from being logged.
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PSConfig Part III: Confessions and assumptions
It's happened to everyone. You're supposed to be an expert in your field, and then you go and get tripped up by something insignificant. If you're like me, you think you've already eliminated the offending possibility, and it's only after the client (ack!) checks out your assumptions that you realize your foolish mistake (in this case, it was the assumption that the server's software firewall had nothing to do with the problem... but it did).
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SharePoint Migration from 2003 to 2007: Leave the clutter behind.
This has come up several times recently, and I think it's another case of the "Microsoft offers it so we should use it" mentality. There are indeed tools and utilities for migrating your existing farm -- or content database(s), or site collection(s) from 2003 to 2007; there are even procedures for upgrading your SharePoint farm to the new version.
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PSConfig revisited: character analysis
After yesterday's brush with covert crazy hyphens, a related tip seems in order.
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PSConfig: helpful tool, unhelpful error messages
Earlier this week, I needed to set up a MOSS development box. Piece of cake, right? Well, I must have been really tired from the long weekend, because when I used PSConfig to pre-create the configuration database, the following error stopped me dead in my tracks:
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Anonymous users and SharePoint workflows: The Problem
Simply put, you can't trigger a workflow from an anonymous user. The workflow must run in the context of the current user account, and of course there isn't one when you're anonymous. If you do try it, you'll probably see the following error:
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SharePoint Designer Gotcha: Where's the "action" in my Form Action button?
It seemed simple enough.
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Fun with MOSS Search, Part I: Service Packs and Registry Hacks
SharePoint farms can take several forms. Probably the most common one is the single-server farm (not to be confused with the "Simple Install", which is almost always a very bad idea). If you're low on hardware -- or you just don't want to shell out for an extra server OS -- you can start out with all of your services on a single box and expand later as needed.
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SharePoint TechFest: A bit of steak with the sizzle
The high point -- of the sessions I attended -- was SharePoint Search Challenges and Tricks, by my former associate (and MOSS MVP) Matt McDermott. Aside from the usual (yet pertinent) look at search scopes, custom iFilters, and external content sources, Matt gave us a look at some lesser-known features, like crawling large files outside of SharePoint by using DFS in conjunction with Server Name Mappings. There was also some great demo integration with the tagging abilities of MS Live Photo Gallery, and of course the usual cameos by his canine companions.
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A call for grievances: what do users hate about SharePoint?
Later this month I'll be speaking at the Dallas/Fort Worth SharePoint User Group, along with Pete Henehan -- long-time MCT and my distinguished colleague at Improving . Together, we'll be exploring simple ways to improve user experiences with SharePoint. To make that talk more effective, I'd like to hear from average users about what you hate, what you need, and what you just wish the IT people would understand.
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Where are my content types?
If one day, for no apparent reason, you notice that your default SharePoint content types have disappeared, you may have made the simple, unwitting mistake of reusing a GUID in a custom content type. This can cause a very confused SP server to hide all of your out-of-the-box content types.
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Adding Time to DateTime Fields in SharePoint Lists
Recently a fellow list member ran into a snag while trying to create a calculated field of the form [DateTimeField1 + TimeValue]. Ostensibly, his problem was the lack of seconds in the displayed value; in reality, however, the initial approach betrayed an all-too-common misunderstanding of the way date and time values are treated in SharePoint.