SharePoint Blank

Tweet Jam Tuesday: The Future of SharePoint, Yammer, and Mobile in the Social Enterprise

John Anderson — Fri, 17 May 2013 19:30:00 GMT

Continuing the conversation which began with last year's popular tweet jam on the topic of The State of the SharePoint Community, Mark Fidelman of harmon.ie will once again host a discussion on Twitter between a group of notable SharePoint community leaders. The topic under discussion at this year's event will be The Future of SharePoint, Yammer, and Mobile in the Social Enterprise, so you can bet that the conversation will be lively.

The event, at which I am once again honored to have been asked to participate as a panelist, will take place on Twitter this Tuesday, May 21, from noon to 1 P.M. ET. Follow #SPJam to get in on the action, and learn what SharePoint experts including (but by no means limited to) Joel Oleson, Paul Swider, Sadie Van Buren, Laura Rogers, Michael Greth, Mike Watson, Richard Harbridge, and Bjorn Furuknap will have to say in response to probing questions such as:

Is Microsoft making the right moves in Enterprise Social Networking (ESN)? Why or why not?
Any holes in Microsoft's social strategy?
How can organizations best take advantage of the new SharePoint solutions and tools?
How will Office 365 play into this new social shift?
How will these Microsoft/SharePoint developments affect the community?
How important is mobile in an enterprise social strategy?
Why/how should every business prepare for mobile as part of its enterprise social strategy?

Join us on Twitter Tuesday at noon ET for Social SharePoint Tweet Jam (#SPJam). With these participants, and these questions, it's guaranteed to be a fascinating discussion ... and one never knows, it could even get heated!

Site Web Analytics in SharePoint 2010 Part 2, in Which We See Actual Analytics Data

John Anderson — Fri, 13 Jul 2012 19:30:00 GMT

Sorry I left you hanging last week, gang. A mid-week holiday on the Fourth, followed by my decision to "take the Fifth" (as a birthday present to myself), and then playing catch-up on various fronts led to my losing the time necessary to assemble a SharePoint Blank post. Let's pick up (sort of) where we left off though, with my discovery that my SharePoint 2010 team site hadn't been provisioned for Web Analytics.

I'm happy to report that our Sys Admin had the site provisioned within minutes of my making the request, but I've since decided that it'd be more fun to share, by way of example, the analytics from Sharing the Point instead. (In part because there are several exciting developments currently in flight with regard to this September's STP Africa tour which has Sharing the Point taking up much of my frontal lobe at the moment. Keep an eye on the STP site over the next week or so for details regarding the exciting developments of which I speak.)

So, after arriving at the Web Analytics Reports page (by following the path outlined in my last post) on a site that's been provisioned, by default, you'll be presented with the site-wide Number of Page Views (by date, in descending order):

For a closer look at the menu of Analytics options available, however, here are all of the options seen in the nav on the left-hand side of the above image:

As you can see, the available options include, in addition to Number of Page Views, Number of Unique Visitors, Number of Referrers, Top Pages, Top Visitors, Top Referrers, and Top Browsers.

Let's take a moment to rewind and have another look at the first image above though. It's a screenshot I just took today, on 7/13, and close observers will note that the availability of data appears to be delayed by one full day, since 7/13 doesn't yet appear in the list at all, and 7/12 still shows a Count of zero page views (which, though I grant is within the bounds of possibility, isn't terribly likely). Anybody know why that would be? Initial—albeit admittedly hasty—investigations into the matter on my part have thus far proved fruitless.

Analytics areas that provide more than just a Count in the default list display of data include: Top Pages, Top Visitors, Top Referrers, and Top Browsers, each of which also helpfully includes a Percentage in addition to a Count, as seen in this snapshot of the Top Browsers display:

I should note that it's also possible to analyze the data in chart form, and to customize reports via the Analyze tab in the Ribbon, but simply clicking that tab doesn't appear to change the (plain, list) display of the data in the STP site for me, so that's going to have to be a topic for possible revisiting down the line. In the meantime, for those seeking that information specifically, I'll point you again in the direction of Ryan Duguid's Introducing Web Analytics in SharePoint 2010 post over at MSDN for additional details on the capabilities of the Analyze feature.

How to Access Site Web Analytics (Formerly Site Usage Reports) in SharePoint 2010

John Anderson — Fri, 29 Jun 2012 20:15:00 GMT

With the publication last week of my post on publishing directly to a SharePoint 2010 blog from Word –an update of sorts to an older post which was dedicated to the same topic using SharePoint 2007– it has occurred to me that I spent years writing "how to" posts for MOSS 2007, but with my shifting responsibilities over the past couple of years, my "2010" output in that regard has been rather woeful.

I still have those other responsibilities (and more besides) on my plate, but the combination of how much fun it was to step back into my well-worn SharePoint Blank shoes last week, and the realization of just how badly I've underserved the 2010 end user community in this blog to date, I've decided to make an executive decision to change that. My plan going forward is to post here (at least) weekly, and I'll start by tackling the 2010 counterparts of what have been, historically, the most popular posts on this blog (based on number of pageviews). I guess you could call it "SharePoint Blank's Greatest Hits ... for SharePoint 2010!" If you're burning for a 2010 version of a particular topic, however, by all means, let me know, and I'll happily bump it up in the rotation.

Anyway, let's go ahead and get started with a 2010 update to the single most viewed post in the history of SharePoint Blank (with over 43K pageviews as of this writing): SharePoint Site Usage Reports: the Site Usage Summary.

In SharePoint 2010, what used to be known as "Site usage reports" have been renamed Web Analytics, and accessing them is a similar process, but they're now accessible at several levels. From within a site, to access the Analytics for that site (which was the point of my original post), you'll start by selecting Site Settings from the Site Actions drop-down:

On the resulting Settings page, unlike 2007 where you'd have found Site usage reports under the Site Administration heading, in 2010 you'll find what you seek under the Site Actions heading in the form of two hyperlinks: Site Web Analytics reports and Site Collection Web Analytics reports:

Clicking the Site Web Analytics reports link will allow you to "View traffic of content inventory statistics for this site."

Clicking the Site Collection Web Analytics reports link will allow you to "View traffic, search, or content inventory statistics for this site collection."

I'd show you what those statistics look like but, alas, when I clicked them on our team site, I received the following message in lieu of metrics, glorious metrics:

"Web Analytics reports cannot be displayed because the Web Analytics Service Application is not provisioned. Contact the farm administrator to request that the Web Analytics Service Application be provisioned."

So I'll give you one guess as to whom I'm off to bother right now. I'll have to beg your pardon for the hasty exit, but you see, our Sys Admin could get the call that will initiate his paternity leave at any moment, so...

We are a full service blog, and we do aim to please though, so for details and a peek at what the three types (Traffic, Search, and Inventory) of reports that are available look like, as well as the skinny on the two other areas they're available for (Per Web application in the farm, and Per search service application), check out Ryan Duguid's post, Introducing Web Analytics in SharePoint 2010 over at the Microsoft Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Team Blog.

Wish me luck on that provisioning!

How to Publish a Post to a SharePoint 2010 Blog Directly from Microsoft Word

John Anderson — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 17:00:00 GMT

Longtime readers may recall that, a few years ago, I wrote a post detailing how to publish to a SharePoint 2007 blog directly from Word. Well, guess who just yesterday published his first post to a SharePoint 2010 blog and is here to tell you how easy it was? That's right, this guy! (Miss me?)

The first step in the process is to select the File tab in Word. Well, actually, that's not true, the first step is to have created a SharePoint 2010 blog (or have had one created for you), and the second step is to have written the content of a blog post, so technically we're starting at the third step, but that's neither here nor there. For our purposes, we're going to call selecting the File tab in Word from your already written soon-to-be blog post "step one" and go from there, shall we?

Right then, having selected the File tab from our document, select the Save & Send button from your menu of options, then select Publish as Blog Post from the resulting choices and, finally on this popup, click the Publish as Blog Post button (this time it means business) that appears at the bottom right:

Assuming this is the first time you've published to the blog from Word, at this point, a dialog box will appear and will ask that you register your blog account. Click Register Now:

Next you'll have to choose your blog provider from the list of available blogging platforms. Note, pleasingly, that, among others, the options include Community Server (which powers Bamboo Nation), but choose SharePoint blog in this case:

At this point, you're actually going to register your new SharePoint blog account by entering the URL of your blog:

But not so fast, before you do that, there's one catch to the process that you need to be aware of first. If you click the Help me fill out this section hyperlink that appears in the image above, as noted on the resulting page is that what you need to enter here is "the address of your blog page with no additional information" (emphasis mine):

In my case, this meant that instead of simply copying and pasting the entire URL of the blog as it appears in my browser's address bar (http://sharingthepoint.org/blog/default.aspx), I needed to truncate it to http://sharingthepoint.org/blog/. After entering the URL and clicking OK, I was helpfully warned that "When Word sends information to the blog service provider, it may be possible for other people to see that information." Which isn't of great concern to me in this case, so Yes, OK:

At this point, the blog provider in question will be contacted, and you'll be prompted to login with your credentials:

Once you're successfully authenticated, the blog account registration process is complete:

Word will now present your original document to you with a prompt to [Enter Post Title Here]:

After you've done so, click the Publish button you'll find at the far left of the Ribbon:

And, if everything works as smoothly for you as it did for me, you'll get your own version of this pleasing "This post was published..." confirmation that I got yesterday morning:

Happy SharePoint blogging!

(Oh, and needless to say, eagle-eyed readers will have divined from my examples herein that the Sharing the Point tour rides again this September ... and this time we're heading to Africa! Check out all the details over at SharingThePoint.org, and look for some of the updates to also appear right here in Bamboo Nation, as has become our custom.)

Tweet Jam on 'The State of the SharePoint Community' Coming February 15

John Anderson — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 22:30:00 GMT

UPDATE : The entire Tweet Jam has been archived and is available at http://harmon.ie/blog/02-13-2012 . Thanks, harmon.ie!

On February 15 from 1-2 p.m. EST, I'll be joining an all-star group of panelists for Tweet Jam 2012: The State of the SharePoint Community . harmon.ie 's Mark Fidelman will be hosting the discussion, which will address questions involving the relevancy of the SharePoint community in 2012, how to build a more effective community, what SharePoint developments will affect the community, and more. My esteemed co-panelists, to name just a handful, include: Michael Gannotti, Michael Greth, Richard Harbridge, Mark Miller, Joel Oleson, Laura Rogers, and Dux Raymond Sy. The complete list of panelists is available in a post over at NothingButSharePoint.com , where you're encouraged to add a comment with your questions or suggestions for additional topics of discussion in the Tweet Jam.

All of the action will be taking place at #SPJam on Twitter, so please mark your calendar for February 15, from 1-2 p.m. EST, and join the discussion.

Halloween Theme for SharePoint 2010 Available as a Free CodePlex Download

John Anderson — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 21:00:00 GMT

OK, this is just too cool to not share. Earlier today, SharePoint MVP Kanwal Khipple of SharePoint Buzz fame released a very cool Halloween theme for SharePoint 2010. To whet your appetite, here's a ghastly glimpse at the topmost portion of a page with Kanwal's "Buried Alive" theme applied:

To see additional elements of the Halloween Theme (and to access the link for the free download), point your browser at: http://spmasterpage.codeplex.com/releases/view/75745.

Alas, much as I was hoping to be able to report here that I'd successfully installed the theme myself, it turns out that (like most end users), I don't have access to alter the Master Page of any of the SharePoint sites to which I have permissions ... which, all things considered, is probably a Good Thing. Having said that, however, the installation instructions that are provided alongside the theme itself look to be devilishly simple to follow, clocking in as they do at just five fiendish steps. So if you've got the requisite permissions to alter your portal's Master Page (and won't get in trouble for doing so), why not arrange for a spooky surprise for your colleagues as they begin the work week this coming Halloween Monday?

Have a happy Halloween, everybody!

Hey, Isn't That Internet Site Built on SharePoint?

John Anderson — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 19:15:00 GMT

I recently happened upon a website in my personal life that caused me to sit back and think, "Hey, I think that's SharePoint!" Granted, while it's never a surprise to encounter a SharePoint site in my professional life these days, it's considerably rarer that I unexpectedly encounter an Internet-facing SharePoint site "in the wild." (Mind you, this is not to suggest that there aren't lots of them out there, and some of the world's biggest companies are among them, I'm just saying that in my personal experience, I don't often trip across new-to-me examples.)

Anyway, having tripped across several more such sites in the span of a few weeks, I got to wondering ... is there a way to determine for sure if a given site is a SharePoint site? Viewing the source of my prime suspects and searching on "SharePoint" and "Microsoft" turned up zilch, which was admittedly disappointing, though not entirely surprising since I figured that default code could probably be overwritten or obfuscated by a talented developer.

After following that suggestion, which had been made by my colleague Jeff Kozloff, and then Googling and using some of the methods described in Nirav Sanghvi's post, How can we Identify a SharePoint Site? (including the one Jeff had initially suggested), as well as comments in response to a similar question at Footprint of IT, I was still unable to ferret out proof of SharePoint existence on any of the suspect sites. Bruised but unbroken, and still feeling certain that at least the original site that had sent me down this rabbit hole had to be SharePoint, I went back to the Google well one last time and, using a different search phrase, happened upon the stackoverflow post, Is the website Sharepoint or just .NET?, which then led me to a nifty website/tool (that's probably familiar to many developers) BuiltWith.com.

And guess what? Turns out that .PHP can be made to look a heck of a lot like SharePoint to the untrained eye. Exhibit A: http://www.stoneponystore.com/, which is the site that got me started down this line of inquiry.

Crazy, huh?

So, what are your favorite (actual) SharePoint sites that you've happened upon unexpectedly in the wild?

Overcoming the 'Override Check Out' SharePoint Blues

John Anderson — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 17:00:00 GMT

In response to an older post of mine, Best Practices for your SharePoint Document Library: Require Check Out, I recently received a comment specifically regarding the Override Check Out feature.

The question, as posed by mlotfe, asked:

"I've seen that when I check out a document, other users may discard this check out. Is there any way to prevent this?"

I did a little poking around on my own, but feeling the pressure of (mounting) other responsibilities, ended up throwing a "Hail Mary" to the Patron Saint of SharePoint Blank, Jeff Kozloff himself, in the hopes of a speedy resolution to mlotfe's query. As is usually the case, Jeff came through in spades, so I'm just going to turn it over to the Man himself. Take it away, Jeff...

"This [behavior] is based on a specific right within the Permission Levels called Override Check Out. In a default Team Site deployment (in SharePoint 2010), there is a default set of Permission Levels that exist:

By default, any Permission Level below Design does not possess the right to Override Check Out. As you can see below, the Design level has the ability to Override Check Out by default:

At the Contribute level, one Permission Level down from Design, however, the Override Check Out feature is not turned on by default:

The default SharePoint Groups are associated with the following Permission Levels:

Notice that if a user is a member of the [Site Name] Owners group, they are associated with the Permission Level Full Control, thus allowing them to override checkouts. So my recommendation is that the user should review their groups and see what Permission Levels are associated with their groups, and maybe even create custom permission levels that will match their needs more closely."

Thanks for clearing that up, Jeff!

Please note that while Jeff's response specifically addresses the Override Check Out issue in SharePoint 2010, I'd be willing to bet that the solution is extremely similar (if not identical) in SharePoint 2007.

Edit My Profile in a SharePoint 2010 My Site when the My Settings page isn't Editable

John Anderson — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 21:30:00 GMT

I've been feeling the itch to return to the topic of the SharePoint 2010 My Site, so I spent a little more time actively working on mine today. In matter of moments, I had tripped across the first noteworthy item when I clicked the My Settings button in the dropdown under my name in the upper right-hand corner of the page:

The page which surfaced as a result of that click was, bizarrely, an un-editable version of my profile, with no sign of an Edit button or even an editable field, and only a Close button upon which I could act:

Curious, no? I certainly thought so, and after clicking the My Profile button in the same dropdown (where I was led to an editable version of My Profile via the handy Edit My Profile hyperlink), I did a little investigating. Turns out the My Settings feature can be disabled, and I'm guessing that's the case with mine, but I'm still in the dark as to why it would be considered an acceptable user experience to present a user with an un-editable version of their My Profile page under these circumstances, and with absolutely no indication as to why such a useless page is being presented.

Further investigation surfaced what appears to be a vastly improved, alternative user experience. The solution, devised by Jesper M. Christensen, involves the creation of a new permissions policy, and is described in his blog post, SharePoint 2010 Foundation: Cannot change "My Settings" of a user. Note, however, that this is a solution that an Administrator will need to put in place, and not one that end users will be able to put into place on their own, but I'm documenting it here by way of helping to broadcast the means to an improved user experience.

Say What? I Can't Edit My Own SharePoint 2010 My Site?!!

John Anderson — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 18:30:00 GMT

While tooling around on the Bamboo portal yesterday afternoon, I happened to drop into my My Site and quickly realized three things. First, I apparently haven't spent any time on my My Site since the portal was upgraded to 2010 early this year. Second, from a Web Part perspective, nothing I had done on my My Site in 2007 had migrated to the 2010 version. Not that that this last was a problem for me since, as longtime readers may have deduced, I (mostly) used my MOSS 2007 My Site as a (mostly) "safe" test area on production. Lastly, and most surprisingly, however, I realized that I apparently lacked the ability to edit my own My Site in 2010!

I should clarify that last statement. I did have the ability to edit my profile and anything else that was a hyperlink-enabled edit (such as updating my areas of expertise in the Ask Me About Web Part), but there was no Ribbon and no Edit button anywhere. In other words, there was no ability to edit a page, which meant, among other things, I couldn't even add a Web Part to my My Site (or, for that matter, configure one of the "stock" Web Parts within the My Site).

After an unsuccessful round of everyone's favorite game show, Googling for Answers, I threw in the towel and proceeded directly to Brett, our SharePoint Admin. In short order, Brett had hooked me up with the ability to edit the My Content portion of my My Site:

I asked Brett what he'd needed to do to bring this about, and he answered:

"I had to use SharePoint Designer to open your My Site page, delete the default.aspx page, and add the default.aspx page from c$\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\SiteTemplates\SPSMSITE on the server. I added some Web Parts just to make sure that everything was working OK."

I asked Brett if that template change was global, or if he'd have to make the change for each employee who wants or needs the ability to edit their My Site. He hasn't had a chance to look into it yet, but suspects that he'll have to do each one individually. Can that possibly be right? I certainly hope not for Brett's sake, and for the sake of all SharePoint 2010 admins out there.

Anyway, now that I've broken the seal on my 2010 My Site, I'm thinking it might be time to resume my old "Pimp My SharePoint My Site" series ... 2010 edition, baby!

'The list cannot be displayed in Datasheet view...' Message when Attempting to Edit in Datasheet in SharePoint 2010

John Anderson — Thu, 26 May 2011 17:00:00 GMT

Anybody else out there ever run into this? I have no idea how prevalent the issue is, or if it was just a fluke in my case but, shortly after getting a new laptop, I discovered that I was no longer able to edit lists in Datasheet mode on Bamboo's SharePoint 2010 portal. When I clicked the Edit in Datasheet button on the Ribbon, this was the response I got:

Given the range of not one, not two, but three possible sources of the problem (and given that I'd just gotten the new laptop), I asked Brett, Bamboo's Administrator extraordinaire, if he could help narrow down the source of the problem for me. In no time flat, he responded, suggesting that I try installing the 2007 Office System Driver: Data Connectivity Components and, after a super-easy download/install process, I was once again happily editing in Datasheet mode.

So if you've come to this post because you're seeing that same message, the same solution may very well work for you too. Good luck!

SharePoint Search Query Returning Unexpected Results? Check Your Metadata Property Mappings

John Anderson — Wed, 04 May 2011 19:00:00 GMT

Today's episode of SharePoint Blank is going to be unlike any post that's appeared in this space previously. You see, many's the time that I've gone into "the mailbag" to pluck a question that allows me to kick off an investigation into learning (and sharing) the answer to the question that had been posed. Today, however, I'd like to hand the reins over to a friend to tell his own tale of a SharePoint mystery he'd tripped across... and how he went on to solve that mystery.

A couple of months ago, my friend Bryon Jordan, an IT Analyst/Project Manager in Louisville, KY, dropped me an email letting me know that his organization was deploying SharePoint, and he was seeking some recommended resources to help get up to speed on the platform. Well, the other day, I heard from Bryon again, and this time he wanted to share an excellent nugget of SharePoint information that he'd discovered. I thought that Bryon's discovery (and his telling of it) made for such a great SharePoint story that I wished the discovery had been my own so that I could blog it here ... and then I realized, hey, it's my blog, so if I want to invite a friend to share his own SharePoint Blank-esque tale of discovery in this space, there's nothing stopping me from doing so, right? And so, without further ado, I'm going to get out of Bryon's way now and let him bring the knowledge...

"I had an interesting SharePoint 2007 experience that I finally solved and thought I'd share it with you. It may be old hat to you by now, but it took a lot of investigating for me to solve it. It's funny how no amount of reading ever prepares you as well as rolling up your sleeves and getting your hands dirty.

We are creating folders for patients using a six-digit number (HIPAA requirements to keep patient confidentiality). Each document in the folder begins with the same number, thus folder 123456 has any number of documents with names that begin "123456," as well as other identifiers to give it a unique name.

When I did a search for certain patients (based on their unique identifier), however, information pertaining to other patients also popped up in the search.

For the following example, I've used two fictional patient numbers to illustrate the issue.

Patient ID 159763 would show six documents in the search results when there were supposed to only be five (not including the parent folder). There was an extra document, belonging to patient ID 311789, popping up in the search results that did not have that number in it at all, although for some reason, the properties reflected 159763 in the search.

It turns out that SharePoint indexes on a lot more than the file name.

After some researching, I went into the DB and started doing queries to see if I could find something in the data that triggered the search to display this other patient's document.

This was my query hitting the views in the SharePoint DB that turned up all sorts of information:

select top 20 docs.Leafname, docstreams.* from docs
INNER JOIN docstreams ON docs.ID = docstreams.ID
WHERE docs.LeafName Like '311789%' order by leafname

As it turns out, the size of the other patient's document that was showing up has a value of 159763 in the field docstreams.size. At least now I know why we have a handful of these unexpectedly popping up throughout our search results.

Better yet, I was able to find a solution for our dilemma.

In Central Administration, go to Shared Services -> Search Settings and then click on Metadata Property Mappings.

Scroll down to the "Size" property and click the right-hand column that links to its mapping.

There is a check box on the bottom right-hand side of the screen named Include values for this property in the search index.

You want to uncheck this. Once you've done so, the change apparently takes effect once you re-crawl."

SharePoint 2010 Lessons Learned, Part 8: 'What? I Can't Embed Video in a Blog Post? You're Kidding, Right?'

John Anderson — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 16:30:00 GMT

I may have mentioned the following video-related discovery earlier in this series but, if so, I'm pretty sure it would've been nothing more than a casual aside. Well, it's now time for me to devote a post to the matter. As was the case with several of these lessons learned, at first I thought that surely it must be user error on my part ... in this case, the only alternative explanation to user error seemed to be the frankly unbelievable notion that SharePoint 2010 didn't support the embedding of video into blog posts out-of-the-box. That couldn't be right, could it?

Well, it certainly appeared to be the case when I first tried to embed a video into a post, only to discover that, unlike pretty much any other blogging platform you could name, there didn't appear to be any way to do so, either via a WYSIWIG interface or otherwise. I made this frustrating discovery a couple of months ago when I was attempting to embed a video into one of my pre-Sharing the Point tour blog posts and, in the interests of time, I ultimately ended up just linking off to the video instead. A week or two later, on the tour itself, Mark Miller made reference to embedded videos not being supported out-of-the-box in SharePoint 2010 and, sharing my own experience with him, I expressed my shock that this was actually the case.

Let's fast forward to the present now, and the sharing of the good news that I've since learned, which is that that there are not one but (at least) two workarounds for the problem available. After putting in some investigatory time (read: a few minutes of Googling), I turned up evidence that videos can be embedded into SharePoint 2010 blog posts after all. The only catch is that it's probably going to be the rare end user who will possess both the permissions and the knowledge necessary to implement the workarounds without the assistance of an administrator and/or a designer.

Nevertheless, workarounds do exist, and the first of them is made possible through a combination of the out-of-the-box Media Web Part and the insertion of "a few lines of JavaScript" to your master page. This first workaround is described in detail by Mihai Coman in his blog post on the Microsoft SharePoint Designer Team Blog, Video Blogging with JavaScript and the Media Web Part.

The second option which will add video-embedding capability to your SharePoint 2010 blog is a code-free solution, and it's accomplished via the Enhanced Rich Text for SharePoint Extended (ERTE), which is available as a free CodePlex download. An overview of how ERTE works (and it works not just in SharePoint blogs, but in any SharePoint Rich Text field) is provided in the GetThePoint blog post, Embed video in your SharePoint blogs and wikis.

I haven't yet had a chance to attempt to personally put either of these workarounds in place in a test environment, but doing so is now officially on the list of to-dos I've been creating for myself in the course of learning the lessons that I've been blogging in this series.

And with that, I've come to the end of this little series detailing the SharePoint 2010 lessons I learned while helping to construct (and blogging extensively on) the Sharing the Point website. I hope that my own discoveries will prove helpful to others on their own SharePoint 2010 journey. Stay tuned as I begin circling back to learn (and share) even more as I begin to tackle the aforementioned to-dos in the weeks ahead.

UPDATE/CORRECTION - Courtesy of Dux Raymond Sy, this just in: Turns out that ERTE does not work on SharePoint 2010 (due to the Ribbon), but the recommended-by-Dux fix is available at the Kirk Evans Blog post, Embedding Flash Video in SharePoint Blogs. Dux tells me that they've got Kirk's fix in place on Innovative-e's public-facing SharePoint 2010 site, so you can have a look at the solution in action there. Thanks, Dux!

Read the entire SharePoint 2010 Lessons Learned series:

SharePoint 2010 Lessons Learned, Part 7: What's Up with Out-of-the-Box Web Analytics for Blogs?

John Anderson — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 16:40:00 GMT

Analytics junkie that I am, I'm surprised it hadn't occurred to me prior to the Sharing the Point (STP) tour proper that there didn't appear to be any way to access analytics for the STP blog posts. Early on in the tour, I started poking around trying to find a way to get my hands on some analytics specific to the blog but, alas, without success. All I could turn up was the most vanilla analytics report imaginable (via Site Actions -> Site Web Analytics reports), which provided total site-wide pageviews by day, but provided no further information, no ability to drill down, etc. There wasn't any time to investigate while I was on the tour, but I did jot down a note to investigate further once I was back at home.

Since I've been pretty much running full-tilt boogie since my return from the STP tour, however, and since I'm leaving for London this very evening (in advance of next week's European SharePoint Best Practices Conference), I still haven't had time to see about actually getting some more detailed analytics in place on the STP site, but what I have done is found some time to at least start looking into the matter.

The first thing I learned is that in order to surface Web Analytics in SharePoint 2010, the Web Analytics Service Application must first be installed and activated. This is something that will need to be done by an administrator, but if any admins out there are looking for a handy how-to guide, Leon provides step-by-step details in his post, Using Web Analytics, over at Lennaerts.com.

What I still don't know is the level of fine-tuning that may be available in terms of providing a more nuanced Web Analytics report than what's currently in place on the STP site (as described above), so I'll need to revisit the topic sometime after I've returned from my upcoming trip.

In the meantime, however, and for my fellow Google Analytics junkies out there, something else I've learned is that it's possible to hook up Google Analytics to a SharePoint 2010 blog, as detailed in CPT-F2010\Administrator's post, Google Analytics connector for SharePoint 2010, over at the ConsultPoint.net blog.

OK, I really should probably start packing for my flight now, so if you'll please excuse me...

Read the entire SharePoint 2010 Lessons Learned series:

SharePoint 2010 Lessons Learned, Part 6: A Cautionary Tale Involving Deleting Photos While Editing a Blog Post

John Anderson — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 19:30:00 GMT

Just as I expected might turn out to be the case, during the recent Sharing the Point (STP) tour of Asia, I learned a few more SharePoint 2010 lessons while working on my blog posts from the tour. Today I'd like to share the lesson that was the most painful, and it involves editing a post that's in Save as Draft form.

INT. Manila hotel room. The time is close to midnight, and the need for sleep is becoming near-desperate (there hasn't been much sleep in the preceding days/nights, and most of the sleep that did occur took place on planes) as I struggle to get one last post published. My roommate Mark Miller is working on uploading some of his tour photos to Facebook. Having finished writing my copy, I paste it from Word into the blog on the (SharePoint 2010) STP site for a final edit and the addition of photos. Once I'd completed the edit and had added pictures, I decided that since one of the photos struck me as extraneous, I would delete it.

Now, I can't swear that this was the first time I'd deleted a photo from a SharePoint 2010 blog, though I'm pretty sure that's the case, but what I can swear to is that I (foolishly) didn't save my edits prior to deleting the photo.

You get one guess what happened when I deleted the photo from my post.

If you guessed, as I'm sure you all did, that I lost all of my painstaking edits, congratulations on your perspicacity.

Specifically, what happened was this: Instead of simply removing the selected photo from the post and leaving everything else untouched (as one might reasonably expect), the page refreshed and took me to the Photos library instead. I think I apologized to Mark at the time for what I suspect was quite a colorful bout of cursing on my part in response to this unexpected SharePoint behavior, but if my manners escaped me while I was in the midst of Hulking out, sorry, Mark.

Of course, now that I'm trying to make the same thing happen again with a deleted photo for the sake of this post, I can't reproduce the behavior. I've tried with deleting a photo added to a blog post from my computer and from a Web address (though it was the former case that caused the problem in Manila), and in every case, the Delete function works as expected ... which is to say that the selected photos gets deleted and everything else within the blog post being edited remains untouched.

Maybe it only happens when you're seriously in need of sleep and the witching hour fast approaches on a Friday night in Manila, but I can't help but wonder if anybody else out there has been bitten by this behavior? Naturally, I'm also writing this post as a warning to any SharePoint 2010 bloggers out there that before you delete a photo from a post you're editing, you might want to take a moment to save your edits first.

Especially when one considers the alternative...

Read the entire SharePoint 2010 Lessons Learned series: