SharePoint Blank

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UPDATE : The entire Tweet Jam has been archived and is available at http://harmon.ie/blog/02-13-2012 .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

SharePoint 2010 Lessons Learned, Part 5: An Image-uploading Caveat Regarding Anonymous Access, and Frustration Involving Modifying Font Styles

John Anderson — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 19:30:00 GMT

This may be the final entry in my little mini-series based on lessons learned while creating pages and content for the Sharing the Point (STP) site. It's definitely going to be the final post in the series prior to my leaving on Saturday for a barnstorming trip that will see me covering the Australia SharePoint Conference in Sydney on March 8 and 9, and then covering the Sharing the Point tour itself, with stops in Beijing, Manila, and Ho Chi Minh City over the following five days. I'll be blogging like crazy all the while, both here in Bamboo Nation (though not here in SharePoint Blank - as with all of my event coverage, those posts will appear in either the Bamboo Team Blog or the SharePoint 2010 blog), and on the STP site blog.

Sorry, where was I? Oh, right back to the topic at hand ... real-world SharePoint 2010 lessons learned while working on the STP site.

There are two issues that I encountered while working on the site that I haven't yet touched on in this series. One of the issues was easily resolved (albeit not resolved by yours truly), but the other one frustrated me for some time before I figured out what was going on. The issue that turned out to be easily addressed had to do with the location to which images are uploaded within the site. When uploading images, I was presented with two options, Site Assets and Shared Documents and, as it turns out, I chose poorly. This was discovered by Eric Harlan in his pre-launch QA of the site, and he gently let me know that:

... the images of the people on the bios page were still in the collab site so users are going to get prompted for login info when they bring up the page. You probably didn't see that because you were logged in at the time you created it. I moved the photos to the main site which is anonymously available.

So, the lesson learned, and it seems obvious now, is that where you upload an image within a SharePoint site may have consequences, particularly if the site in question is accessible both to logged-in users as well as anonymous users.

The other issue I've encountered, and the one that continued to frustrate me for some time, had to do with the editing of text, specifically attempting to change font styles. It was especially frustrating because this was something that should have been dead-simple to accomplish, but on several occasions, I just wasn't able to change the font style of a block of text before I figured out what must have been going on. See, when I was editing a page, and using the Editing Tools to Format Text, I would select a block of text with the intent of changing the font, only to be frustratingly denied the ability to do so. I'd choose the desired font from the drop down menu, and ... nothing would change!

Eventually, I realized that this must have been occurring because, at the top of the drop down menu of fonts, there were two fonts that appeared under the heading of Theme Fonts, and then there were many more font options that appeared beneath those two, under the simple heading of Fonts. Needless to say, I had been attempting to pick from the Fonts list when only the two fonts under the Theme Fonts were permitted for use, because they'd been identified as the allowable fonts on the site. Call me crazy, but it sure seems to me that it'd cut down on end user confusion and frustration if, by default, only the allowable theme fonts appeared in that drop down menu.

As a final note, I'd like to mention that the pages I created on the site, some of which I've included screenshots of in previous posts of this series, no longer look anything like they did when I created them ... and, it must be noted, this is a Very Good Thing. You see, the Sharing the Point team was approached by a representative of Pandaweb last month who very generously offered to provide custom site branding and design services, free of charge. Needless to say, we were quick to accept the offer and very soon thereafter, the site was sporting a very cool new look and feel as a result of the redesign. Thanks, Pandaweb!

Oh, and if you check out the home page of the STP site, suddenly find yourself with a burning need to make reference to The Brady Bunch and, ahem, Alice, and then wonder if you'd be the first to make such an association ... that would be a "no."

Signed,
Alice

Read the entire SharePoint 2010 Lessons Learned series:

SharePoint 2010 Lessons Learned, Part 4: How to Grant Permissions

John Anderson — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 21:45:00 GMT

I'm going to take a short break from mining my experiences with page construction and editing over at the Sharing the Point site to share some newly acquired knowledge right here at "home." Fear not though, for I'll be doing so within the context of the already-in-progress "real-world SharePoint 2010 lessons learned" series. How will I manage to accomplish this feat of blogging derring-do? Read on.

Today's recipe is going to be the granting of permissions, with a dash of upgrading from 2007 content added to taste.

While we've been working with SharePoint 2010 here at Bamboo for what seems like ages now, we only recently completed the upgrade of our corporate portal to the new platform. Occasionally, we'll still discover something that didn't exactly transfer seamlessly during the upgrade, and the other day I learned that one of those things was my Full Control permissions on my team's site. But wait, I'm getting ahead of myself.

I needed to grant Full Control within my team's site to another colleague and, though this was my first time doing so on 2010, I didn't anticipate any difficulty. I started by selecting the Site Settings button under the Site Actions drop down in the site:

On the resulting Site Settings page, however, I didn't see anything relating to permissions, so I reached out to Brett, Bamboo's SharePoint Admin extraordinaire, and said it looked like I had been stripped of my Full Control permissions in the upgrade to 2010. He quickly responded, saying, "Try it now."

Bingo. I was suddenly looking at an entire menu of available options on the Site Settings page, and I clicked the Site Permissions link under the (now present and accounted for) Users and Permissions heading, which led me to the Permissions page for the site, with Permission Tools helpfully pre-selected in the Ribbon. From there, I clicked the Grant Permissions button:

On the resulting Grant Permissions form, I filled in what at first glance struck me as being the appropriate information, selecting the Add users to a SharePoint group (recommended) radio button ... after all, it was the recommended route and all, y'know? As you can see in the red text in the image below, I was told in no uncertain terms that I "do not have permission to add users to the selected SharePoint group," and was quickly reminded that even Full Control only gets you so far (and that sometimes even the "recommended" route may not be what you need).

Take two involved clicking the other available radio button, to Grant users permission directly, and suddenly I was looking at all of the of the options I had been looking for in the first place ... if only I hadn't been fooled by that dang parenthetical "recommended" tag!

And with that, I had accomplished my mission, learned another lesson, and ended up with a blogworthy tale in the bargain.

Read the entire SharePoint 2010 Lessons Learned series:

SharePoint 2010 Lessons Learned, Part 3: How to Create a New Page (and Delete a Page)

John Anderson — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 19:20:00 GMT

As I was writing my last post on how to create a blog in SharePoint 2010, it occurred to me that I had kind of jumped the gun, and that I hadn't yet sufficiently laid the foundation for such a post. After all, from a site-construction standpoint, creating the blog was the last thing I did while working on the Sharing the Point site, and while the blog does serve as its own distinct area of the site, it's a specialized sort of page ... and what about simply creating a new page in SharePoint 2010?

Well, I'm happy to tell you that few things in SharePoint 2010 are simpler than creating a new page. In Edit mode, simply select the New Page button from the drop down options under Site Actions:

Clicking the New Page button will render the New Page form, in which you need only enter the desired page name and click Create:

The newly created page will essentially be a blank slate, e.g.:

Note that the Ribbon will be present, with Editing Tools highlighted by default when the newly created page is presented. For the sake of this post, I called the new page called Test, so that's why you see the word "Test" at the top of the Recently Modified list in the left rail in the image above. Within the new page, the full range of editing tools are available to you via the Ribbon to add and format text, images, videos, etc.

Since I created my Test page on the Sharing the Point site, I'm going to be a good citizen and delete the extraneous page. To do so, I'm going to start by clicking the All Site Content link that appears at the bottom of the left rail in the image above.

Clicking that link will surface a list of all site content and, under the Document Libraries heading, Site Pages is one of the items:

Since I was told on the New Page form (show above) when I created my new page that Site Pages is where the new page would be created, that's the link I'm going to click.

My Test page appears at the top of the list and, when I mouseover the selection, a checkbox appears to the left of the listing:

(While we're here, take note that at the bottom of the list of site pages above you can see that an Add new page link appears, providing you with yet another method of page creation.)

Once I click the checkbox next to the Test page, the Ribbon responds accordingly, activating a number of options related to that page. Among these options is Delete Document:

Clicking the Delete Document button will generate a popup asking if you're sure you want to send the selected document(s) to the Recycle Bin. Since I'm sure, I'm going to click OK, and the page will be unceremoniously escorted to the dustbin of SharePoint history. Sorry, l'il guy, but hey, at least you had your moment in the blogging sun before The End, right?

Yep, that's exactly how easy it is to create and delete pages in SharePoint 2010.

Read the entire SharePoint 2010 Lessons Learned series:

SharePoint 2010 Lessons Learned, Part 2: How to Create a Blog

John Anderson — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 20:15:00 GMT

Once I'd finished creating the initial round of pages necessary for the launch of the Sharing the Point site, I realized that there was still a significant aspect of the site that still needed to be created. Namely, the tour blog, where I'll be spending loads of quality time throughout the tour in March.

Happily, creating a blog in SharePoint 2010 proved to be as simple and straightforward as one could hope. From the Site Actions drop down, I just selected the More Options... button:

Clicking that button spawned a Create page featuring a menu of objects from which I could choose to create a new space on the site. Naturally, Blog was among the available object types, so that's the one I clicked:

As you can see on the right-hand side of the image above, I needed to enter a Title and URL name in order to create the new blog, so I went with the obvious, calling it the Sharing the Point Asian Tour Blog. Since I was under the gun and on deadline at the time, I wasn't able to document the entire process with screenshots, but I can tell you that the default look of the newly created blog featured an initial "post" that included helpful instructions for the care and feeding of a blog.

I deleted that instructional content and clicked the Create a post hyperlink in the Blog Tools Web Part (located by default in the top corner of the blog's right rail), which spawned a Posts - New Item form:

I wrote an introductory post, gave it a headline, and clicked the Publish button (cut off in the image above). Next I added some Categories to the blog, using the Add new category link under the Categories heading which appears in the top corner of the blog's left rail by default. I added four Categories, each of which now appears as available for easy association when I create/modify a post:

Note: The image above represents the bottom portion of the Posts - New Item form that was cut off in the preceding image. As you can see, applying a Category to a post in SharePoint 2010 is as simple as selecting from the left-hand column and clicking the Add button.

Finally, to complete the look and feel of the new blog, I needed to edit the About this blog Web Part in the right rail. Editing the Web Part was as simple as selecting the Edit Web Part button from the drop down next to the About this blog title bar. Once in edit mode, I simply replaced the default image with the official tour logo, and replaced the default text with a brief description of the blog's purpose:

And with that, the Sharing the Point Asian Tour Blog was ready for its close-up.

See how easy it is to create a new blog in SharePoint 2010? Feel free to share links to your own SharePoint 2010 blog in the comments below if you're so inclined.

Read the entire SharePoint 2010 Lessons Learned series: