A Matter Of Degree

No Site Columns, Workflows on SharePoint (MOSS 2007) Surveys

One of my clients wanted to use a SharePoint survey for a data entry form because the branching logic makes the end-user experience much better.  Two problems:

1. The form requires a project code, for which this client has a site column, but you can't add a site column to a survey.  We could do a lookup to a separately-maintained list of project codes - but that is terrible from a maintenance perspective.

2. There is simple workflow associated with the form, but surveys don't support workflows, even though the functionality appears to be there.  I tested this with the built-in approval workflow and sure enough, "Failed on start."

Back to the drawing board.

Gripe about the field description placement in SharePoint

Some of my clients are complaining about the placement of the field description in SharePoint forms, and I agree with them. When you create a field, or column, you have the opportunity to enter descriptive text that will appear on the form, which can be valuable in telling your users how they should fill out the field. However, this text appears below the field data, which is inconvenient for single-line fields, but which really poses a problem when the fields are more complex:

Your instructive field description gets lost, and may even make users have to do double work if they read your instructions after they've already entered data (not to mention the fact that if you're converting a paper form, you'll have to think about the descriptions as you enter them and not use terms like "below").

One of my clients was ambitious enough to create a custom form specifically to solve this problem. She placed the descriptive text below the field name, using a slightly different type style for the description than for the field name. The hitch is that custom forms need to be created from scratch; you can't modify a list's existing New, Edit, or View forms in SharePoint Designer to make a relatively simple change like this. If you want the descriptive text to appear consistently on both New and Edit forms, you'll have to create two forms. In my client's case, the investment of time and effort was justified because her internal customers gave the description placement high priority in their requirements, and because the form is a fairly long one which will be used regularly by every employee in the organization. But smaller, simpler, or less-frequently-used forms may not justify the extra hours it would take to customize them.

Now here's the really maddening thing. Microsoft has placed the field descriptions under the field name on some of their own internal forms, for example, the Change Column form for any list or library:

Which raises the question: If Microsoft's form designers decided that this was a good placement for the field description, why don't end-user list and library forms have the same layout? Why are content owners forced to work with (or around) a less-intuitive design?

This is one of the big items on my wish list for the next release.

If I click a link to get help on a specific topic, don't take me to the Help File table of contents!

Sigh.  This morning I was reminded of how much I hate it when an application offers you a link to get more information about a topic, and then sends you to its online help main table of contents.

I was setting up a workflow in SharePoint Designer and got this warning message:

I clicked the Ensuring Unique Lookups link and this is what I got:

So I tried entering a few phrases like "ensuring unique lookups" and "unique lookup" in the search field.  It turns out there are no entries in the help file on how to do this, just mentions of the fact that sometimes you'll want to make sure your lookup is unique.  That definitely explains why the link didn't take me directly there.  Would "Thanks for wasting my time" sound too bitter?

No Exit - Document Update from Outlook to SharePoint

Let's say you've connected one or more SharePoint document libraries to your Outlook, perhaps using these well-written directions from the MS Office Outlook Team Blog.  While offline, you edit several of the documents in one of your synched document libraries via the folder pane in your Outlook.  When you connect to the network again, you want to update the live document library with your changes. 

You might expect there to be a means of batch updating the documents, perhaps by right-clicking the document library name in the Outlook folder pane, or by hitting the Send/Receive button.  But in fact you need to open each changed document in order to prompt the update. 

That's clunky, but clunkier is the message box you get to perform the update:

If you click the Update button, the server is updated, the message box goes away and the document remains open (no feedback for "successful update").  When you attempt to close the file, the same message box appears.  You need to click "Do not update server" in order to be able to close the file.   

Why make the message appear twice in order for me to be able to get out of my document?  How about an "Update and close" button?    If I have to do this for every document I've edited while offline, the amount of time it takes to update, try to close the file, and click the "do not update" button will become significant.

I don't get it

My Least Favorite Thing about MOSS 2007 This Week - sites created from template don't display custom views in web parts

So you've got a SharePoint site laid out the way you want it, with the web parts configured to show the custom views you've chosen, and the chrome configured to display no toolbar or just a summary toolbar.  When you create a template from this site and then create a new site from that template, your web part configurations are lost - the web parts revert to a default view and full toolbar.

The list view issue has been identified by MS, but no workaround is given.  Apparently a hotfix is on the way:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/926284/en-us

The chrome issue may be able to be handled by tweaking the onet.xml file to change the ChromeType attribute in the zone; I have not yet experimented with this but read about it here:

http://blogs.officezealot.com/mauro/archive/2007/01/11/20052.aspx

I'd love to hear of any workarounds for these issues - meanwhile I'll have to content myself by doling out a fish slap.

My least favorite thing about MOSS 2007 this week - inability to filter by Begin or End date in a calendar view

For some reason, MS developers have removed the Start Time and End Time date fields from the filter choices in an Event list.  In SharePoint 2003 these fields were called "Begin" and "End" and they were available for filtering, so that you could create views such as Upcoming Events, which filtered out anything that had occurred prior to "today."

A "Current Events" view is included out of the box but what makes it "Current" is mysterious; the filter appears to be blank. 

To handle this I've had to create my own "Start" and "End" calculated columns in the Events list, where Start is equal to the column [Start Time] and End is equal to the column [End Time], and then filter on these.  But why make me go through these steps, especially when the functionality existed before?

Luckily MOSS 2007 lets me create re-usable site columns, so I don't have to configure these fields every time I make an Events list, but still, why make me have to add two columns to an Events list every time I want to filter by date?

Please let there be a good reason for this, and not that it's just an oversight. 

The Fish Slap and the Sushi Bouquet

デパ地下寿司, originally uploaded by anzyAprico.

I just wanted to clarify that in my blog categories,

Fish Slap = Bad, Terrible, Worst

and

Sushi Bouquet = Good, Fantastic, Best.

I couldn't find a compelling still shot of fish slapping but here's the brief Monty Python fish slap dance video.

My least favorite thing about MOSS 2007 this week - how picture library metadata is handled

In a MOSS 2007 picture library, or image library, there is no way to upload multiple images and associate custom metadata (such as a category) with them at the time of upload.  There is also no way to do a batch edit of the images once they're in the image library.  There may be a good reason for this due to the nature of storing images vs. storing other file types, but it's extremely frustrating for us end-users.

A workaround would be to change the default choice in the custom metadata field(s) before you upload a batch of images, assuming they should be similarly tagged, because they are posted with the default data.  But how klugey is that!

Why, Why, Why???

Heard on NPR yesterday about the Encyclopedia of Popular Music - a paper-based encyclopedia of 27,000 entries in ten volumes, with a cost of US$995.00. 

Why on earth is this being published on paper?  Why not an IMDB- or Wikipedia-type website where users could search and link from one topic to another, where the artists themselves could be allowed to leave comments on their entries, and where editor Colin Larkin could earn revenue from advertisements to a user community which would undoubtedly use this like crazy?

I am such a product of the hypertext generation that it seems not just absurd but criminal that this has been published in book form.  It was obsolete the day it was printed.  A big fish slap to Colin Larkin and everyone else on the project.