A Matter Of Degree

File downloaded from sharepoint document library replaces spaces in file name with underscores

I have been noticing for some time now, in several MOSS implementations, that spaces in filenames are replaced with underscores on file download/upload from SharePoint.  I was blaming this on SharePoint SP1, since I started to notice it around the time of that release, however this discussion on MSDN indicates Internet Explorer 7 is the reason.

To see the behavior, find any document in a SharePoint document library with spaces in the filename, or upload one.  Then download the document to your desktop - you can see that the underscores are added in the "Save As" window.

If you are working quickly and not expecting this filename change to happen, you would save the document to your desktop, make edits, and then re-upload it later.  Since you didn't actively change the filename, you would expect the document to save over the original in the document library.  This is the way SharePoint has traditionally worked.  But what you end up with is two copies of the document in the document library. 

 

Disclaimer - I'm sure we can all agree that the best practice in general is to check out / check in your document rather than downloading it to your desktop.  (The underscores are not added during checkin/checkout.)  But what if someone else has the document checked out, and you can't reach them to ask them to check it back in, and you're under pressure to make edits right away?  Or what if you thought you were just taking a copy, but the edits you make on your desktop turn out to be the preferred version?    Or what if you haven't fully tested the offline sync capabilities of MOSS 2007, and you want to be absolutely sure the document is accessible when you're offline?  These and many other real-world situations could lead to this downloaded-file scenario, which could lead to multiple copies of the same or similar documents in your SharePoint environment, which is exactly what most of us are trying to avoid. 

The MSDN thread proposes a workaround, although I will argue that the adding of underscores is not necessarily a bad thing, expecially since SharePoint can cause problems when working with filenames that include spaces.  I think it's important to be aware of this download behavior and to work toward minimizing the multiple-copies effect - emphasize checkin/checkout vs. download in end-user training sessions, for example.

xobni - five minutes and I was hooked

I learned about xobni from a colleague last week, and downloaded it today.  Xobni ('inbox" backwards) bills itself as "the Outlook plug-in that saves you time finding email conversations, contacts and attachments" and / or "a more socially aware email environment."  I would prefer to describe it as "the free Outlook tool with addictive metrics."  Once it started analyzing, showing me, for example, who among my contacts is quickest to respond to me, I was fascinated.  Then when it gave me the option to send said contacts their stats, I was hooked. 

The design is bright and appealing (maybe a little too appealing - compared to the bland light-blue-and-white Outlook color scheme its orange, black and purple tones make it difficult to look away or ignore the pane) and I found it user-friendly and intuitive.  After eight hours I'm thinking of my correspondents in terms of their xobni rank ("Yeah, he's my number three") and trying to figure out imbalances ("Why am I sending her two emails for every one she sends me?").  It interfaces with LinkedIn.  It bubbles-up attachments.  It threads conversations.  It hasn't broken anything on my pc, although the comments on this post about xobni's business model indicate that it may cause problems with FireFox.  For my setup, there is no downside and a tremendous upside.

I would rave more, but I've got to go reply to an email from my #1.

Tag as you search?

Today I attended a seminar hosted by the Boston KM Forum on categorization and tagging.  One of the speakers, David Hobbie, brought up a great point - that tagging / categorizing in the enterprise happens when a document is saved into the content management system, when a better way would be to have people tagging documents as they find them in search results.  The first scenario – tag on upload – involves questions such as Which version do you tag?  How can other users tag and rate?  The second scenario – tag on search – accounts for these issues and will lead to richer search results in the future.  I’m not advocating doing away with tag-on-upload, but I’d like to see Hobbie’s idea implemented in the enterprise applications used by my clients.

 

Last night I attended a talk on Enterprise Search from Microsoft by Tara Seppa at the New England SharePoint User Group.   Microsoft emphasizes the value of SharePoint’s “actionable search results” (by which they mean “preview helpful summary information and clear graphical representations of files; move, delete, copy, and drag & drop files; send, forward and reply to messages directly from search results, and open and run applications from the results”). The tag-as-you-search concept would be great functionality to add to future releases of SharePoint Search.

David’s blog:

http://caselines.blogspot.com/

New England SharePoint User Group:

http://www.clearwaypartners.com/SUGHome.htm

KM forum topic:

http://kmforum.org/blog/?p=70

Actionable search results definition from the whitepaper Microsoft’s Approach to Enterprise Search:  Bridging the Gap between Information Management and Enterprise Search

Differences between a MOSS 2007 / SharePoint Publishing Site and a System Site (or Team Site)

I have not been able to find much information on the Web about the differences between a MOSS 2007 Publishing Site and what Microsoft calls a System Site, which encompasses the Team Site and Blank Site as well as some others.

I put together this table based on my hands-on experience with and testing of the two types of sites.  I wasn't able to post it as a blog because the table is too wide, so I'm sharing it from my SkyDrive.

Table of differencees between a MOSS 2007 Publishing Site and a System Site (or Team Site)

I will be adding to this table as I learn more.

Read-only document from SharePoint displays “Check Out” option

I don't like to post issues without solutions, but a client alerted me to this one today and I couldn't find an answer; I wanted to put it out there in the hope that someone can offer some input. Here's the scenario:

In your MOSS 2007 or WSS 3.0 implementation, you have a document library with checkin / checkout enabled. If a user with read-only ("Visitor") permissions looks at the document options from the drop-down menu on the document name, they have no option to check in or check out:

However, if the same user opens a document from that library, the document will open as read-only in its MS Office application (Word, Excel, etc.), but the user will see the "Server Document" bar with the message "To modify this document, you must check it out" and the "check out" button.

When the user tries to check the document out, they are asked to authenticate, they try three times, and then receive the error "Cannot perform this operation. The file has been deleted or someone else has it checked out."

The good news is that the application won't actually let you check out the document – it knows you shouldn't be able to authenticate.  The bad part is that that toolbar shows up at all, and the user has to go through the authentication / bogus error process.  How is it possible to prevent a user with read-only rights in SharePoint from seeing the "Check out" option in Word or Excel?

I posted this to the MSDN forum for Sharepoint general questions. (I've got a private bet with myself that someone will tell me this is supposed to be posted to an MS Word discussion group instead.)

Hidden - and Useful - Functionality in Sharepoint List or Library "Edit in Datasheet" view

If you're like me and didn't know that there was a task pane on the right side of the "edit in datasheet" view of a list or library, check it out!

I have looked at this hundreds of times without seeing it:

It expands to this:

The links open the Access or Excel applications and let you do a lot more with your data, right away. 

SharePoint Slide Library - Selection Check Box Disappears from Grouped View

A client recently reported to me that a grouped view of a slide library (in a MOSS 2007 environment) which I had set up for them was no longer displaying the Selection Check Box.  I know that I had included this field in the view, and when I checked the settings for the view, the checkbox was included in the view in the first position.

The same thing happened on my own company's SharePoint installation (MOSS 2007 with SP-1).  I discovered that the checkbox disappears consistently when you collapse a grouped view by default, but that it appears normally when you expand the view by default.  I have a call in to Microsoft about it, and also opened this thread on TechNet.

This image shows where the selection check box field should be:

 

Workaround for the MOSS 2007 This Week In Pictures Web Part Slideshow Function

Most of my clients want to incorporate a rotating-image web part on their intranet home pages, and most of them dislike the MOSS 2007 out-of-box This Week In Pictures web part because when you click the link for "View Slideshow," the slideshow opens to display the first picture in the image library, not the image the web part currently displays. Aside from developing your own web part or purchasing one from a third-party vendor, there is no way to make that slideshow link point to the currently-displayed picture (There is no view choice field on the web part, and changing the sort order of the "all items" view has no effect on the slideshow).

One of my clients recently designed a workaround to this issue. She asked me to put a workflow on her Picture of the Week image library which would move past pictures to a second picture library. This workflow is a simple one to build in SharePoint Designer; see screenshot below. When she adds a new picture, she changes a metadata field on the previous picture from "Active" to "Past." This change kicks off the workflow, which automatically copies the previous picture to the Past Pictures library and then deletes it from the current picture library. The result is that the "view slideshow" link always points to the picture that is displayed.

This way you can upload multiple photos that are associated with the main picture (for example, a series of pictures from a company outing), and they will be shown together in the slideshow. We put a "View Past Pictures" link under the web part so that employees have easy access to the archive of previous pictures.

Excellent free file sync tool for Windows, from Microsoft

Today I was looking for a file synchronization tool for my PC and found SyncToy, a free tool from Microsoft.  The user interface is clean and attractive, and the tool is really easy to use.  I tested a sync from my laptop to a LaCie external hard drive, and was very pleased with the results.  I'm a little surprised they didn't call it SyncPoint, but no complaints!

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.