A Matter Of Degree

How to know when you've had too much Sharepoint Administrator training

20080426 - SSP, originally uploaded by sadalit.

Friday I noticed this button on my radio and thought, "My car has a Shared Service Provider?"

I'm still wondering what I'd be able to configure there if it did.

Thoughts about SharePoint Content Types, Part 2 - Content Type Hierarchy Diagram

To help clients and others understand the role and importance of content types, my first step was to create a downloadable visual display of the SharePoint content type hierarchy.  I referred to the Visio diagram from the SharePoint Commerce blog, and simplified it for non-developers.  I used colors to highlight some of the different categories of content type; I'm sure there are many ways to conceptualize this, and I welcome any suggestions for improvement.

 

Thoughts about SharePoint Content Types

I'm at Mindsharp's Core Technologies training this week.  Even though I've already passed the two SharePoint configuration exams, I thought a deep dive into the administration of SharePoint would help me understand the big picture better, and help me answer the questions I often get from clients in this area.

The instructor just started the module on Content Types and Features.  He asked the class who was working with content types.  Three people raised their hands.  Then he asked who was working with SharePoint.  All raised their hands.  The instructor said that everyone who raised their hands for the second question should have raised their hands for the first question.  This moment neatly crystallizes how I've been feeling about content types for some time now - that although they are the core of SharePoint, I don't always consider their role, and I don't even know how to begin communicating their importance to clients.

I'm not talking about creating custom content types to make your company's business processes more efficient; I'm talking about understanding the base upon which SharePoint is built, which has an impact on everything you create and display using this technology.

My first thought was that Heather Solomon might have some guidance in this area, and one of her blog posts following the Seattle SharePoint Conference offers some great resources.  However, many of these are about customizing content types for the enterprise, rather than about the basics of what they are and how they form the basis of SharePoint.  I'm giving myself the task of boiling this information down into a simple guide I can share here and give my clients; the concept is too important not to be a required part of knowledge transfer.

How to set up anonymous list submission in SharePoint / MOSS 2007

If you want to add a suggestion box to your SharePoint intranet, and allow anonymous entries, how can you do it? The new Community Kit has an anonymous entry feature for blogs, but it only applies to comments, not the original post. infoPath also apparently allows anonymous entries, but if you're not developing in infoPath (or not on MOSS 2007 Enterprise version), you'll need another solution.

One of my clients recently was tasked with setting up a question-and-answer forum on her Intranet where the CEO would answer employee questions. They wanted the employees to be able to post questions anonymously. My client suggested using SharePoint Designer to hide the user's name from the post. You can't edit the existing forms for a list, but she was on the right track – by creating a custom Edit and View form for the list (the New form does not include the "creator" field), you can easily remove the creator field from the pages.

There are two hitches:

1.    ALL entries are anonymous to the end users, it's not optional to display your name.

2.    Contributor rights allow users to create views on the list, and a savvy user could create a view that includes the submitter name.

If #1 is not a dealbreaker, you can get around #2 by creating a custom rights level (i.e. "Contribute – no view creation") and applying it to this list. You can copy the Contributor permission, and uncheck the Manage Personal Views box:

Then apply this permission level to the user group on your custom list, and you're all set. (Note that anyone with regular Contribute or Full Control rights could still see who the contributors are; you may have to ensure that the Owners group does not have access to this list, and leave only the System Account as the administrator.)

Twitter as Headline News

I just had an insight about why Twitter is good.

Another friend of mine just started blogging, and as I subscribed to her blog in my blog reader, I was dismayed at the prospect of adding one more stream of information to the pile that I already don't have enough time to post comments on, or even read.  I'm glad that we all have the means to publish our journals, our photos, our videos, but my ability to keep up with it all won't scale.  I can't even find the time to read the national news most days.

But I do read headlines.  And if I could get a daily digest of my friends' and colleagues' lives and insights, on a single page, 140 characters at a whack, I would read that religiously. 

It shouldn't be an aggregate of their recently-published blog or photo titles; that wouldn't be the same thing.  I don't want to read text that describes or refers to other content.  I want exactly what Twitter asks for - "what are you doing?"   

FriendFeed gets close, and I like the image thumbnails, but all the different kinds of information in one pile slows me down - e.g. I don't want to mentally filter out everyone's del.icio.us links while I'm looking for the meatier stuff.

I never thought I'd be advocating a Max-Headroom-style blipvert in the place of real content, yet here I am.  I can't keep up with unlimited information.  Sign on to Twitter and help me out?

SharePoint Discussion Board in Content Query Web Part (CQWP or CBQ) Returns (Blank) for Replies

I just had a great collaborative experience with a client.  Last week she contacted me about an issue she was experiencing when displaying a discussion thread on their SharePoint intranet.  She had tried to display the RSS feed of the discussion thread, and had encountered the authentication issue we all know and love when you try to use Sharepoint's built-in RSS reader to display a SharePoint list or library:

My developer colleague was at their site that week, and he suggested using the Content Query Web Part as a way to display the information.  She set this up successfully, with one hitch:  replies to posts appeared as (Blank):

    

She tried on her own to fix this, then asked me for help.  As with so many situations in SharePoint, this issue is related to content types.  Discussion board posts are of content type "discussion," whereas replies are of content type "message" (which does not contain a Title field, which is what the CQWP is looking for).  My client did not want to show the replies to posts, so I was able to filter them out by setting the CQWP filter as follows:

Good to go!  She can now display her company's bulletin board anywhere on their Intranet. 

This solution felt good because it was a tripartite collaboration - the developer's suggestion of the CQWP to get around the RSS issue, the client's independent and successful setup of the CQWP, and my tweak based on prior experience with content types.  My company's goal is to empower our clients to make the most of their SharePoint implementation once we get it up and running.  It doesn't always work out that way but it feels great when it does.   

Best Practice - do not use dash or hyphen in SharePoint system account / server farm account name

We recently saw an issue at a client site where the client chose to use a dash, or hyphen, in the name for the server farm account (a.k.a. the database access account, a.k.a. the System Account) - e.g. "moss-admin."  The account worked until our infrastructure expert tried to create the Shared Service Provider - it hung for over 10 minutes, and when he checked the event log he found it flooded with errors to the effect that the user could not be found in the domain.  Once they went back and changed the account name to remove the dash, they were able to create the SSP without any issues.  Going forward we are recommending that as a best practice, you should not use any special characters (e.g. \ / : * ? " < > | # { } % ~ & - _ . , ) in the server farm account name.