A Matter Of Degree

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.)

Update 4/28/10 - I tested this with SharePoint 2010 and Word 2010 - For a document from a read-only document library, Word does not display a "check out" button, and does not allow the user to check out the document from the File menu.  The document is displayed as a read-only document.

To note - for a user with Site Collection Administrator or higher rights, even on a document library where that user's rights are Read, it appears that Word does allow the Admin-level user to go through the steps of checking out the document (from the File menu), and even displays the document with the checked-out icon in the document library.  When the user makes a change to the document and tries to save the document back to the document library, this message is displayed in Word:

 

To further complicate matters, if the Admin-level user tries to check the document back in, "Discard check out" is not displayed, only "Check out."  If the Admin-level user checks out and then discards that checkout, changes that user made to the document are saved.  Strange behavior of which SP administrators should be aware. 

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.

Greg LeMond Keynote at the SharePoint 2008 Conference

20080305 - LeMond Keynote at SharePoint 2008 Conference, originally uploaded by sadalit.

This morning I attended the keynote by Greg LeMond. His small company (16 people) uses SharePoint; he believes it is “what the future is for working together.”

Among the many themes of his talk (never give up, have ambitious goals in mind, be confident yet keep your nervousness about the possibility of losing, be passionate about what you do, have a partner that believes in you & supports you), the most notable for me was the concept of averaging your days – some days you’re ahead, some you are behind, but it’s the overall trend that is important.

The Tour de France is a great model of this – the racers are acutely aware of where they stand both on a daily basis and overall - you can “win” an individual day or days but lose the race, and conversely, you shouldn't give up hope if you lose the day - you could still come out on top.

Weight loss is another example – losing a certain amount of weight is an effort that can be tracked with hard numbers on a daily basis, to reveal a trend line. If you slip occasionally and indulge by overeating, your trend can still be toward loss.

What if the achievement of your goal is harder to measure? How can you grasp (and feel good about) the overall if the numbers aren't in front of your face every day? Even if you have well-defined metrics for success (a critical first step toward performance measurement that is often overlooked), how can you increase their visibility?

MOSS 2007 offers tools to make your overall performance trend more visible and easier to comprehend.  If you don't have the time or resources to implement a business data catalog, you can still take advantage of the key performance indicator web parts just by putting together a simple Excel spreadsheet or SharePoint list.  Which of your company's goals would be good candidates for a simple graphical display on a SharePoint home page?  On-time employee timesheet submission?  Trainings or certifications achieved across the company?  Number of new projects opened this month compared to previous months?

For me, LeMond's message was an important one to keep front of mind - not to dwell on a failure, but to learn from it and focus on the overall upward trend.  In the future as I work with my customers I'll encourage them to do the same for their companies, using SharePoint as the enabling tool.

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?

The beginning of the end of Flickr?

Enden er nær!, originally uploaded by le petit danois.

Much commotion and protest on Flickr over Microsoft's takeover bid of Yahoo. Link to Wired article... I have no opinion yet although I did join the "MICROSOFT: KEEP YOUR EVlL GRUBBY HANDS OFF OF OUR FLICKR" group to which I was invited over the weekend...

Cannot attach files / view attachments in a blog in SharePoint / MOSS 2007

My colleague Tim just brought this issue to my attention – the inability to attach a file to a blog post in SharePoint (MOSS 2007).

Attachments are part of the blog functionality – they are enabled by default in List Settings:

In addition, there is an "attachment" column built in to the list, which can be displayed in a view. But the New Item and the Edit Item forms do not have the "Attach File" link:

I tried the trick of choosing "attach file" on another list to see if I could copy and paste that function from the URL, but it doesn't work that way – the URL stays the same as the form name as you go through the browse and attach procedure.

I then email-enabled the blog, and my colleague sent a test email with an attachment. This worked, but the attachment is only viewable in Edit mode, which means only for those with Contribute rights. The image below shows the default blog view for a contributor, and you can see that there is no intuitive way to access the attachment.

Here's the post in Edit mode:

For someone with only Read rights, there is no way to access the attachment at all.

This situation is not in the list of issues addressed with the application of SP-1. It seems strange that the developers left the functionality in the list but provided no user-friendly way to access it. There must be a good reason…?

The workaround is to use a document library, and link to documents within the blog post rather than attaching them.