Monthly Archives: November 2008

Social Computing Book for SharePoint 2007

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In mid July, I was offered a chance to author two chapters for Brendon Schwartz’s and Matt Ranlett’s up-coming book, Social Computing with Microsoft SharePoint 2007: Implementing Applications for SharePoint to Enable Collaboration and Interaction in the Enterprise.  (I think they were trying to win a length contest with that title; I think they won).  I jumped on the opportunity and now, finally, the entire book is done, arriving at stores in February.

As SharePoint matures, publishers have begun to produce a new wave of books.  This book is part of that wave.  This wave builds upon the previous round of technical reference manuals explaining core features and functions and begins to describe how to use those features and functions to deliver business value in a very non-superficial way.  I’m not saying that is anything superficial about reference manuals or their value.   In fact, a book like this on Social Computing probably couldn’t have been written a year ago.  (Literally, of course it could have been written, but I don’t think the larger community would have been ready for it).  The new wave of books tends to assume the reader basically understands core features and instead describes how to use those core features in interesting new ways. 

As the title plainly says, this is a book about Social Computing.  Social Computing is a subject ripe for discussion and exploration and indeed, the discussion is well underway among early adopters.  Many companies are now quite comfortable with document libraries, content types, search, basic workflow, etc.  Having implemented and mastered these bread and butter features, they are ready for the next level.  This book offers insights and strategies to do that and thereby, exploit new and interesting opportunities that Social Computing brings to the world.

Social Computing is a big and evolving subject and covers a lot off things, including blogs, wikis, social tagging, search, interactive media, mashups, "people," and other socially-oriented "stuff."  SharePoint has a very strong story to tell in this arena and now, at this time in Internet & SharePoint history, is the time to tell it.  All things being equal between companies, those that successfully leverage Social Computing will outpace and outgrow those that do not.  The train is getting ready to leave the station and you don’t want to miss it!  This book is your ticket for a seat on that train 🙂

Bottom line, this is a blog entry pitching the book.   It’s due out in February.  Pre-order it here: Social Computing with Microsoft SharePoint 2007: Implementing Applications for SharePoint to Enable Collaboration and Interaction in the Enterprise. 

(Full disclosure — there’s no royalty money in it for me if you choose to buy the book, so this isn’t an effort to boost my savings account, though if it sells well, it will help out my ego, which always wants more, more, more!)

As an aside, but very important aside, I thank Bob Fox for connecting me with Brendon.  And naturally, I thank Brendon and Matt for taking a chance on a newbie such as myself and letting me author chapters in their very important book!

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What is Limited Access Anyway?

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UPDATE 11/03/08: Be sure to read the excellent and detailed comment from Dessie Lunsford to this post.

I’ve been working on a secret tech editing project for an up-coming book and it references this blog entry by Tyler Butler on the MSDN ECM blog.  This is the first time I personally read a clear definition of the meaning of Limited Access.  Here’s the meat of the definition:

In SharePoint, anonymous users’ rights are determined by the Limited Access permission level. Limited Access is a special permission level that cannot be assigned to a user or group directly. The reason it exists is because if you have a library or subsite that has broken permissions inheritance, and you give a user/group access to only that library/subsite, in order to view its contents, the user/group must have some access to the root web. Otherwise the user/group will be unable to browse the library/subsite, even though they have rights there, because there are things in the root web that are needed to render the site or library. Therefore, when you give a group permissions only to a subsite or library that is breaking permissions inheritance, SharePoint will automatically give Limited Access to that group or user on the root web.

This question comes up now and then on the MSDN forums and I’ve always been curious (but not curious enough to figure it out before today :)).

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I Don’t Often Agree with Big George Will, But He’s Right About Dreary Outcomes

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The closing thought on this otherwise dull article speaks well to problems we often face in the technical community:

"Such dreary developments, anticipated with certainty, must be borne philosophically."

This puts me in mind of one of the presentations I gave at the SharePoint Best Practices conference last month.  I was describing how to get "great" business requirements and someone in the audience asked, in effect, what to do if circumstances are such that it’s impossible to get great requirements.  For example, a given company’s culture places IT in front of the requirements gatherer / business analyst, preventing direct communication with end users.  This is a serious impediment to obtaining great business requirements.  My answer was "walk away."  I’m not a big humorist, so I was surprised at how funny this was to the audience.  However, I’m serious about this.  If you can’t get good requirements, you can be certain that a dreary outcome will result.  Who wants that?  I’m a consultant, so it’s more realistic (although terribly painful and drastic) for me to walk away.  However, if you’re entrenched in a company and don’t want to, or can’t, walk away, George (for once 🙂 ) shows the way.

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SharePoint Designer Workflow and Email Attachments — A Consummation Devoutly to be Wished

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Sadly, it is not to be.  We cannot send an email with attachments from a SharePoint Designer workflow using out of the box features.  This wish comes up with increasing regularity on the MSDN forums.

However, the SharePoint platform, as with so many things, does offer us a path forward.  We can create custom actions which we then incorporate into our workflows.  Once installed, a custom action looks and feels like any other action (e.g. Collect Data, Log a Message, etc).

Creating a custom action is a big mountain to climb, however, for End Users.  This codeplex project provides this functionality: http://www.codeplex.com/SPDActivities.  Pulling that down and installing it is also beyond the skills of typical End Users.  However, it’s quite simple for a SharePoint admin to do it, so if you find yourself needing to develop a workflow with this capability, work with your SharePoint admin to get it done.

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Quick Tip: Configure Security to Allow Admins to Access any My Site in SharePoint

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In a sign that Social Computing is beginning to take off with SharePoint, I see an increased number of My Site type questions.  One common question goes something like this:

"I am an administrator and I need to be able to access every My Site.  How do I do that?"

The trick here is that each My Site is its own site collection.  SharePoint security is normally administered at the site collection level and this trips up many a SharePoint administrator.  Normally, she already has access to configure security in the "main" site collections and may not realize that this doesn’t automatically work for My Sites.

Site collections collectively live inside a larger container, which is the web application.  Farm admins can can configure security at the web app level and this is how admins can grant themselves access to any site collection in the web application.  This blog entry describes one of my personal experiences with web application policies.  I defined a web application policy by accident: http://paulgalvin.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!1CC1EDB3DAA9B8AA!255.entry.

Web application policies can be dangerous and I suggest that they be used sparingly.  If I were an admin (and thank goodness I am not), I would create a separate AD account named something like "SharePoint Web App Administrator" and give that one account the web application security role it needs.  I would not configure this kind of thing for the regular farm admin or individual site collection admins.  It will tend to hide potential problems because the web app role overrides any lower level security settings.

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Quick Tip: Use “IsDocument:1” to Trim Search Results

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Update 11/03/08: Fellow MVP Mike Walsh correctly points out that this is a WSS 3.0 / MOSS feature.  It does not work in WSS 2.0 or earlier.

Updatte 11/03/08: (Second update in one day!): Be sure to read the excellent comment from "nowise" for more info and another good xref link.

Two questions came up in rapid succession this week on the MSDN forums asking a variation of this:

"When I search a keyword, folders from my document library with that keyword in their path will come out first in my search results. I don’t want that to happen. Files with that keyword are more important to me.  I don’t want to see folders at all."

This is actually quite easy to do out of the box.  Simply add a "IsDocument:1" to the search query and SharePoint search (both WSS and MOSS) will restrict itself to showing actual documents.

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