My latest article for SharePointBriefing.com is up and kicking here: http://sharepointbriefing.com/features/article.php/3887276/The-Road-to-SharePoint-Mastery.htm
Here’s a teaser:
This is basically a pretty short and condensed version of my most popular public presentation on “On to Learn SharePoint.” No banjo jokes, however.
Check it out!
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I was reading one of these pretty generic blah-like articles on BPOS (Microsoft’s exchange and SharePoint in the cloud) and thankfully waded through to the end:
In terms of other near-term deliverables, Microsoft is commiting to provide in BPOS v.Next native PowerShell scripting via a PowerShell endpoint build on PowerShell Version 2. Authentication will be done through Online IDs, with a single credential being able to be used for both PowerShell and the portal.Keane echoed the message other Microsoft execs have been voicing at TechEd this week: Cloud capabilities, over time, will become a superset of what is available on-premises. Currently, the reverse is true, and Microsoft’s Online services offer a subset of the functions available in the software equivalents of each product.
The notion that the cloud will provide more capability than on-premise is new to me. I wonder how true that is going to be in the end. It feels counterintuitive to me. I totally get the idea that a lot of companies will move stuff to the cloud (or start off in the cloud) but I normally think they do it because the pro’s (easier admin, SLAs, etc) far outweigh the cons (reduced functionality).
I’m having a little bit of a hard time believing that cloud offerings will exceed on-prem capabilities. Multi-tenant is hard and seems like it must force compromises in order to provide good SLA and ease of use…
I’ll probably be eating my words on this. I remember thinking that no one could possibly need more than 650 mb of data and therefore, the CD was never going to be improved upon.
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I hesitate to pass this along given that “banjo jokes” is not an option, but … The end-of-August SharePoint Saturday (Baltimore edition) organizers have a poll up asking for suggested topics. Go here to fill it out: http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/baltimore/default.aspx
Vote early and vote often 🙂
But seriously, only vote once.
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Another day, another MSDN-forums inspired post.
Someone was asking whether they could secure a content type such that when a user clicks on the “new” button on a custom list, only content types to which that person is granted access would appear in the drop-down list. As we know, this isn’t supported out of the box.
This question comes up now and then and this time, I had a new idea. Let’s assume that we have scenario like this:
What we could do is create two separate SharePoint lists and two different content types, one for “super” users and the other for everyone else.
Workflow on each list copies the data to the master list (the actual helpdesk ticket list) and the process proceeds from there.
This approach might work flow a kind of column level security as well.
I haven’t tried it, but it feels reasonable and gives a fairly simple, if pretty rough, option to implement a kind of content type and even column level security.
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There’s a common business scenario with InfoPath forms. We want allow people to fill out InfoPath forms and submit them to a library. We want mangers (and no one else) to have access to those forms.
This question comes up now and then on the forms (e.g. http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepointadmin/thread/76ccef5a-d71c-4b7c-963c-613157e2a966/?prof=required)
A quick way to solve this is to enable content approval on the form library. Go the library’s version settings and set it up as shown:
Click on “Require content approval” and that will allow you to pick a value for Draft Item Security.
It’s a little counter-intuitive because we don’t think in terms of “content approval” when all we want to do is prevent people from seeing other users’ forms. However, it works well (in my experience). Just don’t approve those forms and they’ll always be considered “drafts”.
Give approval rights to the people who should be able to see them and you’ve closed the loop.
This isn’t exactly big news, but the question does come up with some regularity, so I thought it would be worth posting.
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I may be the last person to realize this, but SharePoint Online (which I often hear people say is a glorified WSS) supports InfoPath Forms Services. That’s pretty powerful stuff, especially considering that IP FS is a MOSS Enterprise feature and BPOS is something like $1.99/month for 10,000 users. Maybe it’s a little more than that.
So, SharePoint Online defies easy definition. It has this enterprise feature, but no anonymous access (which even WSS supports). You can do some interesting stuff with search (MOSS-ish, since you can define site level scopes), but if you need access to the SSP, you can’t do it. You can play the “on the one hand and on the other” game all night long with this product 🙂
Microsoft is due to release a new version of SP Online in the next few months. I wonder what weird hybrid it’s going be?
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There’s an unusual “theory” type thread going on here on the MSDN forums: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepointgeneral/thread/34d11f89-4405-4ba5-b0f0-faa5af6e6ad5/
A lot of MSDN forum questions are very “how do I do [x]” in nature.
This is a big topic and some of the key issues are being addressed pretty nicely in the thread.
Join in the fun!
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I was reading forums this afternoon and learned something new (something that happens almost every day). This is the posting:
Basically, you can get some interesting information about a site by invoking owssvr.dll against it (h/t to Bil Simser and John Timney).
I gave this a try in a both a MOSS and an SP2010 environment. It worked fine in the MOSS environment. However, in the 2010 environment, Internet explorer didn’t want to download the XML:
As you can see, I know it had 21k or so of content. However, when I clicked the Save button, I got:
(Unable to open this Internet site. The requested site is either unavailable or cannot be found. Please try again later.)
I fired up Fiddler and and I was able to see the output, however. It seems like there may be something happening in SP2010 that prevents owssvr.dll from transmitting its XML payload the way it wants. Or, my SP2010 environment is just acting funny.
Thought it was interesting…
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My latest article is up at www.sharepointbriefing.com. Here’s a teaser:
Read the whole thing here: http://sharepointbriefing.com/features/article.php/3874226/Content-Query-Web-Part-SharePoints-Swiss-Army-Knife.htm
See it in use a real public web site here by following these steps:
It will jump to the “Customer Support” section of the case studies listing.
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Here’s another article I wrote for www.sharepointbriefing.com. This one describes a technique that we can in SharePoint Designer to perform calculations that aren’t possible using any of the built-in calculation-style activities. The basic idea is to use a custom list as a calculation engine – define a list that performs the calculation correctly, create an item via SPD and then read the result.
Here’s a teaser:
Read more about it here: http://sharepointbriefing.com/features/article.php/3866646/Use-Calculated-Columns-to-Close-Gaps-in-Workflows.htm
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