Quite often I come across a requirement when I have a field on the new/edit item form that I want to hide, usually this has already been populated by some development. In this example we have a link field (which in this case links to another sharepoint item) which we want to hide.

1. Open the list, click 'Settings' the 'List settings'

2. 'Advanced settings'

3. Set 'allow management of content types' to 'Yes', click 'OK'

4. Click 'Item' under the 'Content types' header (may not be called item based on the type of list e.g. might be called 'Task')

5. Choose the relevant field (column) that you want to hide

6. Click 'Hidden (will not appear in forms)' then 'OK'

I always think that navigation does not go across site collections and it general it doesn't. However you can use the Portal site connection option in order to include a link in the breadcrumb. For example, you have an Intranet with team sites and you wish to separate the team sites into a separate site collection, which is sensible because then it can be a separate database.

In this case I have a portal called http://intranet and a site collection called http://intranet/portal/sites. In the Team sites collection I want the Intranet to appear as the first node on the breadcrumb. This can be achieved using Portal site collection.

1. Site Actions > Site Settings > Modify all site settings
2. Portal site collection under Site Collection Administration
3. Enter the address and the name you want to appear as the breadcrumb link

    4. This will then display as the first node in the breadcrumb

NB: This is just a link, so this doesn't have to be to another SharePoint site collection - it could be to your corporate website or intranet hosted on something else.

Many times in an Extranet scenario I see that Clients are having to enter domain\username in the username box, although this isn't a particular problem if often causes a few user error issues which could be easily avoided.

1. Locate your externally facing website in IIS

2. Choose Properties on this web site

3. Choose the Directory Security tab

4. Choose Edit.. under the Authentication and access control heading

5. In the Default domain box enter the domain that users will use and click OK twice

Done! Your users will no longer have to type domain\username just username instead

Yes a common pitfall that people fall into is not allowing enough space on their SharePoint servers. Say you estimate your content database are going to get to 100Gb then you actually probably need 420Gb of space - how so...

 Content databases: 100Gb

 Search Index database: 40Gb (This is usually 20-40% of the size of the content databases)

 You need only a 50% fill factor on SQL drives to allow for SQL maintenance operations to run, so therefore 140Gb becomes 280Gb. And presumably you are going to back all of this up, so that is another 140Gb! Tada we have 420Gb!

It is a fairly common scenario that people don't want anyone or some groups of people to create My Sites but it always suprises me how few people know the answer to. This can all be achieved through the SSP:

1. Go to the relevant SSP
2. Choose "Personalization services permissions"
3. From here you can control permissions for different groups to "Create personal site"
4. Users will not see the "My Site" link in the top right hand corner of the page if they don't have permissions to.

When sorting you in a SharePoint Document Library you would expect it to behave as per Windows Explorer and in most cases it does. If you sort by a column (e.g. Name A-Z, Modified date) the Folders appear at the top followed by the Files.

After removing the "New folder" option from New menu on the library it changes so Folders are now in line with files - see illustration below.

My box has SP1 on but no further hot fixes so I can't comment if these would fix this issue.

It has been a long time since my last blog post and about time I started again... The last couple of months have been a tad busy - getting engaged, changing jobs and renovating our house!

 Anyway about time I started again.... So here goes...

When backing up a site collection and restoring it in the same SharePoint 2007 (MOSS) web application, I received the following error message:

 No content databases are available for this operation. Create a content database
, and then try the operation again. To create a content database, click "Content
 databases" on the Application Management page, select the Web application to us
e, and then click "Add a content database".

However I had a Content database which was in the Ready state and allowing new sites...

Luckily thanks to Akila's SharePoint blog article I realised this is because the GUID of the Site Collection already exists in this Content database - therefore the Restored Site Collection needs to be in its own Conent database - creating another content database made my restore work.

We had an issue with documents in a Folder within a Document library. We renamed the folder and the Modified date of all documents updated to be the date at which the folder was modified - which for us caused some strange results as the last user to modify the document had left the company!

 Anyway Service Pack 1 appears to fix this, I had no problems applying this to my environment - instructions are here: http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2007/12/11/announcing-the-release-of-wss-3-0-sp1-and-office-sharepoint-server-2007-sp1.aspx

Today I attempted to setup a View filtering using the contains operator on a Lookup column which allows multiple values - not as straight forward as hoped: 

I had 2 lists:

• Products 
• Categories

Products has a lookup column to Categories, which allows multiple Categories to be selected. In the Products list I wanted to have a view for each category, I thought I would be able to achieve this using a filter and the contains operator - however upon saving the view I was prompted with

"The filter type you selected cannot be used with this type of column. You can apply the 'contains' operator only to columns that have the type Single line of text, Multiple lines of text, or Choice. Specify a different operator for the filter or change the column type. You can then attempt to create the filter again."

This stumped me for a few minutes, until I tried using the is equal to operator instead, which did what I would expect the contains operator to do. I created a view for Category A and set the filter to is equal to Category A - which seems to pick up Products that are in Categoy A and/or other Categories.

As promised this is a follow up to SharePoint Search is not Psychic, In this article I hope to briefly cover a few of the ways you can start to influence you search. I don't intend to discuss search scopes or managed properties in this article.

Authoratative sites/pages

The concept behind Authoritative sites is making a site more prominent in the search results. For example, you have an Intranet which is a single Web Application and single Site collection; within this you have a site called Processes - this site contains important information about processes, procedures and forms in your business. You find people keep copying these and creating their own versions of them. This means that users searching come across uncontrolled out-of-date copies. By making the Process site an authoritative site it tends to be a the top of the search results. In Central Admin under Shared Service Provider, choose Search Settings and scroll to the bottom, choose Specify authoritative pages, then simply enter the URL.

Keywords/Synomns

The concept behind keywords is to offer alternative words to search for. E.g. If you had a business name ABD and it changed its name to ABCD then you could add a keyword for ABCD to offer ABD as an alternative. This helps with content that has not been update from the original name.

Best bets

Best bets are a quick way of ensuring that a user searching for a specific term, gets a specific result returned at the top. E.g. You specific that the specific term "forms" should return to a specific url. This will offer this result at the top of the search results.

Search result removal

Not something I have used much but if a URL is included that you need to remove quickly. Enter the URL in the search result removal Page (under search settings), it will be removed instantly and a crawl rule will be added so it doesn't appear back in the index after the next crawl. To reverse this action you will need to delete the crawl rule that has been added and start a crawl.

Useful articles

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointserver/HA100478321033.aspx

This aricle applies to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007, although if you want to do this with Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0 then check out Microsoft's Search Server offering...

•  http://www.microsoft.com/enterprisesearch/
• http://www.21apps.com/2008/01/suguk-jan-10th-2007-meeting-write-up.html

I was at the user group today (well actually it is yesterday now), Andrew Woodward gave a great presentation on Microsoft Search Server 2008. One of the questions he asked during the session was how many people reviewed and acted upon the statistics about what users were searching for. To my surprise only myself and one other admitted to this! Out of a room of 70ish people, most of whom had earlier admitted they had MOSS!

1. Every week/month we evaluated what users were searching for and if we felt the results they were provided were satisfactory
2. We setup a survey linked from the search results page, to allow users who couldn't find what they were looking for to tell us about it

Using the data from both of the above we were able to analyse where the search was failing to meet users' expectations. We found that:

In lists there is an "Open with Access" option, I never thought much about this and continued using Excel. However we have a requirement to build an application with drag and drop functionality on a desktop application but to publish this to our Extranet. So I tried Access 2007, I simply created an Access database and connected a number of lists in a site on our Extranet to it and voila! You can use this in online or offline mode, it understands the links between the lists and will even give you a relationship diagram! Mine was a spiders web!

 Access 2007 looks much better also when editing an item in the table you get calendar functionality if it is a date/time field, if it is a lookup on another SharePoint list you get a drop down of the options!

I was really impressed it meant uploading and downloading data (using 2-way sync) for our desktop application was simple!

As many of you will already know a Blog template is just a series of linked lists (+ some fancy bits). There are a couple of interesting observations about the Posts list though:

 a) You don't have the option to save this list as a template (presumably because the content is related to other lists)

b) You can enabled attachments on the list but there is no interface to attach anything

We have a site with a couple of document libraries, one is very large (~16 Gb |  25000 Files | 2500 Folders). 

We have encountered a couple of problems, one of them is when you run Audit reports it returns "unknown error". It seems the bigger the site/document libraries the more likely you are to receive this. So we had to work out a way of getting Audit reports preferably without moving documents into new small document libraries.

So presumably this information is stored in the SharePoint databases? I like many others work on the premise that it is fine to read information out of these databases but DEFINATELY not to update these expect through the SharePoint interfaces.

So we went hunting and some time later.....

We found a table called AuditData (in the relevant Content DB), which contains most of the information required. We also used the UserInfo table to understand who performed the action.

AuditData contained most of the data - we were interested in the ItemType Column, UserID, DocLocation, Occurred, Event, EventData.

Some complicated data analysis later.... We established that everything we were interested in was ItemType 1 and the the Event could be used to determine what type of event. 

Therefore you can construct a query that brings back this information for individual sites, this is very basic and then needs some formatting applied.

SELECT     a.Event, u.tp_Login, a.Occurred, 'http://sharepoint/' + a.DocLocation AS [Document]
FROM         WSS_Content1.dbo.AuditData AS a INNER JOIN
                      WSS_Content1.dbo.UserInfo AS u ON a.UserId = u.tp_ID
WHERE     (a.DocLocation LIKE 'site/%') AND (a.ItemType = 1) AND (a.UserId <> '1073741823')

• WSS_Content1 = relevant content db
• http://sharepoint/ = your portal url
• site/ = the site you are interested in this portal url

• Site definitions have to be updated by a developer or administrator with some XSLT or CAML knowledge
• Site templates can be created easily
• If you update a site template (e.g. change the column type) none of the lists based on it will update - whereas for site definitions they will. Only certain aspects based on site definition - will update - e.g. add/changing/removing views will not

There seems to be very little on the SharePoint blogs about this - everyone has moved on so quickly but in practice we haven't all completely done with SPS 2003 yet!

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=AB086D48-1148-48DE-B4EC-A6298367E5F0&displaylang=en

Otherwise you get an error usually, "The network path http://portal/site/doclib/ cannot be found"

I came across this when trying to save as site as a template the other day - the option didn't exist. Beware - one of those nice quirks!

 http://blogs.technet.com/stefan_gossner/archive/2007/09/19/save-site-as-template-option-and-the-publishing-feature.aspx

 This is also relevant: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/925189/en-us

I have been a bit slow getting started with my blog but here it is my first post!

 This post covers what features and other items are configurable at each level - I do not believe this list is complete. Therefore if you have more to add to this please comment on my blog and I will add it on.