I had a problem where external users, in this case hotmail addresses werent recieving Sharepoint Notifications. I was scratching my head but the solution was a simple one, as they normally are….

If you are going to let users outside of your domain receive outgoing email from SharePoint, you may need to enter their domains as valid in SMTP. To do this go to your SMTP server under IIS and right click on Domains. Choose New Domain, and Remote. Add the domain of your users’ email address. If it is going to be a mixed bag, you may need to add several remote domains such as *.com, *.net, *.org, *.co.uk etc etc

When deploying a K2 process you get the following error:

Task Error: System.Exception: Error occurred adding the feature to the farm. —> System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapException: Server was unable to process request. —> Access denied.
at System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapHttpClientProtocol.ReadResponse(SoapClientMessage message, WebResponse response, Stream responseStream, Boolean asyncCall)
at System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapHttpClientProtocol.Invoke(String methodName, Object[] parameters)

This is normally a permission problem & you should check the following & make any changes that are required:

1) Check that the MOSS app pool account has Site Collection and Farm Admin Rights and is also a local administrator.

2)Check that the MOSS app pool account is given dbo permission on the SP Admin Config database.

3)Check that the MOSS app pool account is granted modify permissions: [Program Files]\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\Template\Features\ and \12\ISAPI folders.

4) Make sure the MOSS app pool account is given K2 export rights.

5) Make sure the “K2 Workflow Integration Content Types” in Central Admin > K2 for SharePoint has been activated.

You may also need to to do an iisreset.

If all of the above are present you should be able to publish your workflow without experiencing the above error.

This easiest way is to use the URL below & insert your list GUID

http://servername/site/_vti_bin/owssvr.dll?Cmd=Display&List=*YOURUNIQUELISTID*&XMLDATA=TRUE

To get the GUID of the list you need to go into the list & click ‘Settings’ -> ‘List Settings’. Now if you look at your URL you will see something like:

/_layouts/listedit.aspx?List=%7B7B476F98%2D1075%2D4A6D%2D8F63%2D4C754B3F41FC%7D

The URL is encoded so you will need to replace “%7B” with “{” and “%7D” with “}” and “%2D” with “-” so the end result would look something like: {7B476F98-1075-4A6D-8F63-4C754B3F41FC}

1. Open up SharePoint Portal and click on Site Actions -> Site Settings -> All Site Settings option

2. Under “Site Administration“group option, Click on “Content and Structure” link

3. From top menu Click “New” List option to create a list of type “Document Library”.

4. Let’s Configure document library further…. Let’s name it as “JavaLib”
[ Note: The name of the document library could be any name you like, I like the name JavaLib as we will use this library to organize all JavaScript’s related resources]

5. (Best Practices) Now, We can configure the JavaLib with additional columns, Versioning and Security so that it can return us a favors like versioning and auto advancing to new versions (if needed).

5.1. Add a column “Script Version” as Single Line of Text to JavaLib

Having “Script version” column becomes very informative when one has lots of developers.

5.2. Configure versioning with 10 Major & 10 Minor Versions

Versioning will allow you to rollback to previous version if there is a bug/known defects without having all other pages needing a modification.

5.3. Set Library security as Read Only to Everyone and Contribute to DevGroup

Limiting who can upload new items (scripts) will help establish controlled processes and release changes using major versions.

6. Let’s download most current JQuery version 1.3.2 from http://jqueryjs.googlecode.com/files/jquery-1.3.2.min.js to the desktop

7. Now, Let’s upload jquery.1.3.2.min.js file from our desktop to our JavaLib library.

Note: After uploading the file, Please make sure you change the Name from Jquery-1.3.2.min.js to Jquery and Title as Jquery-1.3.2.min.js and Script version as 1.3.2. This will help us in future if other revisions are available then you do not have to update all webparts with new framework urls.

8. Now we have JQuery available in our environment, with correct control security & versioning in place.

Thanks to Hemendra Patel over @ http://hemsoft.blogspot.com/2009/06/first-look-at-jquery-sharepoint.html

This SharePoint feature allows you to quickly import data from a CSV file or a SQL stored procedure to any custom SharePoint list.

Once you have added the solution to your farm and activated it on your site collection an additional menu option will be available on the Action menu of each custom list that will take you to the import CSV or SQL page.

Simply select which option you want – either import from a CSV file or import from a SQL stored procedure. Next, browse to the CSV file or enter the SQL connection and name of the stored procedure and hit the Import button.

There is a check box option to delete all items from the list before doing the import which is not selected by default.

Click Here

This guidance helps healthcare organisations apply a chosen information architecture or taxonomy within a 2007 Office system environment. Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007 Information Architecture describes how to plan and design an information architecture and provides step-by-step instructions showing how to configure Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007 with these settings.

This guidance is suitable for use by healthcare organisations that currently:

- Have content stored in local drives and file shares
- Archive records manually
- Have a basic Web server with Web master-controlled publishing
- Have not yet deployed Office SharePoint Server 2007, or have recently deployed Office SharePoint Server 2007 and wish to plan a portal structure and information architecture

Solution Accelerator – Scorecards

This solution accelerator acts as a template for configuring a management dashboard to track organisational metrics. It contains four example dashboards ranging from a primary care practice to a healthcare organisation’s CEO dashboard with metrics based on the healthcare targets for 2008. The solution accelerator also includes online guidance explaining how to customise a dashboard for a healthcare organisation’s needs.

This solution accelerator is suitable for use by healthcare organisations that currently use :

- Static paper-based documents to track performance with manually-entered performance metrics

- Static, decentralized, and highly-IT dependent reports

- Standalone spreadsheet-based analysis

Word breakers A word breaker is a component used by the query and index engines to break compound words and phrases into individual words or tokens. If there is no word breaker for a specific language, the neutral word breaker is used, in which case word breaking occurs where there are white spaces between the words and phrases. At indexing time, if there is any locale information associated with the document (for example, a Word document contains locale information for each text chunk), the index engine will try to use the word breaker for that locale. If the document does not contain any locale information, the user locale of the computer the indexer is installed on is used instead. At query time, the locale (HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE) of the browser from which the query was sent is used to perform word breaking on the query. Additional information about the language availability of the word breaker component is available in Appendix B: Search Language Considerations.

Stemming Stemming is a feature of the word breaker component used only by the query engine to determine where the word boundaries are in the stream of characters in the query. A stemmer extracts the root form of a given word. For example, ”running,” ”ran,” and ”runner“ are all variants of the verb ”to run.” In some languages, a stemmer expands the root form of a word to alternate forms. Stemming is turned off by default. Stemmers are available only for languages that have morphological expansion; this means that, for languages where stemmers are not available, turning on this feature in the Search Result Page (CoreResult Web Part) will not have any effect. Additional information about language availability for the Stemmer feature is available in Appendix B: Search Language Considerations.

Noise words dictionary Noise words are words that do not add value to a query, such as ”and,” ”the,” and ”a.” The indexing engine filters them to save index space and to increase performance. Noise word files are customizable, language-specific text files. These files are a simple list of words, one per line. If a noise word file is changed, you must perform a full update of the index to incorporate the changes. Additional information about the noise words dictionary and how to customize it is available at www.microsoft.com.

Custom dictionary The custom dictionary file contains values that the search server must include at index and query times. Custom dictionary lists are customizable, language-specific text files. These files are used by Search in both the index and query processes to identify exceptions to the noise word dictionaries. A word such as “AT&T,” for example, will never be indexed by default because the word breaker breaks it into single noise words. To avoid this, the user can add ”AT&T” to the custom dictionary file; as result, this word will be treated as an exception by the word breaker and will be indexed and queried. These files contain a simple list of words, one per line. If the custom dictionary file is changed, you must perform a full update of the index to incorporate the changes. By default, no custom dictionary file is installed during Office SharePoint Server 2007 Setup. Additional information about the custom dictionary file and how to customize it is available at www.microsoft.com.

Thesaurus There is a configurable thesaurus file for each language that Search supports. Using the thesaurus, you can specify synonyms for words and also automatically replace words in a query with other words that you specify. The thesaurus used will always be in the language of the query, not necessarily the server’s user locale. If a language-specific thesaurus is not available, a neutral thesaurus (tseneu.xml) is used. Additional information about the thesaurus file and how to customize it is available at www.microsoft.com.

Language Auto Detection The Language Auto Detection (LAD) feature generates a best guess about the language of a text chunk based on the Unicode range and other language patterns. Basically, it’s used for relevance calculation by the index engine and in queries sent from the Advanced Search Web Part, where the user is able to specify constraints on the language of the documents returned by a query.

Did You Mean? The Did You Mean? feature is used by the query engine to catch possible spelling errors and to provide suggestions for queries. The Did You Mean? feature builds suggestions by using three components:

· Query log Information tracked in the query log includes the query terms used, when the search results were returned for search queries, and the pages that were viewed from search results. This search usage data helps you understand how people are using search and what information they are seeking. You can use this data to help determine how to improve the search experience for users.

· Dictionary lexicon A dictionary of most-used lexicons provided at installation time.

· Custom lexicon A collection of the most frequently occurring words in the corpus, built at query time by the query engine from indexed information.

The Did You Mean? suggestions are available only for English, French, German, and Spanish.

Definition Extraction The Definition Extraction feature finds definitions for candidate terms and identifies acronyms and their expansions by examining the grammatical structure of sentences that have been indexed (for example, NASA, radar, modem, and so on). It is only available for English.

Havnt tried it but apparently works:

http://mysharepointblog.com/post/2007/02/Suppress-Microsoft-Office-Document-Authentication-Prompt-In-SharePoint-WSS-30.aspx

You want to a user file in your InfoPath form to auto populate with the current user who is logged on, follow these steps:

1) Create a new form by Designing a New Form Template

2)Choose blank form

3) Add a text box to the form (Field1)

4) Go to Tools | Form Options

5) Go to the Open Behavior section and click on Rules

6) Add Action to Set a Field’s Value

7) Choose the field you added above as the field to populate

8 ) For the value, click on the Fx button and choose Insert Function

9) View All in the Categories drop down

10) At the bottom you’ll see userName, pick it

11) The formula that gets dropped in is userName()

12) Preview the form, you’ll see your UserName in field1

Upgrade to IE7 on the desktop. There are performance benefits to moving up to IE7. In some cases the difference is 5x to 10x.

Make sure the IE cache is big enough so our necessary 250K of content and scripts needed for the browser to render Forms Services forms – doesn’t get pushed out the cache after an initial download. Customers with extraordinarily low thresholds (like ~1MB) will have issues. Disk is cheap, increase that value to something reasonable like 10% of disk.

A good perf trick is to populate dropdowns via an XML file (especially if they are somewhat static) that is made a part of the form XSN. We can cache that on the server and get good load performance optimization. You can always republish the solution when the data changes.

If you have to download data via a data connection for a dropdown list or calculation, try to dynamically build a filtered query (via code) so that you are as efficient as possible with what you are retrieving.

Try to minimize On_Load activities like queries unless absolutely necessary.

Conditional visibility logic has some known performance problems. A hotfix is available http://support.microsoft.com/kb/937206, which is manifested in a modifed 250K initial download when accessing Forms Services the first time. The performance issue is related to the IE Script Engine and occurs at the browser level, not server-side.

Instead of using conditional visibility logic, try implementing multiple views on a form. Splitting complex views into more than 1 view provides noticeable performance improvements.

Rich Text controls are noticeably slower in IE vs. Firefox, because Rich Text editing in Forms Services is an IE-only feature. Limiting the number of Rich Text controls shown in the same view can really help form performance.

Try to prevent unnecessary roundtripping between the form browser and the server. There are several round trip switches available on controls. See the Browser Forms Tab on a given control to expose finer-grained options over the behavior. Note what the warning messages you receive say about the form’s potential round trip behavior when admin deploying the form. It will tell you when multiple server roundtrips will be likely to occur when using your form.

If you have to do roundtrips to the server, try to have them triggered by buttons, so that the users know they initiated the wait themselves. This UI trick can tend to reduce user dissatisfaction with the form performance.

Try not to treat an InfoPath form as a full, rich VB application. It’s not designed to be performant in that use case.
The more declarative logic (heavy use of rules, etc.) and managed code you have in the form, the slower it will be. Try and follow the KISS method if at all possible (Keep it Simple, Stupid).

Consider breaking out the server role of Forms Services to another machine on the MOSS farm. Services such as indexing and query serving, or high file I/O operations can really impact the ability of Forms Services to get a time slice and perform properly.

If you have ever tried to format text and / or insert line breaks into your questions in sharepoint surveys, you’ll know its not an easy task. However by adding some simple javascript you can format the text in your questions as you want.

Basically at the bottom of your survey page add a Content Editor Webpart & insert the follow script:

<script language="JavaScript"> var ClassName; ClassName = 'ms-formlabel';</p> <p>var elements = new Array();</p> <p>var elements = document.getElementsByTagName('td');</p> <p>for(var e=0;e<elements.length;e++) { if(elements[e].className == ClassName) {</p> <p>elements[e].innerHTML = elements[e].innerHTML.replace('startitalic','<i>');</p> <p>elements[e].innerHTML = elements[e].innerHTML.replace('enditalic','</i>');</p> <p>elements[e].innerHTML = elements[e].innerHTML.replace('startbold','<b>');</p> <p>elements[e].innerHTML = elements[e].innerHTML.replace('endbold','</b>');</p> <p>elements[e].innerHTML = elements[e].innerHTML.replace('linebreak','<br/>');</p> <p>elements[e].innerHTML = elements[e].innerHTML.replace('startunderline','<u>');</p> <p>elements[e].innerHTML = elements[e].innerHTML.replace('endunderline','</u>');</p> <p>}</p> <p>}</p> <p></script>

You will see the script is mapping your HTML standard HTML command to keywords to trigger your formatting.

So say you wanted your question to appear in italics, you would edit your question as normal but insert the italic keyword triggers ie.

How old are you?

To appear in italics you would write the question as:

startitalic How old are you? enditalic

Now your question will appear in italics and so on……..

If you cant edit your survey page to add you CEWP see the previous post on how to edit this page.

You need to edit a page in Sharepoint but the ‘Edit’ option is greyed out for example on a survey page.

Simply append NewForm.aspx with ?ToolPaneView=2 so it looks like

/NewForm.aspx?ToolPaneView=2

You now have your page in edit mode so you can add webparts etc

If you’re frustrated by the lack of charting ability in Sharepoint / MOSS take a look at Visifire

Using Silverlight, The Dataview Webpart & Visifire you can start charting your list data within minutes with some very smart charts!

If youve tried to save a publishing site as a template in Sharepoint you will notice the link isnt there. However an easy way around this is to simply append: /_layouts/savetmpl.aspx to the site URL ie

/PATH/TO/SITE/_layouts/savetmpl.aspx

I was hoping to use a Sharepoint blog with custom templates for showcasing products but it appears you cant’

“The Post Content Type used in Blogs (0×0110) can be changed, but the changes are not propagated to the list (as its AllowContentTypes is false).”

The Content Type Toolbar is a simple add-on that will enhance the use of SharePoint Content Types in large deployments.

The use of content types in SharePoint 2007 has a number of benefits and businesses may spend a considerable amount of time planning and deploying content type to help support their business processes. Unfortunately, the default methods of using content types may not be intuitive for most users who do not have experience with SharePoint. This problem will lead to content types not being used or being neglected by the end users. This can be avoided by training your end users, but it may be sometime before all your users receive the appropriate level of training, so in the meantime the content types are still neglected.

Get it here…

Excellent step by step instructions here:

http://techtrainingnotes.blogspot.com/2008/11/sharepoint-group-by-on-more-than-2.html

For lists and libraries with large numbers of items, users can access the items with a mix of views and search. The following are some suggestions for views that work well with an indexed column:

Recently changed: To create a view of only the items that have changed in the past week, you can index the Modified column and then apply the filter Modified (Indexed) is greater than [Today]-7.

New items: To create a view of only those items that were added in the past week, you can index the Created column and then apply the filter Created is greater than [Today]-7.

My items: To create a view of only those items that you added, you can index the Created By column and then apply the filter Created By is equal to [Me].

Due today: For lists or libraries with a Due Date column, you can index that column and then apply the filter Due Date is equal to [Today].

Discussion board updates: To create a view of only the discussions that were updated in the past month, you can index the Last Updated column on a discussion board, create a new Subject view, and then apply the filter Last Updated is greater than [Today]-30.

People and Groups: If you have a lot of people visiting your site, you can improve the performance of the All Groups and All People pages by indexing the Content Type column for the User Information List.

Even if only a few people appear on the All People page, many people visiting the site will result in inactive users being written to the User Information List, which can still affect the performance of this list.
Find links to more information about creating or changing views and about formulas and functions that you can use to filter views in the

Note: Because creating views that use a column index correctly is more complicated for large lists and libraries, you might want to remove the Manage Personal Views permission from contributors for a large list or library. By removing this permission, you can prevent users from creating a view that spans all of the items and that might adversely affect the performance of the rest of the site.

Sharepoint 2010 – Sneak Preview

http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/2010/Sneak_Peek/Pages/Overview-Video.aspx

Many times during a project, you hit a requirement to have the ability to display an org chart on your SharePoint portal, and because there are many options to do this, it is difficult to know what approach is best for your particular scenario.

Here is a quick way of developing an org chart that the business users can update themselves! There are many options in terms of what data source you can use, such as Excel, MS Access, SQL Server or any OLEDB or ODBC data source.

For this scenario, we simply configure the Visio 2007 Org Chart to retrieve its data from a SharePoint List. The possibilities are endless in terms of how that data gets populated into the SharePoint List as well. For instance, you can write some code to retrieve and cleanup some data before programmatically importing it into the List.

Read more here