In parts 1 to 3, we looked at getting documents into SharePoint, adding metadata, using that metadata to create attractive and useful views of the documents, and using that metadata within documents. We also looked at a couple of techniques for leveraging information from other SharePoint lists. So now your users can quickly and easily find their documents, and use information from SharePoint in their documents. But still, they complain... ;-) How do I find the right template I'm meant to use for this kind of document? How can I quickly see all these kinds of documents in all our sites?

There is a company with a lot of employees. The requirement is to automate the request and approval process for employee holidays. Each employee has to be able to submit requests for holidays. The request has to be approved or rejected by the employee's manager. Each employee has to have the ability to view only his/her requests. Each manager has to have the right to approve or reject only requests that are requested by employees in his/her department. After the manager's actions, the manager has to be able to only read requests related to his/her department.

In our last tip, we started with the following scenario: Your Boss tells you that the budget has been freed up and new capital for upgrades will be available next year. Thus we will be purchasing SQL 2008R2 and MOSS 2010. He wants you to determine an upgrade plan and any initial tips on performing the upgrade. He wants you to confirm what versions need to be purchased and see if we can run through a test upgrade over the next few weeks on test box that is currently not being used. At this point, you are ready for the actual test upgrade. Your Boss is excited that you have gotten this far and is happy with the progress made. Thus what are your next steps to get your test upgrade complete and a site available for some quick te

In SharePoint 2010, one of the user problems is when a user is a member of a particular site, but when he navigates to My Profile and goes to the Memberships tab, he or she isn't able to view his memberships.

In SharePoint 2010, one of the most frequent enhancement requests that come from clients is to add a custom property to property restrictions in the (Out of The Box) advance search box. By default, properties like Author, Description, Name and others are provided in property restrictions. But how about a case where users want to search documents for a particular department or some other criteria?

Creating a list instance from "Out of the box" predefined SharePoint lists is easy but limited. How about creating our custom list via Visual Studio .Net 2010?

Creating an "Out of the box" predefined SharePoint list is easy but limited. How about creating a custom list via Visual Studio.Net 2010 and adding custom list fields with different data types?

When we try to open PDF files from a SharePoint 2010 library using IE 8 or above, we get prompted to Save the file and it does not open in the browser directly. In a vanilla SharePoint implementation the browser always prompts the user to save the PDF file rather than opening it. This behavior can be very annoying for end users and a bigger concern is that such behavior promotes saving the files on the local computer even if the document is designed for view only.

The default SharePoint 2010 list forms (DispForm , EditForm & NewForm) are quite generic (as they were with previous SharePoint versions).. Wouldn't it be great to be able to customize the look & feel of them? InfoPath 2010 to the rescue...

There are numerous solutions out there in the web to create a Slideshow web part. But finding one with jQuery was a tough job for me when I started working on this. JQuery was chosen based on the requirement given.

In this information intensive world, it sometimes gets difficult for organizations to facilitate a web-site with the home page containing all important information. If there is too much content on the page entered directly, it creates a vertical (or horizontal) scrollbar. Normal Users like to see the content right on the page or with very few obvious clicks. This generates the idea of creating widgets/controls which help content owners to deliver the content in more user-friendly way. There are two very important gadgets worth mentioning: Accordion and Tabs. Let us understand a Tabs widget here.

In this information intensive world, it sometimes gets difficult for organizations to facilitate a web-site with the home page containing all important information. If there is too much content on the page entered directly, it creates a vertical (or horizontal) scrollbar. Normal Users like to see the content right on the page or with very few obvious clicks. This generates the idea of creating widgets/controls which help content owners to deliver the content in more user-friendly way. There are two very important gadgets worth mentioning: Accordion and Tabs.

SharePoint 2007 enabled the ability to read external LOB (Line Of Business) systems like SQL Server, Web services or .Net Assemblies, but in SharePoint 2010 we'll see how to create full CRUD (Create - Read - Update & Delete) operations.

Your Boss tells you that the budget has been freed up and new capital for upgrades will be available next year. Thus we will be purchasing SQL 2008R2 and SharePoint 2010. He wants you to determine an upgrade plan and any initial tips on performing the upgrade. He wants you to confirm what versions need to be purchased and see if we can run through a test upgrade over the next few weeks on a test box that is currently not being used.

Creating cascading dropdowns in SharePoint presents a difficult challenge. There is nothing built in to "Out of the Box" SharePoint lists and libraries that supports this. However, we can use InfoPath in a variety of ways to meet this challenge. This tip will illustrate one of the solutions, using a custom web service.

As the amount of business data stored in SharePoint lists and libraries increases, it is becoming a necessity to be able to access and integrate with that data across many devices and platforms using a variety of tools and technologies. How can we access SharePoint data from an iPhone? How can we access SharePoint data from a PHP-based web site?

SharePoint has never provided an easy way for Administrators to recover a deleted site, or site collection. The recycle bin, introduced in SharePoint 2007 and supported on SharePoint 2010, has only supported recovery of list and list items. If a site or site collection was accidently deleted, the only way to recover was to restore the site or site collection from a database backup.

I understand that SharePoint lists and libraries contain extra columns (i.e. Author, Description, Status etc) that can be used to group, sort and filter content items as needed. These extra columns are known as "Metadata". I also understand that metadata is collected by SharePoint's search crawler and can be used in various ways by developers and administrators. I would like to understand more about this.

I have a company that supports an Internet portal on SharePoint, called HotSpotPlace. The portal provides information, advertisements, services and so on. The company has a merchant partner - a company selling consumer goods online. The partner wants clients to be able to make orders for products on any portal page, because the portal is very popular. Users need to be able to register online and for each product, a history of the last purchase date has to be preserved for analytical purposes. These are the requirements.

Excel workbooks published on SharePoint use the Excel Web Access web part, but the workbook is read-only. In this tip we cover how to make these Excel workbooks interactive instead of static worksheets.

So now we've got documents in SharePoint and we've got some nice looking views. What else can we do to leverage that information, particularly to get it into documents?

One of the restrictions and limitations in MOSS 2007 was that if we wanted to test and check our custom localized solutions we needed to configure and enable variations. But with SharePoint Server 2010 we now have a new Multi -language user interface (MUI) feature.

You have SharePoint 2010 on your server and you recently upgraded IIS7 / 7.5 to ASP.NET 4.0 or you changed the "SharePoint Central Administration V4" application pool's .NET framework from version 2 to 4. Now you are getting error "There is a duplicate 'system.web.extensions/scripting/scriptResourceHandler' section defined" when you try to run Central Administration or any SharePoint application.

In SharePoint 2010, the Managed Metadata Service provides the ability to publish content types from a central location called a hub. In my tip "Publishing Content Types with the Managed Metadata Service", I demonstrated how to configure content type publishing through the SharePoint User Interface. In this companion tip, I will demonstrate how to automate the configuration of the Managed Metadata Service hub, and the publishing of content types through PowerShell.

SharePoint content types are created and managed in the Content Type Gallery of a specific SharePoint site, and are inherited by all sub-sites within the same site collection. In SharePoint 2007, to use the same content type across multiple site collections required duplicating the content type manually, or deploying a custom developed feature. In SharePoint 2010, the Managed Metadata Service provides the ability to publish content types from a central location.

A couple of days after my company migrated MS Office from 2003 to 2007, my CTO walked into my office and asked why any new documents created from a newly created document library ended up opening in Compatibility Mode in Word 2007. I duplicated the problem quickly and told him that I would fix it ASAP. The problem is that the out-of-the-box (OOTB) default document template is a "Microsoft Office Word 97-2003 document" when you create a new document library in MOSS 2007. Most users will not check the option and use the default.

The scope of this tip is to explain the ways to handle performance issues on a customized SharePoint application. Usually these kind of performance issues happen due to the way in which the SharePoint API has been used in the code or due to the application architecture design for accommodating various business needs.

I have a small online business selling consumer goods built on SharePoint. I would like to export new requested items from a SharePoint list and send the Excel file to my suppliers. I would also like my employees to be able to manually choose which items to be exported to the Excel file...

SharePoint defines content types to store different types of metadata. SharePoint 2007 was limited in respect to content type centralization and sharing between site collections/web applications.

SharePoint stores documents in document libraries. There are folders to group different types of documents into a document library. But the problem is, it just provides a logical grouping, it doesn't provide any special attributes, metadata or object model to support the complete set of documents. For example, a folder doesn't allow trigger any workflows.

SharePoint provides My Site, a central location to maintain contact, document and links to every individual in the web application. There is a section of 'my newsfeed' where activities, such as updating a user profile, adding colleagues, adding documents, etc., are listed under Recent Activities. But sometimes these actions do not show, giving the message "There are no activities in your news feed".

Enterprise level systems consist of huge amounts of data which is likely interrelated. All data stored in SharePoint has a specific metadata. Until SharePoint 2007, there was no way of storing the metadata in an organized and hierarchical format.

Enterprise level systems consist of huge amounts of data which is likely interrelated. All data stored in SharePoint has a specific metadata. Until SharePoint 2007, there was no way of storing the metadata in an organized and hierarchical format.

There are situations when we need to provide access to a SharePoint site for users that are external to our domain. They could be clients, partners or vendors. We do not want to add these users to our Active Directory, so NTLM authentication is not an option, but still we need to somehow provide them access to certain areas on our SharePoint site.

Active Directory (AD) is an obvious choice for a user information store in Microsoft server environments. But if the requirement is to have an isolated light weight user store, Active Directory would be overkill or may not be appropriate.

The standard approach for data storage in SharePoint is lists and libraries. However, there are a few scenarios where you need to deal with XML data. Consider a scenario where you need to integrate a flash component in SharePoint which has dynamic XML data. Or consider another case where you need to manipulate XML data returned by a web service. XML is more suitable for hierarchical data. So in some cases you would want list data to be converted into XML first, before doing any manipulation. Now the next question is - how would you render the output as desired HTML from an XML data source?

Creating efficient SharePoint Designer Workflow emails can be tricky. There are a couple of salient points you need to know in order to leverage this to its full extent. In this article we will discuss these points.

I want to show or hide different list fields in each of the New, Display and Edit forms, based on a user's group membership. I need a "No-Code" solution for this.

You've got people putting their documents into SharePoint, and assigning metadata tags. They appreciate that they can now find the documents they want more easily, using views grouped by client or consultant, instead of digging through folders. But where's the "wow factor": something that makes them really sit up and notice how much better things are with SharePoint? Something that makes all the "tagging" hassle worthwhile?

I have a small online business selling consumer goods built on SharePoint. I would like to export new requested items from a SharePoint list and send the Excel file to my suppliers. I would also like my employees to be able to manually choose which items to be exported to the Excel file...

One of the restrictions and limitations of SharePoint Designer 2007 was that we can't save our scripts to be reusable for the entire site. But with SharePoint Designer 2010 we'll see how to create a reusable - code/script snippet.

Many SharePoint administrators need to optimize their SharePoint portals in order to improve the site performance. We'll see how to optimize HTML for SharePoint portal pages via SharePoint designer.

SharePoint 2010 introduced Site Workflows; workflows that can be manually started by a Site Administrator and are not bound to a specific list or library. Site Workflows can be useful for automating periodic administrative jobs, or extending business workflows with periodic batch processes. I like to think of them of being sort of like a timer job, but for a specific Site. The problem with Site workflows is that there is no out-of-box ability to schedule them.

A SharePoint web application can potentially contain thousands of site collections. Granting or denying uniform access to all of those site collections for a set of users can be difficult to apply and manage.

Creating information dashboards is always a challenge for end users, especially when we need to pull data from various sources. The PerformancePoint Service (PPS) is a Microsoft BI technology for displaying information dashboards within a SharePoint platform. PPS was not part of MOSS 2007. But with SharePoint 2010, Microsoft has added PPS as a service within the Enterprise version of SharePoint 2010. The Dashboard Designer provides a rich authoring environment for creating and managing dashboard content.

With evolution of search, different kinds of requirements arise for searching content. One of the requirements we came across was that they wanted to search for content from external locations (i.e. like Google, YouTube and other public facing internet applications).

One of the most general requirements we come across is to make enterprise search more compact and effective, providing quick and more accurate results. One of the major problems is to provide the right filters to find a particular record. For instance in a large enterprise environment, searching for a person called Jeffry from the Finance department, is not always a feasible option. Filters may not provide the accurate results for what users are expecting.

Business users are clamoring for information. Their needs change on a daily basis. They want reports, scorecards, and slick visualizations presented in dashboards that are personalized and security-trimmed. Every time you complete one of these tasks, there's several more in the queue. They also want the ability to do their own ad-hoc reporting and analysis. You're struggling to keep up. What can you do? In this tip I'll review a new book that focuses on how to build and deliver BI solutions that leverage SharePoint 2010.

You have been given a SharePoint site to use as a document storage area for your team. You know how to save documents into folders in a SharePoint document library, just like you would do with a file share. But folders have always been a hassle to use. It's often difficult for people to find documents, because one person's logic of which folder a document belongs in, doesn't always match another person's. It can be time consuming to browse down and up through a folder structure to find documents. A document is only ever in one folder, so you only get one convenient grouping. For example, you could put documents into folders based on which client they relate to, but then you can't easily see all proposals. Isn't there a better way?

I created a SharePoint Designer Workflow for a list. It has a step where it sends an email if the item is modified. After the workflow is fired on an item change in the list, a strange issue started occurring. It started sending several copies of the same email. Over and over.

One of the restrictions and limitations in MOSS 2007 page layouts was that we could not easily change the page layout for a page unless we opened SharePoint Designer 2007. We'll see how we can do it easily in SharePoint 2010 with SharePoint Designer 2010.

Many SharePoint portals require having various page layouts/templates available while creating a new pages. This tip explores multiple approaches in providing different options.

Many Business and IT managers use Microsoft Project to plan, schedule, and track tasks across teams, but need a way to keep the plan up-to-date with the progress made by team members.

Data discovery (and problem decomposition) are driving processes in a root cause analysis exercise. Dashboards and scorecards represent highly aggregated and summarized data. After a high level category becomes the focus for the root-cause analysis, an interactive mechanism is required for navigating through aggregated data (in a dimensional schema of a cube). This "problem decomposition" ends with a data discovery which is generally the end result of root cause analysis. In this tip we would take a look at how PerformancePoint Services can satisfy this data analysis requirement.

As SharePoint Developers and Administrators take advantage of PowerShell support in SharePoint 2010 to automate configuration and maintenance tasks they inevitably begin to run into issues. These include managing larger, more complex scripts, and sharing and managing of snippets and functions they want to reuse across the team.

I have heard that SharePoint 2010 provides Visio Services. I would like to know how to set it up and start using it.

In my last tip I talked about diagnostic logging in SharePoint 2010 and how it helps in troubleshooting. Troubleshooting with trace files is good but wouldn't it be cool if we have all the logging (usage and health) information on single place in consolidated form which help you to build reports and do analysis on collected data from all the servers of the farm? I heard SharePoint 2010 has new logging database. What is it, what does it store? How we can control the amount of information to be logged in the SharePoint logging database?

You want to quickly implement SharePoint 2010 as an Intranet solution. You don't need to turn it into a fully customized web site. You don't want to take the time to build and test custom master pages, and you don't want to hire in development resources. But it does need to look like it belongs in your organization, with a corporate color scheme and banner.

One of the restrictions and limitations of using SharePoint Sandbox solutions is that we can not create or find the Visual Web Part template at Visual Studio.Net 2010, while we can see and use the standard normal webpart template. We'll see how to overcome this issue.

SharePoint designers find it difficult when they try to tweak a SharePoint webpart because everything must be rendered at "code behind", which requires some .NET development skills. How can we make this easier?

A common requirement for publishing sites on SharePoint is to personalize and target content, menu links, and other site features, based on attributes of the user. For example, the latest company news and events for Sales Associates in California may not be all that relevant to Shipping Agents in South Carolina.

A common requirement for publishing sites on SharePoint is to personalize and target content, menu links, and other site features, based on attributes of the user. For example, the latest company news and events for Sales Associates in California may not be all that relevant to Shipping Agents in South Carolina.

You have a mature SharePoint 2007 installation, but lets say you have not been able to update it... And then one day, you get "the call". (And the sky is falling, of course!)... ...The Helpdesk has just informed you that all users are getting the following error when attempting to access one or more site collections. "Attempt to release mutex not owned by caller. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x00000120) Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code. Exception Details: System.ApplicationException: Attempt to release mutex not owned by caller. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x00000120)"

Upgrading a MOSS 2007 farm to SP2 can be a simple task, but not if there is 2 TB of content with lots of customizations. Here is what we did...

Are you tired of users not putting the correct information in on your forms? Recently I have come across issues where users were putting letters instead of numbers for a phone number field or not putting dashes in for their SSN. The question is how do you stop this from happening? Remember back in the day when you wanted to validate form fields in ASP, what did you use? Well you used Regular Expressions or RegExpr. Remember SharePoint is built on ASP technology so why shouldn't you be able to use regExpr in SharePoint? The answer is you can. This tip will show you how to integrate regular expressions on your forms to validate such inputs as SSN, phone numbers, and email addresses. Sit back and relax and let's begin. Note- SharePo

For diagnostic logging, the Unified Logging Service (ULS) has been available since previous versions of SharePoint. But what improvements and refinements have been done in SharePoint 2010? What are the options available for diagnostic logging in SharePoint 2010? How better we can control the amount of diagnostic information to be logged in SharePoint 2010?

If you run a "portal" site for an organization, you need to ensure that the information on the home page is meaningful and relevant for your users, so they keep coming back. But this becomes difficult when you have a large and diverse user base. For example, the Sales department will find information about new lines in promotional goods riveting, but it will have no interest for engineering. Conversely, engineering will be excited by news about a breakthrough in material bonding, but it will be gobbledegook to the accounting department. One option would be to include all the information on the page that anyone would be interested in. This will produce a large and "busy" page, which users will find unattractive and hard to use. Another opt

As a SharePoint Administrator you always wanted to have something in place which alerts you about the running issues or potential problems in your farm. SharePoint 2010 has come up with an 'out of the box' Health Analyzer feature which alerts you about the potential problems, and the locations where they occurred, the cause and how to resolve these issues. Let's explore it more.

Different organizations have different hierarchy structures. In some applications there can be some areas where specific users are not allowed to access documents or at least where the actual storage location exists. On the other hand, there would be some business requirements where users need to at least read a single document without knowing it's actual storage location.

Many enterprises have data which should be put under litigation hold. But we recently came across a requirement where an enterprise had a criteria or filtration parameter for content that was to be put under litigation hold. For instance, every document (of docx type) should be put under a hold in a region site in order to avoid critical data inconsistency.

In many enterprises, there are some documents which should not be edited because they are under litigation hold, so they can not be accessed by any normal user of the enterprise application.

The SharePoint 2010 Business Data Connectivity Service allows connecting with external data systems (WCF service, database, .Net assemblies). This is an improved version of the Business Data Catalog in SharePoint 2007. But you can get an error... "Business Data Connectivity metadata store is currently unavailable" ...when navigating to the External Content Types using SharePoint Designer 2010.

The requirement of creating multiple SharePoint sub sites automatically, at one time, comes up at most organizations. You would think this would be really complex since it requires you to inherit SPWebProvisioningProvider, override its Provision function and do C# coding. This approach does involve a good amount of time and effort, but there is a better way which will save time writing code and will work seamlessly. Well, there a better way which would save time writing code and will work seamlessly.

Many users cannot read content from SharePoint in English or any other language they are not familiar with. How do I make other languages available? Follow this solution...

At some point SharePoint developers will need to trace, log and debug their code when they get tripped up with bugs or any weird things when building custom solutions, applications, or components for SharePoint.

At some point SharePoint developers will need to trace, log and debug their code when they get tripped up with bugs or any weird things when building custom solutions, applications, or components for SharePoint.

In a previous tip on Configuring Alternate Access Mapping in SharePoint 2010, we've seen how to configure alternate access mapping for a SharePoint 2010 site using the Central Administration page. How do we do this task using Windows PowerShell instead?

You may have standardized text in your company which should not change such as a Company Mission Statement, the Curriculum Vitae of your CEO or even Corporate policies. You would like to put it on multiple places in your site without other content editors being able to change it. For better maintenance, you would like to manage the content from a single location. You may also have text in your Company which would serve as a template like a Welcome Message which site owners can insert onto their page and then modify to suit their specific needs. Is there a way to achieve this Out of the box in SharePoint?

PerformancePoint used to be an independent product with the 2007 version. In SharePoint 2010, PerformancePoint has been integrated in the form of PerformancePoint services. But in order to effectively use PerformancePoint services in SharePoint 2010, it should be properly configured with appropriate service applications and a proxy pointing to it.

Many SharePoint sites need to allow public access and/or registration. However developers face the problem of programmatically adding a new user to needed groups in order to avoid "Access Denied" errors.

As part of migrating the MOSS 2007 portal and site contents to SharePoint 2010, moving the existing User Profiles and MySites is also critical. This important task usually leaves a big headache for IT system administrators.

Silverlight applications are used to build rich Internet-based applications. SharePoint previously allowed Silverlight integration with some configurations and many deployment dependencies.

If you try to log in to the SharePoint web application using host header on the server itself, your windows credential doesn't work but you can access the same site from outside. The problem happens when you create a SharePoint web application with a host header (site.company.com) on the SharePoint Server (Server Name: company.com) which is installed on Windows Server 2008. This is a known issue with SharePoint 2007 or SharePoint 2010 on the Windows Server 2008 platform and this problem is happening even with the recent patches.

PerformancePoint used to be an independent product with the earlier version of SharePoint. In SharePoint 2010, it has been integrated in the form of PerformancePoint Services. But in order to effectively use PerformancePoint Services in SharePoint 2010, it should be properly configured.

While configuring SharePoint 2010 using the GUI, the Central Administration (CA) content database name will have a GUID in it (long 36 character alphanumeric string). This is not a real problem but it looks annoying. Moreover a custom name would make it easy to remember if there are multiple CA databases in a SQL Server.

Enterprise management always prefers to see the progress of the enterprise via reports. Management most of the time prefers to view reports in a graphical (chart) format.

In the IT architecture of many enterprises, data resides in different kinds of database management systems like Oracle, SQL Server and others. What if there is a business need to display data in charts in SharePoint from external data sources.

For site navigation, SharePoint provides a Top navigation menu and a Left navigation menu, but sometimes this is not sufficient. If you have 100 sites or pages underneath your Site Collection and you want to look at it alphabetically, anything out of the box is not going to work. You need something custom, but you don't want to write complex C# code or spend a lot of time coding and deploying it, so what can you do?

In a previous tip on using a host header as a SharePoint site path, we've seen how to configure a SharePoint site to use a different URL other than the server hostname for SharePoint Server 2007. How do we do this in SharePoint 2010?

SharePoint gives you a friendly, easy-to-use, web interface for uploading files, editing their properties and content, and so on. However, sometimes you need to perform "bulk" operations like moving a group of files to a different folder or library, or a mass rename or selective delete. SharePoint does provide the "manage content and structure" interface, but this can be slow and somewhat unreliable, and is not available in a SharePoint Foundation / WSS-only environment.

SharePoint administrators need to run regular backups using PowerShell, the STSADM tool or in Central Administration. There is no "built in" way to automate these backups. Wouldn't it be great to devise a method to automated these jobs?

You want to use PowerShell to administer your WSS 3.0 or SharePoint 2007 farm.

Generally you open a document library in Windows Explorer view to move items or documents in bulk to other document libraries. This approach doesn't maintain the current item or document's metadata properties like "Modified" (DateTime) and "Modified by". The list items will get the current Date Time as "Modified" (DateTime) and the user who does the migration as the Modified By. So what do you do to preserve list item Metadata Properties while migrating the list within the site collection?

Normally, the SharePoint 2010 Search service is configured to index content in your SharePoint Site Collection(s). But what if you want to index files on the file server and let users search from one centralized location? This can be solved by creating a "New Content Source".

In SharePoint, a List is one of the most usual ways to store data. We can have multiple lists using the same kind of data (i.e. the Finance and Sales department lists could share the same kind of employee data -- name, address, experience in years and experience level). Now in such a scenario, what if one wants to implement a single centralized workflow which would apply the same automation process to both lists?

Redirecting to another page from the SP.UI.ModalDialog Modal window without closing the window will not work and it always opens a new modeless window where the page will be displayed. The dialog framework supports the Source=url querystring variable like the rest of SharePoint. But this has to be part of the Dialog Options to redirect to another page. However, if you have a requirement to dynamically get the page which needs to be redirected from the dialog then this may create a problem...

Many applications need Claim Based Authentication instead of Classic Mode Authentication. The Form Based Authentication (FBA) is one type of Claim Based Authentication. The default login page of FBA in SharePoint 2010 is very simple which only provides a simple Login control with the user name, password and remember me option. But many developers want to implement a customized login page for a better looking experience or more options according to business requirements.

I'm just getting started developing some customizations for SharePoint 2010 and I'd like some help getting ramped up on how to do this using Visual Studio 2010. My initial task is to develop some web parts.

SharePoint Sites can be edited using SharePoint Designer for customizing the user interface and other purposes. But at times, it could potentially affect the performance of sites. In such cases, some administrators prefer to not to allow customization using SharePoint Designer.

It is easy to export SharePoint lists to an Excel spreadsheet, but how about the reverse? If we already have data in Excel format with predefined columns, headers, formulas, etc... how can we make those available in a SharePoint list?

It is easy to export SharePoint lists to an Excel spreadsheet, but how about the reverse? If we already have data in Excel format with predefined columns, headers, formulas, etc... how can we make those available in a SharePoint list?

The Enterprise has embraced SharePoint technology and generates a large amount of data on the server. As disk space is consumed, at times, content size might exceed the maximum storage limit of a site collection. At such time when any user attempts to create/upload the content, there are probable chances of loss of data.

When planning a SharePoint Workflow, sometimes you just need to let the user initiate it manually. But the standard interface is awkward. First the user must find the item dropdown, then select "Workflows", then (assuming they pick the right one). they must click on it...and then click "Start". That's too many steps and leaves too much to chance. Here's a better way...

SharePoint Foundation 2010 is a great FREE product from Microsoft which often fulfills many businesses needs. However, in my opinion, what lets us down is the Search functionality. Businesses expect and want more out of Search but aren't always prepared to deploy Microsoft SharePoint Server, which includes more a powerful Search functionality.

Microsoft has improved the quality and frequency of updates for SharePoint since MOSS 2007 was released by using cumulative updates. However, as a SharePoint Administrator, you'll have to deal with downtime while these updates install. Some updates may even require reboots, disconnecting from the farm and running PSConfig (also known as the SharePoint Products and Technologies Wizard). Because some updates make changes at the database level, having very large databases will potentially cause hours of downtime for the entire farm.

SharePoint facilitates creating and managing many kinds of enterprise level web applications. It can be quite complex to trace and analyze application usage. Let's learn how to enable and find the built in usage reporting...

Content Query Web Parts are used to fetch data from different sites in a web application. This web part can be used for various purposes like displaying the latest news or latest events. There can be situations that, despite of having different purposes, the Content Query Web Part might need a uniform data display style.

Lists are one of the most commonly used data structures in SharePoint. Consider a scenario when a summarized value of this data needs to be measured and reported. Consider a scenario where your entire employee sales data resides in a SharePoint list and is regularly updated, and you want a KPI to use the SharePoint list as a data source for reporting values.

Many SharePoint portals require extending SharePoint OOB (Out Of The Box) Web Parts. This can lead to the development of custom coded Web Parts. This can be achieved by customizing and converting SharePoint Custom List View Web Parts into XSLT Data View Web Parts.

Many SharePoint portals require extending SharePoint OOB (Out Of The Box) Web Parts. This can lead to the development of custom coded Web Parts. This can be achieved by customizing and converting SharePoint Custom List View Web Parts into XSLT Data View Web Parts.

Business processing forms are created using InfoPath 2007. In several scenarios, these forms are needed to perform different actions depending upon the user accessing the form. Defining SharePoint groups for each business processing form can be quite challenging or perhaps not even feasible.

How do I create a basic KPI from scratch in MOSS 2007? Read on...

Certain departments of an organization (like the sales department) have frequently changing targets or goals. For instance, in a sales department a sales representative can have different sales target/goals for each week. Effectively the performance measurement can vary each week. Consider a scenario where the performance measurement threshold values needs to be changed frequently by the business management without depending on IT staff to configure the KPI. In such cases, the KPI threshold values needs to be kept configurable.

There is a need to publish a presentation (PowerPoint) across the organization and prevent employees from downloading versions of that presentation as employees were keeping older versions of the presentation locally. The presentation is timed and contains animations and videos.

To apply customizations to all team sites in your SharePoint instance and to automate them such that every new team site comes with your customization by default, you can use Feature Stapling. Read more about it in Part 1 of this article: SharePoint Feature Stapling - Part 1. The SharePoint Feature Stapling concept is incomplete without understanding its lifecycle. In this sequel to 'SharePoint Feature Stapling - Part 1', we will learn about the lifecycle of Feature Stapling and the common issues surrounding it. We will also discuss the advanced application of Feature Stapling for globally pushing your customizations to all SharePoint sites, irrespective of its site definition and for intentionally installing your custom site definiti

Have you ever wanted to provide the ability to display and edit SQL data right from SharePoint? SharePoint 2010 has improved its Business Connectivity Service just for this purpose.

SharePoint security trimmed navigation like Global and Current Navigation and the Quicklaunch (where objects and links only appear to a user when they have permission access) are great features. But at times these are limiting (i.e. cannot do multilevel nesting out of the box). Sometimes I don't care about security trimming and I just want to have a plain old multilevel navigation tree without having to download some 3rd party javascript (that is usually nasty to maintain).

Many public SharePoint internet portals require having access for anonymous users. This article explores the configurations for anonymous access in SharePoint 2010.

Wiki libraries are a great way for people to share "free form" information with their team and wider audiences. They includes features such as letting you easily create new pages simply by creating a "forward" link to a page name that doesn't exist yet, as well as letting you review changes made over a page's history, and checking for "incoming links" to a page. SharePoint's wikis are basic but functional. Some of the features SharePoint leaves out, such as text formatting markup, is not required because SharePoint's native functionality is better. Plus you have other SharePoint functionality not typically found in wikis such as web parts, lists and libraries, metadata and so on. The problem is that they can be a bit too "free form": if

When SharePoint goes wrong or you need to do some "advanced" configuration, you are often referred to a tool called STSADM. This article gives you an overview of that tool.

I would like to be able to centralize a message and be able to roll it out to multiple SharePoint sites simultaneously. When the message changes, I only want to edit one section and have the changes roll out everywhere automatically.

SharePoint 2007 and 2010 allows users to store media files such as pictures and videos and display them on a SharePoint page. These media files and other page artifacts (like css and javascript) can be very slow to load. This is because each time the files are accessed they are pulled from the SharePoint Content Database by default. For external facing sites in particular, images and javascript can consume most of the load time for a page.

Lately, there has been growing demand for information about Windows Powershell. The reason is because it is so powerful and easy to use. The built-in commands can handle administrative tasks that are just not possible through Central Administration. Although, Powershell can be used for different technologies we will concentrate on the usage of Windows Powershell for SharePoint starting with a brief introduction.

In Infopath 2007, there are times we need to make several fields non-editable. Advancing on the same idea, another common business requirement might be to make an entire form non-editable. Infopath allows form developers to create an individual control as non-editable, but if the control collection is in the hundreds or more it would not be feasible to use this approach. In this tip we show how to make the entire form non-editable all at once.

This article deals with Feature Stapling concept in SharePoint. In this article, we will cover What is Feature Stapling? When to use Feature Stapling? How to code Feature Stapling?

The idea behind the SharePoint Recycle Bin is the same as that of Windows, but we have more granular control in SharePoint. So how does the Recycle Bin work in SharePoint? How do you configure it? What are the different stages of the Recycle Bin in SharePoint? In this tip, we cover all of these questions.

When starting to work with SharePoint it can be difficult to understand how and why to setup "Managed Paths", for multiple Site Collections. In this tip, we cover this topic.

Broken links annoy users by wasting their time. Links can break because of errors when they were entered, or because the page or file they pointed to gets removed. That wonderful tool, SharePoint Designer, has just what you need.

Sometimes we need to programmatically set the value of a Lookup column field or People Picker / Person and Group column field of a SharePoint List / Library. But this is a problem because these columns are initially set to be in a read-only mode by default.

There may be times when users have created forms in Excel or Word, but we need them in SharePoint in a web-based version. How can I handle that easily using InfoPath? (read more...)

SharePoint Administrators often need to create several installations of SharePoint which may be used for development, testing, staging and production environments. Inconsistencies in these installations will often cause inexplicable problems and much time wasted trying to track down a specific configuration item.

You implement Kerberos authentication, but SharePoint becomes slower, particularly for remote users. In this tip we look at why and how this can be solved.

The SharePoint Summary Link Web Part has some interesting features, but what are the trade-offs versus using a standard "Links List"?

Many SharePoint Intranet portals require users to be able to search for people, but after adding the OOTB (Out of the box) people search web part, no results are displayed.

In InfoPath Forms, one of the repeating controls is the repeating table. The repeating table can be used to facilitate entering multiple records in a structured tabular format. One of the common problems with this control is that InfoPath doesn't provide any kind of out of box approach to set minimum or maximum limit of repeating table. Let's explore a solution...

Many SharePoint portals require that content from PDF documents be available in SharePoint's search results. By default, Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 2.0/3.0, Microsoft SharePoint Foundation, SharePoint Portal Server 2003, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 and even Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 cannot index PDF documents.

Do users complain about SharePoint performance? Prior to SharePoint 2010, tracking down performance bottlenecks might involve attaching a debugger to code and enabling a trace from the SQL Server Profiler. Now, with SharePoint 2010, you can use a cool new feature called Developer Dashboard.

You have read about the new Visio Services in SharePoint 2010, where users can view Visio documents in a web browser. Now you want to start using it!

As a SharePoint Administrator, there might be a time when you would need to restore only some but not all content within a content database. How would you do that in SharePoint 2010? Read on to find out...

Use of images is a great way of making a site more attractive for users. But uploading them into picture libraries through the browser is tedious, and SharePoint doesn't give you any way to crop and compress them.

As a SharePoint Administrator, you would often need to deploy content from one site to another. So what are different options available to export the contents of a site, library, or list from SharePoint and to import it back whenever required?

I have been asked all too often by clients, "When should we use a Site Collection and when should we use a Sub Site?". What's the best option and how do I choose?

When you store critical documents in the SharePoint libraries, sometimes it becomes necessary to track all the changes and to maintain version history for them.

Even with complete read and write access to a SharePoint list or library with a 'People or Group' field type, the user gets the message "The control is not available because you do not have the correct permissions. This puzzled me for a few minutes, but soon I had the solution...

What if I have a web application with multiple site collections in it and one of the them is only getting changed frequently hence I want to backup only a specific site collection instead of backing up the complete farm or web application on regular basis? What if I want to create a copy of the site collection to another SharePoint server? What new options are available in SharePoint 2010 for site collection backup and restore?

Wouldn't it be great to be able to granularly control many of the column properties in a list all from a single interface?

When filling out forms users tend to use nicknames, initials, or non-given names to represent their birth names. If the form is an official document then this is not acceptable. To fix this issue, the creator of the form can automatically fill in the name portion of the form with the name of the person who is filling out the form. This can be accomplished using web services.

This article deals with the Feature Dependency concept in SharePoint. This article outlines when to use Feature Dependency, how to code Feature Dependency, and what the User Experience is activating this kind of feature. In simple terms, Feature Dependency means a feature is dependent on another feature to work. In other words, unless the other feature is activated, the dependent feature won't work. This article outlines when to use Feature Dependency, how to code Feature Dependency, and what the User Experience is activating this kind of feature.

Microsoft has changed things around a little for Excel Services in SharePoint 2010. If you don't setup an Unattended Service Account then all of your data connections in Excel will need the credentials within the connection or will need to revert to the current user.

So what are the 'out of the box' Backup and Restore options available in SharePoint 2010? How do we backup the SharePoint farm, web applications and different components? How have Backup and Restore processes have improved from previous versions of SharePoint to SharePoint 2010?

The scope of this tip is to explain the architecture, configuration & deployment of SSRS in SharePoint integration Mode.

Targeted email notification is a basic need in today's business process automation. Using SharePoint workflow, this can be achieved using SharePoint Designer 2007 (MOSS 2007 or WSS3) whenever a document is uploaded. The content of the email can be improved by including a link in the body of the email to the document item in process.

SharePoint is a great adhoc tool for storing data. Sometimes it is necessary to make automated calculations based on user inputs. Let's take a look at how to calculate the difference between two dates using SharePoint calculated columns.

SharePoint is a collaborative platform. A central feature is the ability to share documents with other users. But what if multiple users try to edit the same document at the same time? This can lead to versioning conflicts and confusion about changes. How can this be prevented?

What happened to the SharePoint 2010 "Announcements" web part? In WSS3 and MOSS 2007 (and WSS2) the default Announcements web part showed the Title and a few lines of the Body of the announcement. Now it just shows the Title. Well here's the answer...

In SharePoint, version control helps to track the changes made to content by saving a copy of each iteration. This provides a way of rolling back to a previous saved version if needed. Read more to learn how to configure this ...

Here is an unforeseen consequence of using MOSS 2007 Information Management Policy (IMP) Expiration. The IMP sets a flag on the document to make it exempt from the policy thereafter, which meant the workflow would never run again even if the Expiration Date was reset, because the document is exempt!

There may be times when you need to edit SharePoint form fields that are published to a SharePoint document library with InfoPath. By default, you will not be able to. Read more to learn how to enable editing for these fields.

What happened to "Open with Windows Explorer" in SharePoint 2010? Read more to find the answer...

Displaying relative information in the form of a master - detail view is one of the most common UI requirements. In this tip we will look at how to deal with this requirement in SharePoint using "Web Part Connections".

The site template for "Site Directory" was an interesting navigation feature in MOSS 2007. When I went to look for it in SharePoint 2010, I could not find it. After doing a few searches, I found the answer...

Corporations that have offices in diverse geographical areas might need to cater information to each country in its specific language. Check out this solution for installing and configuring multilingual SharePoint sites.

In order to create different InfoPath forms, SharePoint generally needs different form libraries. This is true even if the form shares many common fields. The problem is that creating multiple libraries and developing multiple forms can be costly.

In order to create different InfoPath forms, SharePoint generally needs different form libraries. This is true even if the form shares many common fields. The problem is that creating multiple libraries and developing multiple forms can be costly.

Many SharePoint portals require you to remove or hide the default search scope drop down list. In this tip we cover the steps on how this can be done.

When you create lists by default there is a TITLE column created. When a user fills out the list details you don't want this field to be displayed. How can I hide this field? Check out this solution...

Creating an optimized SharePoint development environment was not an easy task with Sharepoint 2007, but it's even harder with the new SharePoint 2010.

The scope of this tip is to explain the usage of RunWithElevatedPrivileges() [RWEP] - a method for security elevation and in SharePoint.

This article deals with SharePoint Custom Timer jobs. It outlines when to create Custom Timer Jobs, how to create a Custom Timer Job, how to debug it in Visual Studio and how to deploy it.

It's easy to find blogs and msdn documentation on creating Custom Timer jobs, but still developers face issues while deploying and running them on SharePoint farms due to lack of timer job development guidelines.

SharePoint is widely used for storing and maintaining content. Different groups of users access SharePoint, but what if an organization wants to provide granular customized access rights like read, write or delete for different users? In this tip, we cover how this can be accomplished.

After migrating your SharePoint 2007 content database to your new x64 SharePoint 2010 farm you receive errors when trying to use or activate the SharePoint Publishing feature.

In this tip we cover how to organize content using different types of libraries and also how a library is used in SharePoint.

Sometimes there are requirements in a Variated Multi-Lingual SharePoint portal which require having a unified single source document library/list with its folder structure to be displayed across all webs (Sub Sites : ex: English, Arabic, French, etc...) but achieving this we will face two serious problems. We'll discuss them in detail through this two part article series.

Sometimes there are requirements in a Variated Multi-Lingual SharePoint portal which require having a unified single source document library/list with its folder structure to be displayed across all webs (Sub Sites : ex: English, Arabic, French, etc...) but achieving this we will face two serious problems. We'll discuss them in detail through this two part article series.

In a recent tip, I discussed installing the Windows SharePoint Service and SharePoint Foundation 2010. Once you have completed the installation, you need to understand how to create a web application, site collections and sites. In this tip we will look at each of these components.

By default, SharePoint document libraries display graphical icons representing various Microsoft Office Applications (i.e. Excel, Word, etc.). All non-Microsoft documents are represented with a plain white square. How do I display a special icon for other document types?

In SharePoint List, sometimes you need to display information in groups and perform mathematical operations like sum, averages and others. For instance, what if you want to see total monthly salary paid to employees for individual department?

SharePoint provides "Lists" to store information which is basically used in row/column formats in a tabular structure. SharePoint facilitates this with a feature known as "List Views" which allows you to target, process and display different sets of information without changing the original data stored in the list. Sometimes, you need to process operations like sorting and filtering before displaying the information to the users. For instance, you want to display employee information of specific department sorted by their ages.

SharePoint provides "Lists" to store information. These are basically used in tabular structure (rows and columns). In certain circumstances, you need to display different data to different sets of users. For instance in a business firm, sometimes you need to display different sets of employee information to immediate supervisors, managers and others. In addition, you also need perform basic operations like sorting, filtering and grouping.

This article outlines how to configure SharePoint Forms Based Authentication (FBA) to use user accounts stored in an SQL database, typically used on a SharePoint Extranet.

This article outlines how to configure SharePoint Forms Based Authentication (FBA) to use Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), typically used on a SharePoint Extranet.

Every enterprise has a set of commonly used links, which is required to be standardized. Here's how to add one to your SharePoint site.

People who are using SharePoint know that Central Administration (CA) must be running on one of the servers in the farm. So, the question is can we have CA running on more than one server in the farm? Maybe the main server that has CA installed is down, but we still need to access CA. In this tip I cover how this can be done.

Many Multi-Lingual SharePoint portals may require having the same List structure in its webs (Sub-Sites) [i.e. having a list in a primary language site (ex: English) which has a set of predefined columns and the need to have this list structure in a secondary language variated site (ex: Arabic) where each template has its own language variated template]. Also, there may be the need to extend a certain List quota (i.e. list items size) instead of using the default quota. Rob Fisch wrote a tip about "Managing SharePoint File Size Limits" which applies to any file (item) size under an entire web application using SharePoint Central Administration. I will explain how to extend a List items size without effecting other files in the site using

Populate multiple InfoPath listing controls like a Drop-Down List, and a List Box with only one datasource.

Wouldn't you like to be able to redirect users to the page of your choice after submitting a new item to a SharePoint list? In this tip we cover the steps.

At certain times, we want to hide the details in user input forms, but also at the same time we want to maintain the data in the backend. In SharePoint we could use the list to store data. The default forms provided in the list like NewForm, Editform and others contain all metadata (fields). Now the problem is if you want to remove fields from the forms, either you need to remove columns from the list or you need to create new forms to replace the default forms.

Many SharePoint portals implement and apply the MySite feature (the MySite feature is only available in MOSS 2007 and is not provided by WSS 3.0).  But how about branding the same look and feel of the parent site to MySite? Unfortunately Microsoft designed MySite to have a default format and does not allow custom branding to be effective for all private MySite users. In this tip we'll go through how to overcome this issue.

On very rare occasions, it is possible to receive an error when trying to delete a particular portal site with the SharePoint Central Administration application. To circumvent this error, one can delete the portal site using the SQL Server management tools.

Looking for documentation and software related to SharePoint 2010? Check out this compiled list of SharePoint 2010 related documents and software.

This blog provides a nice summary description of some of SharePoint 2010's " Business Connectivity Services", allowing users to connect to and update external resources (i.e. SQL databases), directly from SharePoint.

You are using a SharePoint blog and you want to speed up and improve the blogging experience. In a nutshell Microsoft Live Writer is a client application which allows you to create a blog entry with rich content. It is then able to post your entry directly to Windows Live, WordPress or even SharePoint!

The scope of this article is to explain, how to create SharePoint web parts with HTML text editing input controls. Here we will go through the creation of an email sending web part with the Message field enabled for HTML formatting.

Windows SharePoint Service is an add-on service of the Windows Server OS which provides collaborative development, content management, search features, etc., without any additional licensing. So how do we install this service, configure it and get started to leverage these powerful features?

Window SharePoint Service (WSS) 3.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 both provide a platform for communication, collaborative development, content management, search capability etc. But how do they differ from each other, what benefits do each of them provide over other, in which scenario to use WSS and in which to use MOSS?

Getting ready for SharePoint Foundation 2010, let's review the installation prerequisites.

We have officially launched a new page on the site that has over 90 SharePoint User Groups around the world.

Wouldn't you like to hide some fields from a user when filling out a new item form for a list?

What options are available to backup my data in a SharePoint 2010?

By default, SharePoint Lists provide default new, edit and display forms. Limitations include the requirement to show and edit all fields and the inability to customize formatting of the form.

This tip demonstrates how to dynamically display a SharePoint 2010 Task List in a Visio 2010 diagram using Visio Services.

This article demonstration how to collect data from a user during a workflow and use it change the outcome of the workflow.

Dynamically control workflow recipients from a separate SharePoint list based on a field in the workflow list, to receive an email.

After publishing our 1st SharePoint User Group Roundup, many have responded with additional groups that are available.

The "Open with Windows Explorer" option on a SharePoint document library does not open Windows Explorer.

SharePoint logs information to the Windows Event log and a file on the local drive which is normally located in the hive (C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\Logs). The log files on disk (trace logs) can be very hard to read using notepad or other basic programs.

You cannot browse to the SharePoint server from the server SharePoint is installed on. You may get challenged for authentication or you receive a 401.1 page error.

Microsoft SQL Server Business Intelligence (BI) Professionals are generally well versed with either of these technologies: SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS), SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) and SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS). But with Sharepoint Server continuously growing as a collaboration platform with it's increasing set of Business Intelligence features, MS BI Technology Stack considerably relies on Sharepoint for hosting and/or consuming SQL Server based BI deliverables. I find many SQL Server BI Professionals confused with the question of what are the Sharepoint based BI features one needs to have in vision to architect an end-to-end BI solution. In this article, we would look at an overview of Sharepoint BI feature

When developing for SharePoint you may find your code does not execute due to the users permission levels.

When trying to upload numerous documents into a SharePoint library, a user does not see the "Upload Multiple Documents" link/selection that would allow them to upload more than one document at a time in a particular directory.

On an Internet facing SharePoint site you want to enable anonymous access so your visitors do not need to authenticate against your membership provider.

I have not been able to find the details about SharePoint 2010 editions. I need to know what features are included in each edition.

Consider a scenario where an InfoPath form is built which includes some approval process too. In the approval process, some information in the form should only be shared to a select group of users.

I have read that installing SharePoint 2010 Server requires a number of prerequisites. Before I spend a great deal of time looking for them all, is there a place where I can download them all at once? In this tip I show you a simple solution.

Take a look at some of the new features of the SharePoint 2010 Ribbon Bar.

I am planning a new SharePoint 2010 installation and need to know the hardware and software requirements.

(SearchWinIT.com) Bridget Botelho writes about new SharePoint features in 2010 for administrators.

I am looking to network with other SharePoint professionals in my geographic location. In this tip I list the first set of SharePoint user groups.

Ryan McMinn does an online video demonstrating how to publish a Microsoft Access (2007) database to the web using SharePoint 2010 Access Services.

Microsoft has implemented some new limitations with SharePoint Designer 2010. This information is important for all SharePoint admins to know about.

This article, by Mike Ferrara (CMSWiRE), gives us a first look at SharePoint 2010's improved "Social Networking" features.

SharePoint Designer 2010 beta has been out for several months. It is now out of beta and available as a free download.

I would like to selectively open specific links in a new browser window from an out-of-the-box SharePoint "Links List". In this tip I show you how this can be done.

Anticipating the arrival of SharePoint Foundation 2010, wouldn't it be great if we can setup a test environment so we can have a feel of what it is like working with the new version of SharePoint?

SharePoint 2010 has many new features and in this tip I go over some of the new features in SharePoint 2010 that I think may be of interest.

When managing permissions with groups, the link in the automated access request email is wrong.

By default, when publishing browser enabled InfoPath forms, the user must manually choose a filename when saving the form. Wouldn't it be better if the system generated a unique filename programmatically, based on a desired rule set?

I would like to utilize SharePoint to host web forms for routine business activities without specialized software for all users. Is there a way to do that with InfoPath?

When a SharePoint list or library is added into a web part zone, whatever view I choose does not change when I update the view from the list or library settings.

With WSS2, I used to be able to read and write to SharePoint lists from MS Excel 2003. With WSS3 and MOSS 2007, that functionality seems to have been disabled. Does that functionality still exist?

Gathering data from different sources or parts of a web application in SharePoint can be tricky. Consider a scenario where one needs to gather data from the entire web application as well as from data sources outside the web application. In MOSS 2007, one of the ways to achieve this is by using a new feature named Data Views in Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2007. In this article we will discuss how one could connect to another application and use it as a data source.

I find it easier to analyze data using Excel. Is there a way to export my SharePoint List or Library metadata?

Microsoft Announces SharePoint 2010 Launch

Sharepoint is a great collaborative tool, but its internal reporting capability is limited. Wouldn't it be so powerful if you could report against one or more Sharepoint lists from Microsoft's Reporting Services?

I have worked hard creating a custom SharePoint list. Now I want to reuse the structure for another team in another site.

A seemingly mysterious problem started occurring a couple of months after implementing a workflow solution. The workflow statuses (Completed, Approved, Rejected, etc) started disappearing. After doing a little research, it seems that, by default, the workflow status information is purged after 60 days.

I frequently have large numbers of files in a SharePoint Document Library, that are in a "Checked Out" status for a variety of reasons. Is there a way to check them in all at once?

I would like to copy multiple files to one or more SharePoint libraries. Is there any way to do it outside of using the "Upload" button, which limits you to files within a single folder?

I would like a SharePoint web part to display a list of links that can start up a new web browser window.

I'd like to design a portal splash page in SharePoint, but I need a way to apply permissions to different section summaries. I would like different groups of users to see different content on the main portal page. MOSS 2007 provides an option called "Audiences", but the administration demands can be overkill for many situations. Also, with WSS3, there is no "Audience" option.

By default, whenever creating a new site with unique permission in MOSS 2007 or WSS3, the default group name "Members" seems confusing to me. The term member seems too ambiguous.

I created a document library but would like one or more business users to be able to maintain permissions, without giving them "full control" of the library or site.

With Windows Server 2008 R2 out in the market for quite a while, you may be asked to install Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007) on this OS platform. However, the available media for MOSS 2007 only contains Service Pack 1 and that it is not supported on a Windows Server 2008 R2 platform. How do you go about installing Office SharePoint Server 2007 on Windows Server 2008 R2?

Every SharePoint site template (both MOSS 2007 and WSS3) has its own default layout of Web Part Zones. I would like to customize the layout of these zones for flexibility of design in a particular site.

I know how to create basic SharePoint lists to track information, but I would like create a dynamic workflow application for submitting and tracking helpdesk requests.

I know how to create basic SharePoint lists to track information, but I would like create a dynamic workflow application for submitting and tracking helpdesk requests.

I know how to create basic SharePoint lists to track information, but I would like create a dynamic workflow application for submitting and tracking helpdesk requests.

This tip shows how you can create a special library to host Web Part Pages and how you can use these to show filtered content for different functions. Using this method, you can consolidate your content onto centralized lists, while offering filtered views of the content for different functions, teams or projects, etc.

When creating Web Part Pages, there is no "Quick Launch" area for site navigation. Patrick Tisseghem offers the solution to put the Quick Launch back by removing the following line from the Web Part Page

I've heard that Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2007 is a great administrator and designer tool for SharePoint. What are some of the compelling features, how do I get it and how much does it cost?

By default, MOSS 2007 configures every 1st level sub-site to have a tab (with link) on the horizontal navigation bar at the root level of the site collection. I would like to be able to nest some or all of these links under one tab heading, saving space for other tabs.

By default, SharePoint (WSS3 and MOSS 2007) limits file sizes to 50mb. However I would like to change that number. Is there a way to change this configuration?

Often times users leave SharePoint documents in a Checked Out status. This can happen for a variety of unintended reasons. As an administrator, I would like to be able remedy these situations when they happen. Is there a way to do it without having to log in as the user?

As SharePoint system administrator, I create all sites for users. This is true even when I turn over "Full Control" to a power user that will design and maintain the site, including setting up permissions. However, I still get the automated email messages from users that "request access" using the built-in access request form. Is there a way I can direct these email messages to go the power user in charge of the site?

How to use the check out feature in SharePoint document libraries.

SharePoint (WSS3 and MOSS 2007) blocks certain files types (by file extension) from being uploaded while allowing others. Is there a way I can manage what file types are allowed or blocked?

How to receive email notifications when documents or items are added, changed or deleted.

Replace the SharePoint server hostname with a user friendly Host Header name.

When creating business solutions with SharePoint lists, one of the field types is the 'choice' column. This is handy to offer users a static list of values. This can be important to help users not have to lookup categorical or other frequently used information. It can also help when building custom views to have consistently chosen (and correctly spelled) data. However, I continually get requests to modify the list of choices. Can I give a few select users the power to maintain their own choices without giving them control over the rest of the list structure?

After having implemented a new installation of MOSS 2007, I cannot figure out how to get Excel Services working. I have added the Excel Web Access web part, and linked to a MS Excel 2007 worksheet, but all I get is an error message that says "You do not have permissions to open this file on Excel Services". I also don't know how to display a specific part of the spreadsheet.

Users in my organization are confused about whether to continue using file servers or to begin using SharePoint document libraries. Some users continue using file servers, while others enjoy the visual aspect of using a web browser to accessing files. I am new at administering SharePoint technologies and I am not sure what the right answer is.

We are starting to use SharePoint calendars to manage projects, however we are running into conflicts with both unrelated project calendars and individual user calendar items in Outlook. Is there a way users can coordinate information between all these silos of information?

There are many users collaborating on document creation with MOSS 2007 or WSS3. It is critical that some level of control or 'gatekeeping' exists. Is there are way to manage this so that everyone knows when a document has been finalized and approved?

I am just getting started with SharePoint and noticed many security options and features. I can see that you can attached named users to sites, lists and libraries. I can even see there is some type of grouping system. But I don't know what to make of it all.

Using the Sharepoint Content Editor Web Parts for free form style display of content.

SharePoint (MOSS 2007) search databases can grow very large. This can affect performance and scalability. What are the best practices for distributing load over multiple disks?

I'm an experienced SQL Server DBA, but new to administering SharePoint 2007 databases. Our current SharePoint databases are very large and getting bigger every day. Based on my initial research the content database is the one I am going to focus on initially. In this tip we cover steps to take to best manage your SharePoint databases.

Being new to SharePoint, the combinations of possibilities seem endless. There are site collections, sites, web parts, libraries, lists, content editor web pages, calendars, tasks, discussion boards, wikis...the list goes on and on. How does one put it all together in a way that makes sense?