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SharePointHosting.com's - SharePoint Demystified > Categories
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11/17/2008We recently updated our screencast tutorial web part (see at the left). This is a standard SharePoint list which has been saved as a convenient .stp file which you can add to your list template gallery on your SharePoint site and then add to any page with a web part zone on your SharePoint site.
The download is located here, http://blog.sharepointhosting.com/Downloads/tutorials5.stp.
Once installed, you can search your SharePoint site for keywords included in the tutorial description. For example, if you needed to know how to change your password you could just tell your users to search for that term. By clicking on the link they can easily watch the tutorial. This is very convenient.
There are also two different views – a standard list view and broken down by category as seen to the right.
8/25/2008
A common end user question surrounds the use of Microsoft or third party templates for SharePoint. For non server side templates (ones that you can upload yourself to the Site template gallery on your SharePoint) you can simply go to the Site Setting area of the site and click on Site Templates > Upload. Pretty easy. But here's the catch: what if you want to use this template to create your top level site? Since the Site Actions menu is not exposed during template selection it is not immediately obvious how you would do this. Here's the trick. You need to add \_layouts\settings.aspx to the URL of your site and then simply navigate to the Site templates gallery of the site and upload your template. After this, just return to the URL of the top level site and refresh the page by clicking F5 on your keyboard. Now you will see your template in the list of options available to you. Pretty neat.
Here's a tutorial on how to perform this task, "Adding a .stp SharePoint site template prior to the selection of the top level site template through the SharePoint web UI" Click the screen grab below to watch. (PS you need SilverLight).
8/21/2008
One of the common causes of SharePoint page malfunctions or poor performance is the closed or corrupted web part. This issue comes across my desk two or three times a week. A user forgets that the Close option from the web part menu is not the same as the delete option. After awhile of closing many, many web parts the page load time goes through the roof. Known issue. You need to delete web parts when you don't want to display them on a page any longer. The other common issue is that a developer or SharePoint Designer will be working on a site and while they're figuring out the data view web part which you can add through SharePoint Designer they close it so users don't encounter something on the page which isn't done yet. Then they forget it was there and add three more, or perhaps the data that those web parts are bound to somehow changes and now they become corrupted and the page won't load. Again, known and common issue.
To deal with this you are going to want to do two possible things (1) see if you can still open and the page and if you can just go and delete the closed web parts (2) if you can't open the page in your web browser you are going to want to go open the site up with SharePoint Designer. The closed web parts are grayed out as shown in the video below.
Check it the screencast by clicking the screen grab below or by clicking here, "Working with closed web parts in IE 7.0 and SharePoint Designer"
One of the powerful SharePoint features that you can leverage is user profiles. You can find yours by clicking the drop down next to your username in the top right hand corner of the screen in a default SharePoint installation. Typical information you might want to document here is your contact details, title, department and even add attachments such as your resume. This will other SharePoint users to find you more easily and perhaps learn something about you that they did not already know.
There's a catch to updating this profile information – by default only a Contributor or higher may change the information in their profile. This means if you have read-only SharePoint users they will only be able to modify their Alerts and potentially their Password from the My Settings area on the site.
To change this restrictive policy you need to go to Site Settings > Advanced Permissions > and click on the Settings drop of which will allow you to select Permission Levels. Once you arrive at the new screen you will see a list of the available Permission Levels - such as Full Control, Contributor, Read. Click the Read and this will link to a page with a long list of check boxes which you may select to change an individual permission associated with the select Permission level. Down near the bottom of this list you will find the check box next to Edit Personal User Information and then click Submit below. This will now allow your Read only users to update their profile information.
To watch the tutorial below you will need to have the Microsoft SilverLight plug-in activated in your browser. Click the image for this link to start playback, "Allow a read only SharePoint user to update their user information"
1/27/2008Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007 brings a whole new set of great form and data management capabilities to end users with form requirements. If you have not checked out what InfoPath and SharePoint can do together, download the evaluation of InfoPath here and sign up for a SharePoint evaluation site here.
One of the ways you can use InfoPath with WSS 3.0 is by creating a Form Library on your SharePoint site, and then changing the default form that is spawned when you use the New button in your SharePoint library. When you enable management of Content Types with your SharePoint Library (Library Settings > Advanced > Allow management of content types) you can easily change the document or form template that opens after a user clicks the New button in the main view of the library.
The screen grab above shows a screen where you can modify this document template associated with the New button in the library. As you can see, you can choose a template already uploaded somewhere on your SharePoint site or upload an entirely new template.
This SharePoint screencast tutorial, "Publish InfoPath form template to a WSS 3.0 Library as a content type" will show you how to publish an InfoPath form template while in Design mode to your WSS 3.0 site. The same basic steps will work for MOSS 2007 as well. Click the screen grab below to begin watching the tutorial.
Playback Tip: You will need Microsoft SilverLight to watch this tutorial.
11/16/2007Did you know that you can add appointments directly to your SharePoint calendars with an e-mail meeting invitation sent from Outlook 2007? This allows you to carbon copy (cc) the SharePoint calendar right from the meeting invitation or during appointment creation in Outlook. Many customers are leveraging this feature to help keep team members apprised of important meetings or other events. For example, a sales organization who has built a SharePoint (WSS 3.0) based CRM is keeping their managers apprised of important opportunities via this feature and workflow. Another organization is using this feature to manage certain company wide resources such as conference rooms, projectors, etc.
To get started you first need to e-mail enable your SharePoint calendar. Click this link to watch this SharePoint screencast tutorial to learn how to E-mail Enable your SharePoint Calendars, or just click the image below. Playback note: You will need the Microsoft SilverLight browser plug in to watch this tutorial content.
9/12/2007Have you or your other SharePoint users accidently closed web parts in the Shared View of a WSS or MOSS site? This can be a common issue faced by SharePoint administrators – you'll often get the "where my web part" e-mail or panicked phone call when this happens. This is not too bad of a SharePoint issue unless the user choose the delete web part option. You'll have to restore from a backup if that is the case! Here's a screencast tutorial to help you on your way.
Watch, "Working with closed SharePoint Web Parts" or click the screen shot below. Playback tip: you will need Microsoft's SilverLight installed to view the tutorial. Remember that you can just click anywhere in the video to pause it. Double click to go to full screen resolution – press escape to return to the small view.
8/21/2007If you enjoyed the first tutorial webpart for your WSS 3.0 or MOSS 2007 site then you will enjoy this update with a few more tutorials for your SharePoint site. Check out this SharePoint Tutorial web part download. The instructions remain the same (1) unpackage the .zip to the directory of your choice (2) upload the .stp file up to the your site list gallery (3) create a new list based on the the custom .stp you just uploaded. (4) add a webpart for the list you just created.
Please deploy these SharePoint tutorials to your new users on your own SharePoint site. Cheers. (PS you will need both SilverLight and FLASH for these tutorials…) 8/10/2007Have you seen the Sample Master Pages on Microsoft's website? If you have not checked them out yet, make sure you spend some time working with them. They are a very good solution for companies or individuals who want to customize the look and feel of their SharePoint site beyond the theme's available from Site Actions > Site Settings > Site theme. The Sample Master Pages Download gives you four new master pages, each of which come with a number of different color schemes to match to your own tastes or existing branding.
You will need SharePoint Designer 2007 to customize your site with these custom master pages – and these are only master pages for site content, not for application.master pages which deal with common site functions like adding users, and the Action or New item menu's.
After downloading the Sample Master Pages Download, executing the executable and unpacking the compressed folder to the directory of your choice you need to open up your site with SharePoint Designer 2007. Remember to have your top level site folder highlighted before clicking File > Import > File as shown in the screencast – this is very important, otherwise you may import the files into the wrong directory! Some of the image files are the same so don't worry if you add all the master pages and have to overwrite some images, it won't hurt anything.
Take a look at this screencast tutorial on "Working with the Sample SharePoint Master Pages with SharePoint Designer" Playback Tip: You will need the RC (release code) SilverLight browser plug in to view this content.
8/9/2007The first rule of cooking is wash your hands – and the first rule of customization is make a backup. Do not attempt any customization unless you have made a backup of your data first, because chances are that you might need that information later on. If you don't already have SharePoint Designer 2007, go download the evaluation from Microsoft.com. Remember that SharePointHosting.com offers a $100 discount on SharePoint Designer 2007 to all customers while supplies last.
Check out this SharePoint screencast tutorial if you need help with this skill.
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