|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
SharePointHosting.com's - SharePoint Demystified > Categories
|
7/23/2009
When attempting to create a list from a spreadsheet you may run into the error:
"The specified file is not a valid spreadsheet or contains no data to import"
Here is the solution:
3/17/2009
Sometimes a user may get tired of having to constantly enter their username/password when accessing a SharePoint site. By adding the SharePoint site to your "Local Intranet" zone, one can have Internet Explorer remember login credentials. Here are the steps:
- Go to Control Panel
- Go to Internet Options
- Click the "Security" tab
- Click "Local Intranet"
- Click "Sites"
- Click "Advanced"
- Add your SharePoint site into the "Local Intranet" zone.
- Click OK to confirm on all Internet Options screens.
- Open up Internet Explorer and go to your SharePoint site. When prompted for username/password make sure you enter your credentials and check "Remember My Password".
- Your username/password should now be passed to the SharePoint site automatically.
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"
11/19/2007
Problem: Shared SharePoint hosting is in general not compatible with third party software. There are a variety of reasons but the two biggest concerns our customers have had over the years relate to (1) ability to migrate content and custom functionality between SharePoint versions (2) developer availability to keep current with the Microsoft patch cycle. With WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 the SharePoint SDK and your ability to use SharePoint as a Platform for launching other services and software, in fact Microsoft support of this model is implicit.
Our solution: Separate shared hosting environments for 3rd party application hosting. While we offer economical shared hosting for OTB (out of the box) functionality of WSS 3.0, we can now offer shared hosting for customers who have requirements for third party SharePoint add-in software. By separating the hosting environments we can tune security and availability to meet the requirements for non-standard SharePoint add-ins.
Affordability: Since we have to maintain a separate solution stack (think hardware, firewall, SQL databases, software licensing, support) keeping this service affordable for our customers is very important to us. In many circumstances we are able to keep the service affordable by keeping the additional per month hosting cost under $100 USD. It is important to keep in mind that 3rd party software has additional licensing and support costs beyond what we license through Microsoft's SPLA program.
Demo of a solution we are currently providing: We are happy to support many companies who are choosing to go paperless with SharePoint (the amount of money you can save with a SharePoint implementation on printing and postage is huge). One of the third party solutions we are currently providing is a product that enables direct communication between your hosted SharePoint sites and document scanners in your offices. This allows you to scan documents directly into SharePoint document libraries and build the contents of those documents on the fly to a final product as a TIF, PDF or MDI file format. The product is called Scanner Enabler 2007 Windows SharePoint Services Edition by Dark Blue Duck.
Click here to watch the demo, or click the image below.
How to get in touch with us about this software or any other: You can contact us through our website (http://www.sharepointhosting.com/contact_us.asp) - make sure to mention that you are looking for hosting for third party SharePoint add-ins.
10/21/2007SharePoint offers a compelling, Microsoft-based alternative to other blogging services and software. This blog is a SharePoint blog quite literally. SharePoint based blogs are easy to get either in a hosted blog model, or with an in house installation of SharePoint. If you are using SharePoint at work and need a blog make sure to speak to your IT department about spinning up a blog site for you to try out. If you are not able to get one at work, just sign up for a SharePoint evaluation site with one of the SharePoint hosting partners recommended by Microsoft.
Here at SharePointHosting.com we've put together a huge number of resources and tutorials to stimulate the adoption of SharePoint based blogging. Here are some of the links to those SharePoint based blogging resources we've published in the past.
SharePoint Based Blogging Module 1 Topics Covered: Create your SharePoint Blog, Update your Blog user account, Create Post Categories, Change your Blog Theme, Create a Blog Post directly from Microsoft Word 2007
SharePoint Based Blogging Module 2 Topics Covered: Add a category to your post directly from Microsoft 2007 2007, Change your blog site's description, link to other bloggers, post to your blog from Microsoft Word 2007 with pictures (graphics), Add navigation tabs to your blog site
SharePoint Based Blogging Module 3 Topics Covered: Create a calendar view of your blog posts, E-mail enable your SharePoint blog to receive content from your mobile phone, delete or restore a blog post, configure anonymous comments with moderation
SharePoint Based Blogging Module 4 Topics Covered: Configure Amazon's Associates advertising on your SharePoint blog, Configure Google Analytics, Tour the WAP (mobile) view of your SharePoint blog, Configure Google Analytics for sub-pages non-programmatically, Capture granular commenter information on post comments
Individual Tutorials:
How to configure Google Adsense for your SharePoint-based Blog
How to configure Google Adsense referral program for your SharePoint-based Blog
10/18/2007
About twice a week someone calls or writes into support trying to figure out why their Site Owners cannot reset passwords, manage the recycle bin, or "see everything" in site settings. The answer is pretty easy – you have to be a Site Collection Administrator to be able to perform those actions. The next question we get from Site Owners is "how do I become a Site Collection Administrator?" The answer is easy enough, find out who your current Site Collection Administrator is and ask that individual to promote you to that role. Here's a short tutorial on how to create new Site Collection Administrator.
Take a look at the graphic below (click for full version). It displays the different views if you will see if you log into the Site Settings portion of your WSS 3.0 site as a member of the site owner's group and then as a Site Collection Administrator. Hint – the Site Collection Administrator's view is the top image. You can easily replicate this for yourself if you want to test it out – just create a test user that is a member of the Site Owners (or similar) SharePoint security group and go to the site settings page.
So get to know your SharePoint security schema! By default the hierarchy looks something like this from most to least privilege (left to right):
Site Collection Administrator > Site Owner > Contributor > Reader > Anonymous User (if enabled) 10/17/2007Problem: You want to keep a historical archive of your SharePoint site's data but are unable to access your server side backups in the shared hosting model.
Background: If you have come to rely on your SharePoint sites like many businesses do today, you need to have a data recovery plan in place. You need a service which would allow you to restore a snap shot of what your site's data looked like to a particular time in the past. You need a service which would allow you to restore that data anywhere you wanted as well. You also need full ownership and control of that data (meaning you control where its saved/stored).
Solution: SharePointHosting.com is now the only SharePoint hosting provider to offer a monthly service that allows you to access and download your latest server-side SharePoint site backups on-demand. Remember – you do need to have SharePoint infrastructure to restore the data to, but this is commonly available in the market space today. 9/25/2007
Problem: When we originally wrote "SharePoint alerts will not open in Outlook or appear to be corrupt" the reported problem users were having was that they got a SharePoint Alert or Alert creation confirmation e-mail but they couldn't open the item in Outlook (but they could in OWA, etc).
Background: The issue is mainly faced by Outlook 2007 users who are running Exchange 2003 as their backend e-mail server.
Solution: "SharePoint alerts will not open in Outlook or appear to be corrupt" suggests that you can try to repair your Outlook 2007 instance, or even run the Office Diagnostics utility (Start>Programs>Office 2007>Office Tools>Diagnostics) to find issues with your Office 2007 installation.
A few users have reported that they have successfully gotten alerts working by disabling cached mode, going back into their inbox, then re-enabling cached mode. There is some risk of having to re-sync the entire offline contents of your mailbox (this could take awhile on a slow internet connection). Other users have reported that re-building their entire mailbox cache by deleting their existing Exchange Mailbox and reconfiguring the whole mailbox in Outlook 2007 can work as well. 9/24/2007
See that Title field up there? You can access it from Site Actions > Site Settings > Title, Description and Icon. Do not leave this field blank – there are a number of bugs which will crop up due to a blank Title field including broken bread crumb navigation and some list failures. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|