The real quote is a Chinese proverb that says: "Give me a fish and I eat today; teach me to fish and I eat for a lifetime." It is always best, in my experience, to show someone how to do something, but not to do it for them. "Fish Slap" has become a metaphor in the…
I admit that since it’s just shipped, I haven’t taken a look. However, the possibilities are intriguing. Between analyzing site performance, scalability, and uptime using this new tool and doing analysis on the search logs to optimize search hits and best bets, SharePoint site collections are becoming more powerful than much of the competition for community…
When you use the Data View Web Part in SharePoint to display documents in a document library, the "File Type" field that is available is text (doc, pdf, gif, etc.) rather than an icon. You’d really rather display the icon instead to be consistent with other document library views. Here’s how you can make that…
I posted earlier about editing the default.aspx file in the C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\60\TEMPLATE\1033\MPS directory to apply branding to your SharePoint 2003 sites. I was focused on meeting sites at the time. Today I realized that each of the directories under C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\60\TEMPLATE\1033\ contains a default.aspx for a different…
I recently had an opportunity to mirror some Access reports in SharePoint. It reminded me how powerful Data View Web Parts in SharePoint really are. Here’s what I did… The Access front end was using SQL Server as its back end data server, so I knew that I could get at the data from SharePoint. …
Very interesting article today from Microsoft Research about all of those annoying doorway pages that are all over the Internet these days. These are the pages that you see often when you search for something, click on one of the links, and get a page full of links and ads. The underlying report is worth a…
My colleague Mauro Cardarelli wrote a good post yesterday about workflow. We’ve had many philosophical as well as reality-based discussions about workflow over the last few months and I wanted to toss a few more ideas into the mix. Sharepoint 2007 (MOSS) provides the tools to build incredibly complex and rich workflows. However, the toolset is a…
Branding can often be an anathema to technical types. We often think that we can’t do anything with it unless we have a designer working with us. I proved to myself recently that it’s not actually that complicated. Here’s how it went. All of the changes I outline below happened in Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2007…
I went to an interesting session of the Boston KM Forum last night. The presenter was Marc Solomon from PRTM, and the topic was Enterprise Deployment: Warts and All (A Working Session on Intranet Development). Marc talked about the journey it took to implement PRTM’s SharePoint 2003-based KM system. He had many insights on what…
While there’s no real master page concept in Windows SharePoint Services 2003, I’ve found that editing "C:Program FilesCommon FilesMicrosoft Sharedweb server extensions60TEMPLATE1033MPSdefault.aspx" to replace images, resize objects, etc. works much like a master page in SharePoint 2007 would. Between the default.aspx file and the OWS.CSS file (C:Program FilesCommon FilesMicrosoft Sharedweb server extensions60TEMPLATELAYOUTS1033STYLES), I’m able to…