Simple Branding on a SharePoint 2007 Site Collection

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…

Windows SharePoint Services 2003 “Master Page”

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…

Restoring a SharePoint Site Collection from a Backup

We had been trying unsuccessfully to do a Sharepoint 2003 backup and restore from production to development for disaster recovery planning for one of our clients, and the restore kept failing with this message: The database schema is too old to perform this operation in this SharePoint cluster. Please upgrade the database and try again. We checked…