We just did a Site Collection backup from a development environment into a staging environment. The development environment can only be accessed through a VPN while the staging environment is available through the Internet. When I went to change the page layout for a site’s welcome page (default.aspx), I got the following error: After some…
SharePoint has a nice capability on many pages where, if you pass a Query String parameter named Source with a value of a page URL, the user is returned to that page when they are done with the activity. An example would be when a user clicks on an ‘Add new document’ list on a…
OK, so you know how I’m going to come down on this, but I got your attention, right? In fact, at almost every large client I work with, the latter seems to be the opinion. The rules are usually: No SharePoint Designer use in staging and production. Period. This stems from a fundamental lack of…
I figured out a great little trick for sorting a DVWP-based display based on a column name passed in the Query String. You can see this in action in the default All Items or All Documents views in lists or libraries. When you click on the column headers that allow sorting, the browser is sent…
This is another idea that I was certain I’d posted about long ago, but I can’t seem to find. It’s especially useful if you are developing Data View Web Parts (DVWPs) in one environment and then porting them to another on any sort of frequent basis. When you create a Data Source for a SharePoint…
I think I’ve posted about this before, but it seems that every client I have asks me about how best to do backups with SharePoint. If you are just backing up the server, you have almost zero (repeat: ZERO) chance of restoring after a problem. Keep in mind that a backup strategy only works if…
Sometimes when you try to remove a Content Type’s association from a list, you will get the error "Content Type is still in use", even if you don’t seem to have any items in the list! Here are a few things to check: Make sure that the Content Type isn’t the default – Go to…
This is a little trick, but a useful one all the same. When you use the Publishing Site template for a site, you do not have the option in Site Settings to save the site as a template for reuse. There are probably good reasons for this due to the underlying structure of Publishing Sites,…
A great way to manage the values for a Site Column in SharePoint is to put the values into a list and then use the Lookup column type to grab the values. When you allow multiple selections in the lookup column, what is stored looks something like this: value1;value2;value3;value4 If you would like to then…
This one is a little embarrassing to report, because I’ve been frustrated with it and just living with it so long. However, maybe it will help a few of you out there. For a very long time, I’ve been getting regular script errors in IE7 on Vista. I assumed that it was some artifact of…