This is something that I’ve told people more times than they really want to hear. Sure, SharePoint sits on top of SQL Server, which is an excellent database, but SharePoint itself is not a database! So is this a dire “abandon all hope, ye who enter here” message? Absolutely not. With planning and forethought, you…
This one might fall into the "Duh, Marc" category, but when I get stuck, I figure maybe someone else out there might get stuck, too. (And it makes me feel better to think that way.) I was trying to get Skype set up on my Dell Latitude D820 laptop this morning (which is running Vista),…
By default, workflow history will "disappear" after 60 days. Microsoft has built this into MOSS intentionally to ensure good performance. By deleting old workflow history, it’s more likely (but hardly guaranteed) that the Workflow History list (/Lists/Workflow History by default) will stay below the magic 2000 items per list limit. (See the "Working with Large…
At one of my clients, I’m using a pretty simple SharePoint Designer workflow to manage their Purchase Order approval process. About half the time, the workflow runs fine. The other half, the workflow instance gets stuck with the status ‘Failed on Start (retrying)’. If I terminate the “stuck” instance and fire it off again manually,…
I’ve had several clients ask about this, and my answer to date has been “It’s a known ‘feature’ or bug.” I just ran across this Microsoft KB article that shows you how to fix this issue by loading the 953749 hotfix: SYMPTOMS You use Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 to add a Custom List Form…
Here’s a nice tip to help clean up the spam that you tend to get in the comments of your Live Space, thanks to Matt Farrington-Smith in the UK (http://windowslive.uk.msn.com/rss/article.aspx?cp-documentid=9257705). Instead of navigating to your default Spaces homepage we’re going to visit the ‘Mobile’ version. If your Spaces default page is http://yourspacesname.spaces.live.com then your mobile…
Andy Lewis over at the Microsoft SharePoint Designer Team Blog has a nice post about how to do Filtering and Formatting with Date Values. The best part of the post (it is FULL of useful information) is a set of utility templates that do some useful calculations on dates: getDateFromDays Outputs the date that is…
I posted back in February about using the Data View Web Part to do cross list rollups (See Rolling Up Content in SharePoint Using the Data View Web Part (DVWP)). Since then, I’ve done quite a few of these, and I’ve been meaning for some time to post this update. Not everything that I believed…
I recently updated my Windows XP SP3 machine with some recommended updates from Windows Update. After I did so, I received the following error every time I tried to open a Datasheet view in SharePoint: The list cannot be displayed in Datasheet view for one or more of the following reasons: A datasheet component compatible…
Here’s an easy one — except that most of your users won’t know about it. I was just asked how someone can know about how much disk space they are using with their SharePoint sites. Well, lo and behold, if you are a Site Collection Administrator, you can (at the root of the Site Collection),…