There’s a new forum over at EndUserSharePoint.com called Stump the Panel. The goal is to answer questions from real end users — no fancy coding allowed, just "out of the box" functionality available through the UI (they acknowledge that a little XSLT is OK). If you like brain teasers of the SharePoint variety, check it…
My colleague Mauro Cardarelli posted a simple code snippet yesterday to determine the GUID for an SSP. It worked, and he accomplished what he wanted to accomplish, but my first thought was: STSADM command extension. If you’ve worked with SharePoint much at all on the server, you’re very familiar with STSADM. It’s the command line…
Do you regularly look at your search logs? If you don’t, you are missing a significantly valuable source of information. The search logs tell you what people really want, not what you’ve provided them "easy" access to. Some insights you will be able to glean include: Ways to tailor your navigation to provide access to…
Last week, Microsoft announced three updates which affect SharePoint Server 2007, Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, Project Server 2007, Search Server 2008, Search Server 2008 Express and Project Professional 2007. These updates are explained on the Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog: Announcing: Availability of Infrastructure Updates. The Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers contains the new Enterprise…
There’s a post over the SharePoint Solutions Blog which describes the benefits of Microsoft’s new Search Server Express 2008 well. One key benefit: You can search across Site Collections in WSS! An excerpt: So the scenario is that you have deployed WSS in your company and you do not have a need for most of…
Over at the Microsoft SharePoint Designer Team Blog, there’s a nice post from Jon Campbell about how to plot your data using Virtual Earth. The first step is to get your data into nice shape using some geocoding service. There are many of these out there these days, but Yahoo’s service has been many people’s…
I’m on vacation this week in Topsail, NC with my extended family. It’s hot as Hades outside, and as long as my family doesn’t drag me outside to the beach, I’ll be catching up on the SharePoint-oriented blogs I try to watch. (I love the beach, but at 96 degrees, I can only take so…
As anyone who follows my blog (or is unfortunate enough to get roped into a conversation with me about it) knows, I’m a HUGE fan of the Data View Web Part (aka Data Form Web Part or DVWP). Chris O’Brien has written two great posts (so far) about using just the SPDataSource to get at…
If you have a parent/child relationship between two lists, you will undoubtedly want your users to be able to create child items without having to type in the common key or ID. I’m not going to go into the full architecture of this here, but here’s an important part of the process. Let’s say that…
Here’s another one of those things that’s so obvious that you’ve probably never noticed it. When you configure a view, one of the sections on the page is the Style section (fourth from the bottom in most cases, collapsed). I’d never really looked at them but they all look like they would be useful in…