Ben There, Done That

If you’re like us, chances are you have users accessing SharePoint from several different browsers.  SharePoint 2007 can bring about many challenges for users not wanting to Internet Explorer, one of which is replying to threads in a SharePoint Discussion board.

To be perfectly honest I’ve never been a huge fan of the discussion board in SharePoint, so I haven’t often paid much attention to it.  However, since switching jobs, I have found the users here love the discussion board.  The first thing I did to make it even better for users, was to download the Quest Discussion board web part, to give users a much nicer interface for viewing posts.

Recently, more and more of our users have been accessing discussion boards from a browser other than IE.  When replying to a discussion, this brings up and ugly mess of HTML for the end users if they are replying from FireFox, Safari or Chrome.

We had three options for solving this:

1. Training – Make sure all users know that when replying to a discussion, they are not to touch the HTML, but simply add their response above it.  Feasible…but definitely not the best idea.

2. Require all users to use IE – hahaha…yeah right! Parts of our environment are accessible to our users from home as well as a subset of our users having the ability to choose if they want a MAC or a PC.  This just won’t happen.

3. Find a way for users to edit rich test (eliminating the HTML) when responding to or posting a new item in a discussion board.

Thanks to Telerik, we were able to take approach #3.  The Telerik RadEditor Lite (bottom of the page) provides two features.  One feature to use the RadEditor for Rich Text fields when using a browser other than IE and the second feature to use the RAdEditor for IE as well.  After adding and deploying the solution to the SharePoint farm and activating the feature on your SharePoint site, when you edit a Rich Text field from a browser other than IE, instead of the ugly html you are given a nice, easy to use Rich Text field from Telerik.

This is starting to get dangerous…I’m blogging about SharePoint development twice in a row.  Again, this may be something very basic to most SharePoint developers, but as I learn, I enjoy blogging about issues I’ve discovered and things I’ve learned as I continue to develop more.

My next venture into SharePoint development is to create some custom .ASPX forms for use within our SharePoint environment.  For our situation, InfoPath Forms Services would make much more sense, unfortunately, we only have SharePoint 2007 Standard with no plans to go to Enterprise.

So, I created a very basic .ASPX file with an equally as simple .cs (code behind file), packaged it all up as solution and deployed it.  However, when I went to access the site, I encounter a “Could Not Load Type…” error.  After a quick search on Google, I found – http://blogs.catapultsystems.com/matthew/archive/2007/12/07/could-not-load-type-error.aspx between that post and the post by Andrew Connell that was referenced there I was able to solve my problem.

When I had created my .aspx file I had failed to use the “5 part name” to reference the assembly file.  I had put Inherits=”NewForm.NewForm” rather than Inherits=”NewForm.NewForm, NewForm, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=*********”

As soon as I changed my .aspx file to use the 5 part name and redeployed my solution everything worked perfectly!

We have been having an issue with our search indexing and crawling in one of our SharePoint farms.  The problem is that after an undetermined set of time, pretty much all search queries wind up returning several results that show nothing but an IE icon.  The result isn’t attached or any page or give any textual information.  Obviously best case would be to figure out what causes this error, but at this point in time we haven’t been able to find the problem.

However, what we have discovered is that simply resetting the search index and running a full crawl will solve the issue.

So…until we can solve the issues, I wrote a small SharePoint timer job that simply resets our search index right before a scheduled full crawl runs.  I used Andrew Connell’s post (http://www.andrewconnell.com/blog/articles/CreatingCustomSharePointTimerJobs.aspx) to develop the Timer Job, Solution and Feature and modified it and was able to find the following code on http://www.sharepointdev.net/sharepoint–development-programming/programmatically-reset-all-crawled-content-41959.shtml that I inserted into the timer job frame work in order to automatically reset our index on a regular schedule to minimize the risk of our search issue effecting the end users.

try
{
    SearchContext sc = SearchContext.GetContext(ServerContext.Default);
    sc.Reset(true);
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
    throw new InvalidOperationException("Unable to reset content index.", ex);
}

For some of you, this may not seem like much, but coming from the SharePoint Administration/Configuration side of SharePoint and having very little real development experience I was rather proud of myself.

I’ve posted bits and pieces of this story on Facebook, but decided to make it into a blog posting as a friend of mine suggested.  First of all, this is a departure from my usual topic of SharePoint .

Last weekend my whole family was in town and we spent a fair amount of time at the pool.  Saturday afternoon we went over to the pool for a swim.  As we got out of the car, I threw my Palm Treo Pro into my swimsuit pocket to free up my hands to carry other stuff.  We got to the pool and all jumped in.

After swimming for about 10 – 15 minutes, I felt something in my swimsuit…you guessed it, it was my phone!!  To skip to the end of the story, it almost completely works today…touch screen and all.  The only known issue right now is the vibrate on the phone no longer works.  So how did I get it back working again?

1.  As soon as I realized it was in my pocket I pulled it out of the water, removed the batter and dried it off the best I could (you could see water inside the screen).  My wife shook the phone a little bit to get some of the water out.  After that, we continued to swim and I just left the phone, with the batter still removed, wrapped in a towel.

2. Once we got home I immediately put my phone and battery (with the batter still removed) in a zip loc back and filled the bag with rice to absorb all the moisture.  I left the phone in the rice all weekend, checking it sporadically to see how the screen was drying out.  My Monday morning I needed my phone for work and it looked to be completely dry.

3.  When I arrived at work, I stuck the battery back in the phone for the first time after it got wet…low and behold, it didn’t work   Talking to a few co-workers they mentioned similar experiences who said getting a new battery fixed their phone.

4. After work, I stopped in at the Sprint store to see if they had a batter around that I could try.  After sharing the story with them, they were unconvinced that a batter would fix it, but complied with my request anyways and got a new batter to try.  We stuck the brand new battery in and the phone started right up!!!

I’ve been using the phone with the new batter for almost a week now with the only problem being the vibrate no longer working that I mentioned before.  There is also some discoloration inside the screen, but that seems to be slowly going away and the touch screen functionality still works perfectly.

So, that is the story of my phone.  Moral of the story..if you phone gets wet, remove the battery, dry it off, place it in a bag of rice for at least a day, if it still doesn’t work, try a new battery.

The other day I had an annoying problem accessing SharePoint sites.  I am running Windows 7, IE8 and Office 2007 and Office 2010 Beta.

Any internal SharePoint site continued to throw the error of element not found for init.js

It only happened on my desktop (my laptop worked just fine).  I tried clearing the temporary internet files, browser cache, even uninstalling and reinstalling IE8.

Nothing worked, I finally found the solution here – http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepointgeneral/thread/41e1874f-7825-4bfe-ba4c-37255d198df2

So, I opened up SharePoint Designer 2007, ran the diagnostic tool in the Help menu, restarted IE and everything was back to working as normal.

Microsoft has been talking about how much better the user experience with SharePoint 2010 is when using browsers other than Internet Explorer, mainly, Mozilla Firefox.  They have been doing a lot of SharePoint demo’s with Firefox to demonstrate this ability and Firefox has been labels as being a level 1 browser for SharePoint 2010.

However, in my use of Firefox, I have found a couple of things so far that still work only when using Internet Explorer.

1. You can’t upload multiple files to a document library from within Firefox.  This is due to the fact that for some of these actions.  SharePoint 2010 does indeed still use ActiveX controls.  In fact, some people don’t even have this option in Internet Explorer according to this post – http://sharepoint4u.wordpress.com/2009/05/07/no-multiple-upload-no-connect-to-outlook/

2. There isn’t the ability to drag and drop to re-arrange web parts on a SharePoint site or to move them between zones.  You must move the web parts around by using the setting in the web part properties.

I am actually somewhat surprised by both of these limitations.  The first one probably more so than the first, especially considering that when using Microsoft SkyDrive you have the ability to upload multiple files using Firefox.  You would think this same type of functionality could exist in SharePoint 2010.

Based on the most recent posts by Microsoft, http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263526%28office.14%29.aspx, it doesn’t look like they have plans on changing any of these limitations.  This site contains additional details on these limitations as well as other limitations that exist for various browsers when accessing SharePoint 2010.

Read the RTM announcement from the Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog – http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2010/04/16/sharepoint-2010-reaches-rtm.aspx

Great job guys!  Can’t wait to get my hands on it

Have you ever had a long SharePoint list that you wanted paged by the first letter of a column rather than by simply picking the number of items you wanted on each page?

That’s exactly what I ran into the other day.  I had a list just short of 3000 medications that medical staff at work needs to reference.  They needed the list to be sorted alphabetically and be able to quickly jump to the various medications based on the first letter of the medication name.

After doing some searching I found this post that solved the issues and performed exactly as I was hoping – http://mdasblog.wordpress.com/2009/06/19/alpha-selection-of-list-items/

Additionally, here is a tutorial video that was posted in the comments of the blog posting that was very helpful.

I’m definitely not the first to blog this, nor will I probably be the last; and, chances are that you have already read this elsewhere, but just in case you haven’t, I figured I would post it anyways.

So, here it is, the launch date for Office and SharePoint 2010 has been set!  It will be May 12, 2010 at 11:00 am EST.  You can view all the details and sign up to watch the even live online here – http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/businessproductivity/proof/pages/2010-launch-events.aspx#fbid=N7_NqK7briG.

So this weekend I decided to install SharePoint 2010 on my desktop at home.  My desktop is running Windows 7, and due to requirements of other software I need, I’m unable to run Windows Server 2008 on it.

Running a stand alone installation of SharePoint 2010 is great, however, I wanted to see if I could get a complete install on Windows 7 and user SQL Server 2008.  Fortunately, I found this blog post by Neil Hodgkinson that explained how to do it.  Everything appeared to be working great and the configuration wizard finished without any problems.  Unfortunately, that appearance didn’t last too long.

My problem arose when I went into Central Administration and, despite being a farm administrator, the first thing I noticed was I couldn’t create new web applications.  There were some other security issues as well, however, those are beside the point.  The purpose of this post is how to go about fixing this issue if you encounter the same thing.

After mulling over the issues for a few minutes, I remember are beloved User Access Control (UAC) and other issues I’ve seen when it is enabled on Windows Server.  So, I went into my UAC settings, disabled them complete, restarted my computer, logged into Central Administration and what do you know, it worked!  I can now create new web applications and have full control over my SharePoint 2010 installation.