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.

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.

As discovered by Todd Carter there is a memory leak in SharePoint 2007.  He has outlined the details as well as a work around to the fix the memory leak.

I decided to do some testing with it, however, when I compiled the dll, placed it into the GAC, and changed my global.asax file, I started getting this error: “Could not load file or assembly ‘[Assembly Name]’ or one of its dependencies.  The system cannot find the file specified.”

After digging into this error for a while I discovered my problem.  This may be fairly obvious to developers out there , but coming at this from more of a SharePoint administrator type roll, I missed this one step that isn’t outlined in the steps provided by Todd.

After deploying your dll to the GAC, you need to open up your web.config and place

<add assembly="[Assembly Name], Version=[Version Number], Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=[Public Key Token]" />

in the web.config file of the web application you wish to apply your fix to.  This line should be added between <assemblies> and </assemblies> in the web.config file.

All of the information: Assembly Name, Version Number and the Public Key Token can be found by right clicking on your dll in the GAC and viewing the properties of the dll.

Once I added the assembly to my web.config for the web applications I was trying to apply the fix to, everything worked as expected.

A while a go a write a short post on how to hide web part headers in SharePoint 2007.  Recently I had some inquire how to do the same thing for SharePoint 2010.  So, here is what to do in order to hide a web part header in SharePoint 2010.

1.  Add a content editor web part to your page.

2. Edit the Web Part

3. Click in the content area of the web part, click HTML and select “Edit HTML Source”

4. Put the following code in the web part:

5. Click “OK”

6. Expand “Appearance” (on the right side of the page)

7. Set the chrome type to “None”

8. Click “OK” and then save and check in your page.

The headers of your web part should now be hidden.  This can be extremely helpful when your page contains a web part using “boxed” for your style when creating a list view.  The only downside to this approach is if you have multiple web parts on a single page, it will hide the headers for all the web parts on your site.

How to do the same thing in SharePoint 2007

I’m a little late with posting this news, but I figured it never hurts to repeat it and get the information out to as many people as possible.

Yes, you read it correctly, SharePoint Designer is now free.  There were some rumors going around that it was an April Fools Joke by Microsoft, but 5 days later, it is still free, still available for download and definitely not a joke.  Here are some links that I gathered from Microsoft as well as various blogs that relate to SharePoint Designer and how it may effect your current SharePoint implementation.

SharePoint Designer Download

SharePoint Designer for free interview with Tome Rizzo (YouTube)

SharePoint Designer Governance

Locking Down SharePoint Designer in your Organization

Woody Windischman’s Blog Post on the release – The guy who wrote the book on SharePoint Designer

Check out The Mossman’s blog for screen shots as well as the download link on Microsoft’s Site. I am planning on downloading and installing them right after I get done writing this. If you want to go right to the download site, you can get the themes here.

Ironic, the day after I publish the link to the Documentum vs. SharePoint article, Microsoft releases an MSN article on integrating the two .  So, for more information on how to integrate SharePoint 2007 with external document repository systems, such as Documentum, see the links below:

Integrating External Document Repositories with SharePoint Server 2007

Code for Integrating External Content Repository with SharePoint Server 2007

Scott Hiller (author of the MSDN Article) on Integrating External Document Repositories with SharePoint Server 2007

I was working on a site today and I added a list web part to the site.  I wanted the information to be displayed in two columns so I created a new view using “Boxed, no labels” as the style for the view.  The only problems was the column headers that end up at the top that really don’t make any sense or line up with anything.

To remove these annoying headers I used a simple content editor web part.  Instead of using the rich text editor, open up the Source editor and enter the following three lines:

<style>
.ms-viewheadertr { display: none;}
</style>

Under Layout in the Content Editor Web Part check the “Hidden” check box so you’re web part wont’ be seen on your site and click OK.  The column headers will now be hidden from view.

This method can also be used to hide and/or change the look of other aspects of your SharePoint site without using SharePoint Designer or making any custom modifications.  Any change can easily be undone or changed by going into Page Edit mode and changing the source in the web part.

How to do the same thing in SharePoint 2010