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.

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 second, 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.