Ben There, Done That

I had this problem today on one of our sites that has anonymous access enabled.  We wanted to link to some PDF files in our quick launch navigation, so, naturally, we logged into the site and manually added the links.

However, when we tested the site with anonymous access the links weren’t there! So, next step, check the document library.  It was inheriting permissions, and I could even manually type in the URL to the document library and the PDFs using anonymous access and view everything just fine.

So, time to start digging.  Fortunately I found a thread on a discussion board that pointed me here – http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927082/en-us?spid=11373&sid=200.  Apparently when you turn on Anonymous access, Microsoft doesn’t think you could really want everything to be anonymous access.  Anywho…I figured it was worth a shot, so I logged into the server, disabled the feature running the command in the KB article linked above, turned anonymous access off and back on and what do you know.  It worked!!!

So, if you are having any trouble with certain lists, documents, navigation, etc.  Give this solution a shot.  As of yet I’m not aware of negative impacts to disabling this feature, but if I find any I’ll definitely update this post.

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.