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.

Ok…this blog posting is way off topic, but I have a friend, Bryan, that I talk to and discuss things with regularly…this posting is for him and the random things we have been talking about lately.  Specifically random thoughts that could actually make sense as well as some gripes we have with some online services.

1.  I installed Windows 7 on my desktop the other day after such great success with it on my MacBook Pro.  Well, the result, catastrophe, it’s been nothing but a headache and I’m about ready to go back to Vista on my desktop (look for an upcoming blog post on this).  Bryan’s theory…Microsoft is using MacBooks as their development platform for Windows 7…based on my experience, it’s almost plausible and believable.  It goes right along with how many people inside Microsoft use Google for Search.

2.  Gmail labels and the lack of organization available.  Those guys are all engineers, we’re anal, we like stuff organized.  Have you every tried to have a highly organized gmail inbox?  You can’t do it.  Our primary example, Bryan and I both do 99%, if not all of our billing online.  So you have all your emails relating to bills.  In those bills you have Comcast, AT&T, Electric, Water, Rent, etc.  Sure you can label a “bill” email Bills and Comcast, but what if you want to pull up only your Comcast bills?  Go ahead, give it a try…let us know how it goes.  Yeah, that’s what I thought, you can’t do it.  Following that same logic, if you want highly organized/categorized emails, you have a REALLY long list of labels.  Our solution, how about some “sub-labels” Google or the ability to filter on more than one label at a time would be a good start?  We’re all engineers who like our organization, help us organize.

3. Microsoft new security approach – a top secret division to create viruses for the Mac.  This one we haven’t seen any evidence of, and nothing to back it up.  But after reading this article we wondered why not.  If they are offering rewards to catch hackers rather than fixing security holes that have been found.  Microsoft and Mac have always had arguments going on about the most secure OS.  Microsoft obvious sells a lot more and has a lot broader user base, and therefore many more viruses and security holes discovered.  So, why not create a Top Secret division of Microsoft to create viruses and exploit the security holes in Apple’s OS to make the two OS’s seem even in terms of security

Ok, so that’s all for now, just the fun things we talk about and come up with in our spare time…feel free to post any other random gripes and conspiracy theories about technology that you may have