Have you ever come across a SharePoint installation that’s been customized in an unsupported way? You look at the 12 (or 14) hive and see that files have been modified by hand? Not good.   As you may know, changing core SharePoint files is unsupported and can lead to problems when patching.   The best […]

SharePoint deployments succeed or fail based on adoption and adherence to business goals, not technical functionality. It doesn’t matter how pretty your SharePoint site is or how many features you pack in. Perception is reality, and if people don’t perceive value, it’s failed.   Along those lines, communications planning is paramount for winning hearts and […]

The SharePoint Conference is in full swing! Despite a groggy start for some attendees (thanks to AvePoint‘s late-night “Red Party”), Tuesday continued the great stream of content.   While a peek at the next version will have to wait until at least SharePoint Conference 2012, excitement and innovation around SharePoint 2010 are still in vast […]

Here’s the scenario: You publish SharePoint content using UAG Users want to share links via email/IM When the recipient clicks your link, they’re prompted to log in After authenticating, they’re redirected to your SharePoint homepage instead of the original link The reason for this is that UAG only has one <FORM/> action target that is […]

How many versions of a typical document do you need to keep? 5? 10? 100?   SharePoint content databases often get cluttered with redundant versions of the same documents. In some cases, I’ve seen presentation libraries with less than 10 GB of active content, but hundreds of GBs of content due to gradual changes.   […]

SharePoint 2010’s rich text editors make it pretty easy to format text and insert media, but they also make it difficult to embed Flash content. In order to streamline the HTML generated by the Content Editor Web Part and other edit boxes, Microsoft decided to automatically remove non-essential tags. Any time we try to embed […]

Last month, I had the distinct honor of speaking at SharePoint Saturday Chicago. Kudos to the organizers for putting on another great event.   Here are slides from the two sessions I presented:   Office 365 Deployment Strategies       Moving to Office 365 provides the perfect opportunity to clean house and get SharePoint […]

I consider InfoPath Forms Services to be one of the most underrated features of SharePoint. When combined with workflows, InfoPath allows us to streamline most day-to-day tasks. Sometimes that takes a little creativity… A scenario that I’ve run into a few times now is trying to find the first non-null value from a given set […]

My favorite thing about SharePoint is its friendly and vibrant community. Having already attended a few fantastic conferences this year, including yesterday’s standout SharePoint Saturday in Twin Cities yesterday, I’m excited about the slew of other events coming up. 2011 is a huge year for SharePoint. I’m planning to attend: April 25-27: SharePoint Connections Coast […]

Challenge   You have to show items from a SharePoint list in a random order. Maybe it’s a subset of data (or just one item). Maybe it’s everything, just returned in a random order.   Approach   You may think .NET code is necessary to make that work, but there’s a much easier approach. SharePoint’s […]

When invoking SharePoint jobs (either standalone or timer jobs), I occassionally run into a 403: Forbidden error. This is one of the more difficult to diagnose errors I’ve faced.   I ran into it again today, in this case during a feature receiver’s Feature Activated event. I searched for clues in the usual places: I […]

This is the second post in a series exploring InfoPath Forms Services in SharePoint 2010. See Part 1: The InfoPath Clients. Additional posts will be published in the coming weeks. What’s the Same Before diving too deep into the new features of InfoPath Forms Services, I’d like to highlight a few things that are the […]