Robin's SharePoint and Website musings

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How to use a 'Link to a document' in place of a real document in SharePoint. Great way to have links to documents/websites that don't exist in your SharePoint site for consumption by the user. Especially helpful when using DocRead, because the links list doesn't have a title field, but the document library does.

One of the things we wanted to do in our new SharePoint 2013 environment was create a more user friendly environment and increase adoption by giving users the ability to learn "how-tos" without the need of a training class or a guided tour by the SharePoint person (aka me).  My first thought when we began planning for the upgrade was that built-in help would be excellent, but would also be a monumental task to create.  Having used many of SharePoint-Videos.com videos for my own learning needs, I turned to their site for ideas. Enter VisualSP.  Obviously, I'm not the only person who desired in-context help for the end users. We purchased VisualSP for SharePoint 2013.  Once our environment was configured properly, installation was not difficult. The installation procedures were straight forward and easy to follow. I am not replicating that information here, but will hit the highlights.  For full details and screenshots, see the link above. Installation must...

Something I hope I never need, but good to know it's out there in the event I do: Connect to SQL Server When System Administrators Are Locked Out (SQL Server 2012) http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd207004.aspx

New Discussion posted on the SharePoint Community... hoping to find answers soon

How to use a 'Link to a document' in place of a real document in SharePoint. Just what I need to do in our new 2013 site... link to documents that live elsewhere.

As always, SharePoint provides daily learning lessons.  Today I noticed that the "or drag files here"  control didn't show up on computer where I was doing a demo of our new SharePoint 2013 environment.  The machine in question is running Windows 7, Internet Explorer 9 (32-bit) in Compatibility View, and running Office 2010. I opened the same site in Firefox and was able to demo the drag and drop feature without issue.  But this got me to questioning what was causing the problem (was the browser or the office version?) So I came back and looked at 2 machines in the office. Same build and updates on IE running on both machines. Same Compatibility and Internet Options settings. I tried removing Compatibility View and clearing browser history on IE, but this made no difference. Here's what the machine running Office 2010 looks like:  The machine running Office 2013 shows the same site like this: I was logged on with the same credentials/permi...

This link no longer works, because it may have been moved or deleted. You can try to find it and follow it in its new location. (via www.absolute-sharepoint.com ) I had a problem at a client who had SharePoint 2013 MySites and a couple of WebApplications. Users were able to follow sites and they appeared in their mysite as usual, however when they clicked on them, they had this error: This link no longer works…

Creating and applying a Composed Look: 1. Download SharePoint Designer 2013 and SharePoint Color Palette Tool. 2. Create your theme using the SharePoint Color Palette Tool and save it as a .spcolor file. Suggest that you sort the Color Slot Grouping by UI Groups. 3. Open SharePoint Designer 2013. 4. Click Open Site. 5. Enter the URL of your SharePoint page (Master Page). 6. Click on All Files under Navigation. 7. Click on _catalogs. 8. Click on theme. 9. Click on 15. 10. Click Import Files. 11. Select your .spcolor file and click ok. You should now see your template file in the 15 directory. 12. Click All Files. 13. Click images. 14. Click Import Files. 15. Select the image you want for your background image and click ok. You should now see your image file in the image directory. 16. Now open the master page that you want to add the theme to in SharePoint 2013. 17. Click on the settings icon and select Site Settings. 18. Under Web Designer Galle...

The Ultimate Guide to SharePoint Server 2013 Certifications V2 by Vlad Catrinescu   

A user with admin permissions changed the URL of our WordPress site. This, of course, caused the site to be unreachable. After major frustration, and frantic searching, I asked friends on the SharePoint-Community.net for help. Was referred to this URL: http://codex.wordpress.org/Changing_The_Site_URL What worked for me was a two step process: Since I had just upgraded the WordPress site the day before to the newest version (at the time 3.6.1), I had backup files on an external hard drive. I tried first doing a hack on the Functions.php file in the theme. That gave us a login prompt but nothing else. I tried editing the wp-config.php file, but at first it didn't seem to work. So I went ahead and rolled back the files from the day before. Then I tried one more time with wp-config.php as follows (from the codex.wordpress.org site above): Edit wp-config.php It is possible to set the site URL manually in the wp-config.php file. Add these two lines to your wp-config....

Every time I have to do this, I have to look up the instructions, so I thought why not write down my steps this time. So here goes: For reasons unbeknownst to me our WordPress site never allows us to apply Upgrades, apply updates to plugins or themes automatically. So I end up having to go download the needed files and remote to my server. See WordPRess's full explanations of upgrading here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Updating_WordPress 1) Make a backup of the Wordpress and PHP directories. If you don't have an automatic backup in place of the MySQL database, back that up too. 2) Deactivate plugins that are being updated 2) Download all needed files 3) Extract needed files 4) Upload files to server 5) Copy files to appropriate directories. Remember to reactivate your plugins.

In our MOSS2007, environment we've had issues in the past with users getting the "InfoPath could not submit the form" message. Our "fix" was to uncheck the "Display intranet sites in Compatibility View" on the Compatibility View Settings screen (see below). However, since yesterday, I've been trying to resolve an issue where a user could open an InfoPath form from the Form library, but got an error message when she tried to open the same form from the workflow task library. Another user in the same office was not experiencing the issue. So we began to compare settings, looking at Add-ons thinking that was the problem. However, nothing we changed in the Manage Add-ons section worked. In correcting an unrelated issue with PeopleSoft screens in the browser (items were overlapping each other), we noticed that the second user had "Display intranet site in Compatibility View". So we went back to user 1 and checked "Display in...

Understanding jQuery More SharePoint goodness from SharePoint Videos and jQuery from Marc Anderson!

Item ‘Modified By’ Value Doesn’t Change: Fixing a Damaged Column Schema (via http://sympmarc.com ) I ran into an odd situation the other day at one of my clients. When people edited existing list or library items in *some* lists (we couldn’t discern a pattern) the Modified By (Editor) column value did not change. The date/time stamp (Modified)…

Five reasons why you should learn SharePoint  - great post from Thuan Soldier

Having worked in a MOSS 2007 environment for my entire SharePoint career, the thought of upgrading to 2013 has been both terrifying and very exciting (simultaneously).  In an effort to educate myself and gain new skills, I have been reading several new books.  I started out reading SP 2010  books thinking we were upgrading there, so you'll see a few of those in the list too. Hope to share reviews of these as time allows.  So here's the list in no particular order: Kindle Books: How to do Everything Microsoft SharePoint 2013 by Stephen Cawood Professional: SharePoint 2013 Development by Reza Alirezaei, Brendon Schwartz, Matt Ranlett, Scott Hillier, Brian Wilson, Jeff Fried, and Paul Swider Microsoft SharePoint 2013 App Development by Scott Hillier and Ted Pattison Exploring Microsoft SharePoint 2013 New Features and Functions by Penelope Coventry I ntroducing Microsoft SQL Server 2012 by Ross Mistry and Stacia Misner Beginning SQL Joes 2 Pros: Th...

More great reading material for SharePoint 2013. Step by Step: Create a SharePoint 2013 Composed Look - End User - NothingButSharePoint.com