Sharepoint 2007 | Digital Collaboration & Social Computing news, tips, guides...

SharePoint is all about continuous quality improvement, 13 things outlined

Written By Milo

Jakob Nielsen is a foremost authority on web design and usability and one of his earlier articles this year was about the 10 best intranet designs of 2010.

The top things for Intranet design include:

1. Growing intranet teams
2. Mobile Intranet sites
3. Social features on intranet
4. Emergency preparedness
5. Continuous trends = Continuous quality improvement

In the continuous trends = continuous quality improvement, Jakob specifically listed “Frequent use of SharePoint”. The things he noted as improvement for quality improvement include page templates, editorial workflows, news stream, personalization, customization, intranet search, people search, ROI.

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Facebook Gets News Feeds Patent, a key Collaboration Feature

Written By Milo

Facebook News Feeds Patent Facebook gets awarded with the patent for News Feeds which is gigantic in the social networking, social computing, and digital collaboration.

When I attended the SharePoint Conference in 2006 in Seattle, one of the key features discussed on SharePoint 2007 was the social computing aspect and the speaker emphasized the web parts capable of adding feeds. As a demo, the speaker showed how easy it was to add news feeds, and use these feeds for digital collaboration. It was discussed how important feeds and news feeds was for SharePoint and collaboration within the enterprise organization. Microsoft has great intentions but the problem was they failed to acquire the patent for it.

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How to Guide: SharePoint 2010 Migration or Upgrade from SharePoint 2007

Written By Milo

SharePoint 2010 is around the corner and similar to the release of SharePoint 2007, developers, architects, managers and stakeholders were getting their hands on information on migration or upgrade from their existing SharePoint 2003 site to SharePoint 2007.

I am still finding bandwidth to research migration from SharePoint 2003 or SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010; but I suppose the following approaches would still be applicable to the SharePoint 2010 move:

1. In-place upgrade
2. Gradual upgrade
3. Database migration (advanced)
4. Site & List Definition upgrade

I have heard from my colleague network that a number of large enterprise are inquiring and considering waiting and migrating to SharePoint 2010 before major enhancements are pushed forward; but until now, there is still no official recommendation on the upgrade strategies and approach on SharePoint 2010. The best option we can do at this time is to run the stsadm –o preupgradecheck. This stsadm command would create an XML and HTML report based on the following files:

1. Preupgradecheck.xml files
2. OssPreUpgradeCheck.xml
3. WssPreUpgradeCheck.xml

From the report, you can go ahead analyze the results , and try to match it up on the upgrade options I have outlined above.

I would be updating this page for a robust information on the SharePoint 2010 migration. Keep this page as a hot item for now.

Cannot get the list schema column property from the SharePoint List

Written By Milo

A number of people have experienced this error message when exporting a list to Microsoft Excel 2003 or even Office 2007: Cannot get the list schema column property from the SharePoint List.

This is most likely caused by a column setup as “Date and Time” which is a known issue in MOSS.

To solve this problem you can try the following items:

1. Install Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 hotfix

The hotfix information is as follows:

A supported hotfix is available from Microsoft. However, this hotfix is intended to correct only the problem that is described in this article. Apply this hotfix only to systems that are experiencing this specific problem. This hotfix might receive additional testing. Therefore, if you are not severely affected by this problem, we recommend that you wait for the next software update that contains this hotfix.

The issues the hotfix are able to resolve are the following error messages:

1. A duplicate name “Duplicate Test” was found.
2. The URL ‘url to uploaded doc’ is invalid. It may refer to a nonexistent file or folder, or refer to a valid file or folder that is not in this current web.
3. Error: Value does not fall within the expected range.
4. An error occurred while sending file to the record center.
The MOSS RC Records Center is not properly configured for this request.
5. Cannot complete this action. Please try again.
6. This page contains one or more errors. Fix the following before continuing:
There is not enough disk space. Free up space on your hard disk and then try again.
7. Error, Cannot complete this action
8. FatalError: There is no row at position 0
9. There is a problem with the query that this web part is issuing. Check the configuration of this web part and try again.
10. The query you typed contains only words to exclude from results. Type one or more search words to include, and then retry your search.

Comments – there were some application of these hotfix that didn’t solve the issue and as such some things needs to be done (see number 2 below).

2. Convert “Date and Time” to “Single Line of Text”

This is not the best solution but should be able to quickly resolve your issue. Some clients might not want this option and they would still want the “Date and Time” field in their schema. You can handle this with the following suggestions:

1. Maintain the current list and create a workflow that automatically dumps the list to another list having “Text” as it’s type.
2. From the main list, edit the navigation so that the export would actually export the list from the temporary list
3. To make this seamless to the user, you can either edit the navigation from the original list via javascipts to make sure that exports extract data from the temporary list for exporting
4. You can also use content query webparts, xml programming to make it even more seamless to the user

3. Brute force approach

If you only have few items, you can do the following:

1. Create another column with Date as type
2. In Datasheet View, make sure your view only shows the “Title”, “Original Date/Time” and the “New Date” Columns
3. Copy “Original Date/Time” Date column
4. Paste the values in excel as “values” only
4. Format the values to Date
5 Copy the formatted values back to your data sheet view to the “New Date” column
6. Export the fields together with your “New Date” column
7. Worth a try

Conclusion

The error might not occur when exporting to Office 2007 after the hotfix has been applied. For those clients that still have the old Office 2003, you might want to build a case around the importance of upgrading the software. Microsoft has disclaimers about using old technologies with MOSS in the event that the site breaks, doesn’t function correctly, or misbehave properly. It is always best to read the recommeded technologies and try to upgrade them to avoid a lot of workarounds and spending more on upgrades for decade old technologies.

It is already year 2009 (crying out loud) and SharePoint 2009 or SharePoint 2010 is close to release, make sure we look into these old technologies and plan accordingly.

The query you typed contains only words to exclude from results. Type one or more search words to include, and then retry your search

Written By Milo

As described by Microsoft: You create a content type that is named Duplicate Test on a SharePoint Web site. Then, you create a content type that is named Duplicate Test on the subsite of the SharePoint Web site. If you use the Stsadm command to export the parent site, and then you import the parent site to a new site, you receive the following error message:

A duplicate name “Duplicate Test” was found.

This is an issue in MOSS 2007 and be fixed via this hotfix:

You can view the list of the fixes from this post: Cannot get the list schema column property from the SharePoint List.

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