Category Archives: Admin

Simplified People and Groups pages in SharePoint

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One of my pet peeves with SharePoint is the People and Groups pages. These are pretty damn complicated.

standard-perms-page

You typically get groups for:

  • Owners
  • Members
  • Visitors

And often you can have

  • Approvers
  • Moderators
  • Designers
  • Individual users granted rights directly on the site (rather than being in a group)

… and so on. And if individual sites start to break from inheritance and define their own groups, you get even more groups. It’s possible (especially if the administrator of the system doesn’t understand what they’re doing – which is often the case) to end up with 3 times as many groups as sites!

Frankly, this is enough to confuse me, never mind users. Trips into the People and Groups pages often takes me some time to understand what I’m seeing. And the worst part is that often users just want to be able ‘Give Fred access to this site’. They don’t care about other groups or other sites, permissions levels, or any of that jazz.

The case management system we’re working on at the moment has this sort of requirement. Each case is a site, and we want ‘Case Owners’ to be able to add/remove ‘Case Owners’ or ‘Case Workers’. They don’t need access to other groups. They don’t need the ability to send emails, call people, remove users from the site collection, or any of the other (confusing) options on the menus. So, I built my own administration pages… Continue reading →

Mailing an Active Directory Group

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This was something that I set up in our offices, and was trying to set up for a client – but it turned out that there were a few more components involved than I’d first realised.

We have an AD group of ‘All Staff’ which contains, um, all staff. We also have a ‘Company Announcements’ list, and we wanted to send any announcements added to that list to all our staff. As an administrator, I could add an alert for the ‘All Staff’ group ( on the list click List Settings > Alert Me and then enter the group we want to email)

The ‘All Staff group’ is a Mail enabled security group, with it’s own address – e.g. staff@example.com. The puzzle for me (not being an exchange or AD expert) was that in that case, what resolves the addresses? I’d thought that the group being mail enabled meant that you could resolve the email addresses of the users within the  group – but what does that? Well, Exchange, as it happens, though I’m not sure how to configure that. The upshot of it is, though, that the AD group you want to mail needs to be mail enabled, and you may need to talk to your exchange guys too.

This is unfortunate, as in a lot of organizations making changes to AD can be a tortuous process. Still, if there is an appropriate group you can email then this is a quick win with things like Announcements lists.

Highlighting tabs in the top navigation

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We’ve got a customer who’s top navigation tabs aren’t being used as links to content in SharePoint. Instead, these tabs take users to other parts of their system, which is maybe fair enough given that the left navigation also gives them the same sort of access; indeed this duplication of navigation is often a source of consternation with clients.

Anyway, they’ve now added site that they do want linked from the top navigation bar. Therefore, if you click on this tab, they want it to appear highlighted – and it’s the only tab that would.

The site in question isn’t a subsite of the root site of the site collection, so I must confess, I didn’t think you could do this. They emailed and asked, though, and I suggested that the full URL that they were using (e.g. http://sharepoint/somesite/tabsite) wasn’t a good idea – as if they extend their web app for an extranet that link won’t work. As it transpired though, they’d thought to try a relative URL (e.g. /somesite/tabsite) and that worked nicely!

I had to check:

nav-link

showing:

highlighted-top-nav

There we go, a site 2 levels down, highlighted in the top nav correctly!

I suppose it makes sense that the relative URL might work – but I’d sort of assumed that the manual links wouldn’t undergo the same checks as the ‘show subsites’ links would.

Custom Email Alert Templates for individual lists

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Over time my inbox fills with notes of things I want to blog about – even if just as notes for myself in the future. This was one that I’d forgotten about – you can set an email alert template for an individual list! Really, it’s setting up the Alert Template (in a copy of AlertTemplates.xml), setting that that file can be used for alerts (via STSADM), and then setting that alert template to be used through the object model.

You also get to run a CAML query on the list, and access to the before and after values for items, when filtering what things to send emails about.

It’s all in this very good article.

Plan Your Publishing Pages

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I was reading Andrew Connell’s book ‘SharePoint 2007 Web Content Management’ and it made something crystallize for me. I’ve been pondering this for about 8 months or so, but I believe that several of our customers are using the Publishing features of MOSS incorrectly, and that simply basing sites on out-of-box Collaboration and Publishing site templates is a mistake.

(Well, at least without additional planning) Continue reading →

“How to Optimize SharePoint WCM for Performance”

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Really, this is just a link to the MSDN article “How to Optimize a SharePoint 2007 Web Content Management Site for Performance“. Nice easy title.

It does mention a particular irritation of mine – that many (most?) systems don’t use any kind of compression on static content. I remember seeing Apache admins complaining about people not using compression, oh, 10 years ago. In SharePoint, this is such a waste! JavaScript and CSS files are lovely and compressible – and core.js is big. So is Core.css. Doesn’t seem much reason not to enable it!

To do so, open IIS Manager, and right click on the ‘Web Sites’ folder. Select the service tab, and check the check box. Don’t go for dynamic compression; this would be a bad idea.

iis-compression

You’ll also want to check/edit the file types compressed. See Using HTTP Compression for details, and you’ll probably need to add the .JS and .CSS extensions.

I must sit down and give this a proper test some time. Certainly I don’t see the same sizes in the article, but then I’m looking at the file sizes on disc; in 12 Hive, and in the temporary compression cache (typically %WinDir%/IIS Temprorary Compressed Files). My numbers show Core.js to be 575Kb uncompressed, 91Kb after compression. Nice!

Personalization Sites, Links, and Two Tabs

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I came across an interesting problem today. I’m building a demo, and I wanted to use personalization site to ‘push’ a dashboard page to a certain set of users. I created a Personalization site (using the Personalization Site tempate), and then went to my SSP to set up a Personalization Link to it:

I then logged in as a user who belongs to the audience it was configured to show for:

Everything looked good – I had my ICT link that I’d just set up, so the audience was working correctly. However, when I clicked on it, things didn’t work so well…

Yup, two tabs were being shown. One was my Personalization Site link that I’d configured in the SSP, and the other was the navigation tab for the site itself. I only noticed ‘cos the name on the tab I’d added in the SSP (ICT) and the name of the site (ICT Dashboard) were different. Also, the Site’s own tab gave me the ‘Pin/Unpin Site’ option.

It’s a bit of a digression, but what’s the pin/unpin site stuff about then? Well, you don’t have to push personalization site links out to users (via the SSP). Instead, users can go to a personalization site and choose to add it to their My Site tabs; this is ‘pinning’ the site. After they’ve done this, they can remove the link (‘unpinning’).

However, that’s not what I wanted – I want the ICT audience to always have that link, and I don’t want another tab, or any pin/unpin options. So how do I get rid of that? There must be a way; it’s obvious that if I’m pushing a personalization site to a bunch of users that they shouldn’t get those options.

After much head scratching, I figured it out. My personalization site link in the SSP only pointed to the site, not to the actual page. I changed it to point to the page (default.aspx).

When I then navigated via that tab, I was shown only one tab – with no pin/unpin options:

Hurrah! What I think happens, then, is that the top navigation compares the URL of the current page in the personalization site with the URLs for the tabs in the user’s My Site. If none of them exactly match, then it adds a tab for the site itself, including the pin/unpin menu. Although my personalization site’s url did resolve to the same page (default.aspx) the URLs were not the same – and hence I was getting two tabs!

Navigation from a ‘My Site’ back to a Site Collection

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I don’t normally do much with My Sites to be honest – usually I’m building applications, and they’re not usually in My Sites. One of our customers asked me ‘How do users navigate back to the Intranet?’ and I’ve got to admit, I was baffled.

Well, SharePoint’s My Sites have a site-collection setting for ‘Portal Site Collection’. This setting modifies the Global Breadcrumb, and inserts another link there – so you can have a link back to your site-collection.

There a number of issues with that, though… Continue reading →