Here are a few quick screen shots to see how the Help Desk template looks without modification. This site has our custom theme applied and some “demo” content added, otherwise it is OOTB (Out Of The Box).
Help Desk main page:
Fab 40 Help Desk Template
Service Rep Home:
Help Desk Service Rep Home page
Service Rep Manager Home:
Help Desk Service Rep Manager Home page
Support FAQ’s:
Help Desk Support FAQ page
If you import your User Profiles from Active Directory (or LDAP, or anywhere) into SharePoint then at some point you may want to make use of some properties available in that external system. The default import connection in SharePoint maps several commonly used properties for you, in my case properties found in Active Directory.
When you go into your Shared Service Provider (SSP) in SharePoint 2007 and navigate to User profiles and properties found under the User Profiles and My Sites section, you can View profile properties to see what is available.
When I did this, and selected Edit from the drop-down on one of the properties I noticed that I could not see any way to map the property – that is I couldn’t set the Mapped Attribute. I could see the Mapped Attribute column, and see that many of the default properties had Mapped Attributes, but could not change them. Since I wanted to create a new Property and map it to an AD Property I had a problem with this.
What I learned was that this was a permissions problem, not because of how I logged in but because of how the Import Connection was configured. So here is what you do if you have the same problem.
Go to your SSP, navigate to User profiles and properties and select View import connections to get to the ”View Import Connections” screen.
View Import Connection
Select your import connection, and click Edit, this will take you into the Edit Connection screen. Scroll down to the Authentication Information section.
The Use Default Account radio button is selected, click on the Specify Account radio button to add your farm credentials – Account and Password. This account must have at least Read access to your Active Directory and can be one of the accounts you setup to manage your SharePoint environment. Click the OK button to save your changes.
Authentication for Profile Import Connection
You will be returned to the View Import Connections screen. Navigate back up to the User Profile and Properties page and select View profile properties. This time when you Edit a property you should see the Data source field to map and Enter field to map fields under the Source Data Connection in the Property Import Mapping section.
Property Mapping
Hurray, now your work creating properties and mapping them starts. Those steps may follow at a later date.
The default Search settings within MOSS 2007 may work fine for many companies, but there is one setting that we didn’t like on our SharePoint based Intranet. That is the display of search results from the Internet. We want our searches from within the SharePoint sites to focus on internal content, and felt that it is a distraction having what some consider advertising to be displayed with every Search result.
Removing this isn’t difficult, finding the place to do it might be. If you haven’t messed with Search very much then you won’t likely know where to go to control this behavior. Additionally, you probably won’t have any idea what it is called so your Google searches may not help you very much.
Want to remove or modify the Internet Results in your Search Results display?
Here are the steps:
- Navigate to your Central Administration (or directly to your SSP)
- Select the SSP for your site from the QuickLaunch in Central Administration
- Select Search Administration, found under the Search heading on the Home page of your SSP
- Select Federated Locations from the Queries and Results section of the Search Administration QuickLaunch
- On the “Manage Federated Locations” page you should see 2 or 3 items listed on the page, we are interested in any that have “Internet Search” in their name. Notice that the Trigger column displays “Always”
- Click on Internet Search Results
- Scroll down the Edit Federated Location page to the Trigger section
- Read the information about your options, you want to choose what is best for your site. For the sake of this post I am selecting Prefix and entering “web” in the Add Prefix field
- Click the OK button
- Repeat steps 7-9 for Internet Search Suggestions (which I assume you have like I did) Your Manage Federated Locations should look like this now:
- Jump out to another browser and try searching on your site. The Search Results window shouldn’t display
Search Results without Internet results
Manage Federated Locations
Modified Federated Locations
Tadaaa, you have done it!
In this case, if anyone searches on “bozo” (for example) they will get results without anything included from the Internet. However, if they search “web bozo” they will get both results and suggestions from the Internet. That is because I choose Prefix and used ‘web’ as my prefix. In both scenarios they will always get results from the SharePoint site.
<rant >
History: we have a boat-load of documents being stored in Visual SourceSafe 2005 by project managers, product documentation staff, and engineering staff. They started storing various documents there simply because it was available (due to our developers using the tool) and because they didn’t have anywhere else available. Most wanted both version and access control.
Fast forward a few years to today. We are in the process of implementing a SharePoint based intranet. Some of the files stored on PC’s, Laptops, file shares, and VSS will move to our Document Center or some other Document Library within SharePoint. There are some files currently in VSS that the groups want to leave right where they are. Management is in agreement with this situation.
One of the goals of our new intranet is to make it easy to find files. Search is a big deliverable. The obvious question is can we perform a search in SharePoint and find files in VSS? A follow-up question is, better yet, can we integrate to some level where users (with appropriate permissions) can see the documents stored in VSS from within a SharePoint site?
The answers are yes, I think, but that isn’t really the point of this post. I spent hours searching MSDN and TechNet for information to answer those questions. That is the point of this post. My biggest complaint with Microsoft is that they seem to make it very very difficult to find any information you are looking for.
Why can’t I search on “Search Visual SourceSafe with SharePoint” and find anything related to what I am looking for? I tried various searches, with various combinations of words, no luck really. One old article talking about integrating VSS 5.0 with SharePoint 2003 (the info in that article doesn’t apply to the current versions, things changed).
I tried focusing on Visual SourceSafe 2005 – no mention of integration or interaction with SharePoint found. Then I tried focusing on MOSS 2007, nothing. It was painful, and I only found tidbits of information that were actually related to the topic I am interested in.
TechNet FAIL, MSDN FAIL. Why can’t Microsoft improve the search capability within these sites, it has been terrible for years and years? It is still nearly impossible to find anything in TechNet and on MSDN when you search for something, especially if you don’t know the “proper” keywords.
</rant>
Although there was a huge turn-out for the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2009 in Las Vegas this week, there were lots of us who didn’t attend. Many reasons for that I am sure, mine was simply work schedule conflicts.
Before the conference I was depressed knowing I couldn’t go to Vegas. All of the twitter, email, and blog buzz made it The Place To Be this week of October. SharePoint MVP’s, notable authors and bloggers, as well as all of the “cool” SharePoint vendors were going to be there. How could I not be bummed?
With the Live Blogging and Twitter hash tag for the conference (#SPC09), I felt better knowing I could keep up and learn a bit about what was going on at the conference. The conference site also presented video feeds – at least for the Keynote, which lasted several hours. Other highlight videos were made available as well.
As it turned out many attendees posted photos and videos as well as blogged and twittered about the conference. As I started following things it quickly became apparent that the massive amount of information coming out of this conference was overwhelming. I had Twitter notifications from TweetDeck popping up constantly. Not one notification but 6-9 at a time. And by constantly, I mean less than a second in between.
The information was great, and there were so many folks that deserve commendations for posting such great material that I couldn’t even keep track of them all. I hit more blogs and information sites this week than I have ever before (at least it felt like it).
The funny part was that while I had been bummed I couldn’t attend, I ended up having to shut down TweetDeck and stay away from the updates. It was to much to keep up with and still get any work done. I wanted to follow along and read up on everything, but it would take all day every day. If I had that time I would have been in Vegas!
I will have to digest all the links I saved over time. It appeared that people were going 20 hours a day there at SPC09, guess that is what happens in Las Vegas!
I hope I can attend the next great conference. Until then THANKS to all that posted so much, and know that while you got tired walking around to sessions – “we” got tired just trying to keep up with you online!
Recently I had to create a couple of custom themes for an intranet, the requirements were not tough, but since I hadn’t created a theme in several months I felt rusty. I forgot a few things and had to go back and clean up after deploying. So, I thought a “cheat sheet” of sorts might be appropriate for my blog. The purpose of this is to help me remember and possibly help someone else smooth out their own custom theme effort.
Tips/Notes
- Use Themes to change colors, fonts, background images.
- Use Master Pages to move elements around on the page.
- If possible, apply an Out-Of-The-Box (OOTB) theme that is similar to the color scheme you want to your work site.
- Copy that theme folder and rename it to your custom theme name.
- C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\THEMES
- Don’t forget to modify the .INF file:
- rename the file to your custom theme name
- replace the original theme name with your custom theme name everywhere inside the file
- change “codepage” to a unique number
- If you “tweak” and view using the theme in a site, don’t forget to copy ALL of your changes into the theme.css that will go into your new theme folder.
- I like to use SPD to edit the applied theme (“themename”1011-65001.css) so I can view my changes with just a Save. Once I have it completed, then I copy the css out of that file into my custom theme.css file.
- Use the developer tools in IE to find the styles that you are missing. If a style is in the Core.css, copy the style from there and place it in your css prior to modifying it. Your theme.css will override the core.css in most cases.
- Don’t just remove or comment out an image file that you don’t want used…use “none” in the image attribute to make sure you are overriding the image usage elsewhere in a SharePoint style.
- Ie: backgroun-image:none;
- Edit the SPThemes xml, duplicate a <templates> section for your theme
- C\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS\1033\SPTHEMES.XML
Sample section (copy section and change the bolded items in the copy to your theme name and images):
<Templates>
<TemplateID>Lacquer</TemplateID>
<DisplayName>Lacquer</DisplayName>
<Description>Lacquer has a gray background with gray control areas and orange highlights.</Description>
<Thumbnail>images/thlacquer.gif</Thumbnail>
<Preview>images/thlacquer.gif</Preview>
</Templates>
- Place your thumbnail and preview images in the 12 hive (can be gif, jpg, or png)
- C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\IMAGES
- When your work is done execute an IISRESET /NOFORCE to make the new theme available to your SharePoint sites
I read Paul Swider’s blog post “Best Practice for User Accounts When Installing MOSS” today. He is right on target, “there should be no surprises on install day”. It is ironic that I read this blog today because I created a similar table to the one he has in his blog post earlier this week, to prepare for my SharePoint install this morning (I installed MOSS, did basic configuration setting up a couple of web applications and SSP’s easily well before lunch). Paul’s table was nicer, and I like his idea of phases which I thought of in a similar way but couldn’t vocalize it as nicely as he did.
The point of this post is that he made me think a bit more about best practices, especially when installing MOSS. Here are some off-the-cuff random thoughts I had on that topic:
- Did you download any service packs or patches that you might need installed PRIOR to your SharePoint install?
- If so, are they all in one easy to find folder, ready to go?
- Where are your CD’s/DVD’s – do you need them?
- Are you documenting your install in any way? How? Where?
- Do you have a scheme for naming your web applications, ssp’s, content db’s?
- What services are you going to configure?
- What is your indicator that you have successfully installed MOSS? When do you stop this task, and move on to the next?
I like to have these things mapped out, in my mind and documented. The process of install and initial configure should be straight forward and easy. Just make your own check-list, include the critical details, and follow the steps. Write down what you do as you do it and you won’t have to hunt for a port number or database later. Being a bit anal pays off sometimes…my install day today was kind of relaxing. By the way, I had Thai for lunch.
There are many reasons why you might want to e-mail enable a Document Library in SharePoint. One of them could be simply because some manager doesn’t want to navigate to the library to upload a file. Another, better reason is because they are traveling and want to post a document on your Intranet without having to VPN into your network. Regardless of the reason, the steps to make this happen are easy so let’s get started.
Step 1 – Know what you want
- Do you want the documents to all go into the root library or into folders?
- Do you want anyone in the world to post files to this library?
- Will your e-mail system allow incoming email to route to SharePoint? (not sure, see references below)
I will assume you get those questions answered and are ready to go now.
Step 2 – Navigate to the Document Library you want to e-mail enable. I will use “Shared Documents” for this example.
Step 3 – Select Settings > Document Library Settings
Select Document Library Settings from the Settings drop-down
Step 4 – Select Incoming email settings from the Communications section of the Library Settings page
Select Incoming e-mail settings
Step 5 – Enable Incoming e-mail
- Allow the document library to receive e-mail – yep, that is why we are here.
- Enter an e-mail name for users to send files to this library. You may want to use some form of the document library name. Since this is a test run for me, I used ‘testtony’ and plan to change it once I know it is working fine. Note that the full email address contains “@sharepoint” dot your company domain. This is something you may have to ensure your e-mail system will allow. You also may have to setup a specific e-mail box and use that address here to allow it to work. See the references at the end of this post.
- Select the appropriate options for E-Mail Message, and Meeting Invitations (if you are not sure just say No, it is likely the best option).
- Read the Caution under E-Mail Security and set the E-mail security policy.
Incoming E-mail Settings screen
Step 6 – Click OK and Test
Send an email to the address defined and see if it post to the Document Library. In my case I am using the Subject line as the folder, so I am making sure that works by sending several emails with different subject lines/folder names.
REFERENCES:
Planning for Incoming E-Mail: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263260.aspx
Reference this article for details on configuring your SharePoint SMTP services:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262947.aspx
The Southern California SharePoint User Group meeting for September is this Thursday 9/17. The groups meets monthly in San Diego.
Topics for this month are:
“ESRI MapIT for SharePoint”
and
“SharePoint from a Project Manager’s View”
Details can be found on the SoCal SUG site (link above).
RSS - Posts
Handy Twitter Tools
Oddball post, but hey it is my blog so I can do what I want! ha!
Here are some handy twitter tools -
First the good ol hashtag (#) – for SharePoint people search #sharepoint, #moss, SPSaturday and watch for postings on conferences etc. such as #spc09
Look at Trends to find other hashtags or words you may want to follow.
Other Tools
http://www.twitblock.org
http://www.tweetdeck.com/
http://www.hootsuite.com/
http://dossy.org/twitter/karma/
http://twitpic.com/
and
99 twitter tools from Smashing Magazine
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