SharePoint Designer 2010 allows you to easily create a new edit or display form (as an aspx page) for a list or document library. You just browse to a list or library in SharePoint Designer, and then click the “New” button next to Forms. You’re then given the option of what type of form you want, and which content type to use it for.
This works great with lists, as the new form is populated with all of the fields from the content type, and you can easily modify the XSL to choose which fields are displayed, as well as the layout. However, the form will be a lot more empty if you try this with a document library. For some reason, the new document library forms include the data view web part for the library, but do not start off with any of the fields included. But the fix for this is pretty easy. Just follow the steps below to get the data view web part to include all of the available fields:
1) In Designer, create a new edit form and pick your content type
2) Click the form to open it
3) Click to the right of the “created at” field. This should show “Data View Tools” in the ribbon.
4) Open the Design ribbon, and check “Sample Data.” That should be it–that puts all the fields into the form.
After that, you should be able to modify the layout, as well as the fields in the XSL.
Depending on the configuration, users are sometimes prompted for credentials when opening Office documents from SharePoint, even when Windows integrated authentication is turned on, and the SharePoint site is in trusted sites or the local intranet zone (and auto logon is enabled). Often, the user can simply cancel the authentication prompt, and the document will open just fine. Other files, such as PDFs, also open without a prompt. The reasons for this are complex, and you can read a good background on how Office opens documents from a web server in this KB article:
Continue reading…
We recently came across some strange issues with virtual machines in a domain, where the SQL and SharePoint Servers were joined to the domain, however they were not authenticating regular domain users correctly. Domain users could log onto the machine, however the SharePoint people picker, SharePoint managed accounts, and SQL itself could not authenticate anyone except the administrator account. You could browse to SharePoint locally from the SharePoint box, but could not get past the authentication prompt from any remote boxes. We also saw the following error in certain places in SharePoint:
Continue reading…
Microsoft Project Server 2010 is tightly integrated with SharePoint 2010. There’s many articles on deploying Project Server 2010, but not so much information on configuring it as an extranet, with external users. However, this can be one of the best uses for Project Server, since you can build project schedules that include members of your own organization as well as external parties, and allow everyone to collaborate and manage the tasks and schedule in one central place.
Continue reading…
SharePoint 2010 comes with many new social features that can help lawyers keep track of what others in the firm are doing, and can help with finding the right people with the right skills. These features can be leveraged even if SharePoint is not your document management system.
Continue reading…
Workflow functionality in SharePoint Designer 2010 has been significantly enhanced over 2007. I’ve had mixed feelings about the process in 2007, mainly because of the difficulty in customizing task assignments and because workflows could only run in the security context of the item submitter. This security limitation was a huge annoyance when building more complex workflows that queried several lists, because we had to make sure that the submitters had appropriate rights on each list. In some cases, we had to come up with strange workarounds when we dealt with HR lists, such as vacation days, that we needed the workflow to update, but users to only view. Luckily, both of these issues are resolved in SharePoint 2010. In fact, we’ve been able to enhance and simplify our vacation request and new matter intake workflows by using these new features.
Continue reading…
When preparing for disasters, one thing to consider is what would happen if your SMTP servers went down, and applications that needed to send critical emails were unable to. We recently had a situation where some custom applications needed to continue to send mail, even though internal SMTP servers would be down. As long as you have access to the code for your applications and a Gmail account, it’s possible to use Google’s service to send mail from your applications. All you need to do is reference the Google SMTP server and the appropriate port, and make an SSL connection. It’s possible that other online mail providers would work as well, but we haven’t tested others.
Continue reading…
SharePoint 2007 lists use aspx forms for new item, edit item, and view item forms. These forms can be modified to customize the look and feel of the forms, and add additional functionality. For example, you could add client side javascript to do additional validation or to show and hide sections based on where a user clicks. You could also add javascript events to list items, such as onchange and onclick events.
Continue reading…
Being able to drag and drop emails and attachments from Outlook into a SharePoint folder is one of the things that’s clearly missing in SharePoint and Outlook 2010. The lack of this functionality is a non-starter for any law firm that wants to manage emails and is considering SharePoint as their DMS. There’s a number of good solutions from third-party vendors to address this shortcoming, including Colligo, MacroView Wisdom, Accola DMS4Legal, and some other products that we’ve been beta testing. But what if you don’t want to spend any additional money, and are looking for a real basic solution? Here’s two ways to keep it simple, and be able to get your email and attachments into SharePoint…
Continue reading…
0
Back to top