Please visit my new site: Sharepoint Resource Center. It’s a brand new site based on a slightly different concept (compared to a blog) – see for yourself:

Sharepoint Resource Center

...Your gateway to all things Sharepoint...

See you there

Greg

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Scenario:

A user decides to give his colleague access to a document. He clicks the Add Users button to select his colleague, clicks the address book icon and types in John in the Select people and groups dialog box. On clicking the search icon he’s presented with a list of 50 different John’s – of which only 3 actually work for his company. The user is confused, talks to his manager, manager talks to his hosting provider – “If I can see other companies’ users they can see mine. Outrageous… and in direct violation of the Data Protection Act. “. What ensues is plenty of some embarrassing explaining to do…

Cause:

The people picker gets all users from the Active Directory where the WSS farm is deployed. By default no filters are applied when users search for people using the  “Select People and Groups” dialog box. In an environment where there are multiple site collection the search box will display users from the whole Active Directory rather than, as you would expect, users from the site collection only.

This behaviour can not only be confusing for end users but can present a serious privacy issue in hosted environments where every site collection is used by a different company and employee information should not be revealed to unauthorised users (those belonging to other site collections/companies). You don’t want end users to be able to search the entire Active Directory

Solution:

Stsadm peoplepicker-onlysearchwithinsitecollection parameter

“The command below will set the people picker so it displays only users that are already added to the site collection. This prevents anyone from using the People Picker to browse a different user directory” [quote from the MS article]

stsadm -o setproperty -propertyname peoplepicker-onlysearchwithinsitecollection -propertyvalue yes -url http://<defualtzone.sitecollection.url>

For full syntax check the following MS article: Peoplepicker-onlysearchwithinsitecollection: Stsadm property

Gotcha

Ok, so the above command is mentioned in quite a few blogs – you could be easily forgiven to just run the command, check your People Picker see results are now trimmed to users from your site collection only and forget about the whole thing. There is one significant caveat to be aware of though – a small, easy to miss, note in the MS article mentioned above says:

“Users can search Active Directory using a fully qualified logon name, regardless of this property setting.”

WTF? Turns out even though users will no longer be able to use the People Picker to search for users outside their own site collection when searching by name they will still be able to snoop around if they use a fully qualified logon name (domainname\username). See the table in this article for the full list of name formats that will still return results from outside of the site collection

Solution:

Microsoft now offers a hotfix to address the issue – described in the following MS article: The Check Names function does not honor the Peoplepicker-onlysearchwithinsitecollection setting in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

The hotfix will truly lock people picker down – even searches using a fully qualified logon names will not return results from outside of the site collection.

There is a small price to pay though – you will no longer be able to add users to the site collection using the GIU (as no users from outside the site collection will be displayed) and will instead have to rely on STSADM (or code).

Other notes:

For some reason the peoplepicker-onlysearchwithinsitecollection parameter would not work for me a few times – it turns out you seem to have to use the full command without abbreviations:
- this command will work:

stsadm -o setproperty -propertyname peoplepicker-onlysearchwithinsitecollection -propertyvalue yes -url http://<defualtzone.sitecollection.url

- this command will sometimes not

Stsadm.exe -o setproperty –pn peoplepicker-onlysearchwithinsitecollection –pv yes –url http://<defualtzone.sitecollection.url

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So Office 2007 SP2 is being released today. Surprisingly, there is really not too thorough information out there. Even the MVPs who are normally the first to get a details about new updates and releases seem to be very quiet.

Well, let’s wait and see. In the meantime below is a list of SPD and WSS issues fixed in SP2.

Sharepoint Designer:

• After you back up a SharePoint Server site that spans multiple CMP files by using SharePoint Designer, you cannot restore the Web site.
• Custom list forms do not support attachments.
• Editing a page that contains Web parts that participate in Web part connections causes the connections to be broken.
• SharePoint Designer does not support connecting to SharePoint sites using forms-based authentication.
• The workflow does not start and you receive no notifications when a declarative workflow tries to run as the system account.
• When a data view participates in a Web part connection, paging does not work as expected.
• When a workflow changes a list item and is set to trigger when items are changed in the list, the workflow continues to trigger itself indefinitely.
• When you configure data views by using the on-object property panel in Chinese (Hong Kong), certain strings incorrectly appear in English.
  When you delete the primary list form Web part for a list, you receive no warning that the list may break.
• When you look up an empty string within a declarative workflow, question marks are erroneously displayed.
• When you post back data from an ASP.NET control in a data form Web part, the data form does not remember the state of the parameters.
• When you post back data from an ASP.NET control, SharePoint Designer uses the wrong parameter value.
• When you restore a SharePoint site from an STP site template, data views are broken because of errors in the GUID.
• When you use a data form against a SharePoint Server list that uses lookup fields, SharePoint Server does not submit the form correctly if the lookup source has 20 or more values.
• When you use a data form against a SQL Server data source, SQL Server ignores empty text values when you submit the form.
• You are not advised of any potential upgrade issues with your current SharePoint site configuration.
• You cannot successfully configure a Web part connection that contains a SharePoint Server filtering Web part.

Windows Sharepoint Services 3.0

• Site administrators can create policies on their site content types and can expire items using that content type. If a policy was set on any content type in a site, that policy can no longer be set on content types in the subsites of that site.
• Migrating data may encounter errors when uniquely secured folders contain draft items.
• You cannot use SOAP calls to restore a site that is two levels deep (/1/2/) if the first level does not exist (/1/).
• Search may not work correctly if some document properties contain high value surrogate Unicode characters.
• Calling the WebUrlFromPageUrl SOAP method may not work correctly on Web applications that have certain explicit inclusions.
• SharePoint does not allow some field names to be changed to their original values.
• Confusing errors may be displayed after a database is marked as read-only.
• A comment field is not available for posts on new sites that were created from a saved Blog site template.
• The mergecontentdbs command for STSAdm.exe will not work if the command is executed by a user who is not a site collection administrator.
• Users are not warned when their files exceed the maximum path.
• Pages may display errors when served from 64-bit servers.
• Large files may be changed unexpectedly after the files are checked out and then checked in.
• After a site reaches its quota, the site becomes inaccessible.
• List views fail when they are grouped by calculated fields or by lookups to calculated fields.
• Alerts may not be sent correctly on certain installation languages.
• Survey summaries might not be displayed correctly.
• Breaking permission inheritance may take a long time.
• Importing a site fails when the site that is being imported contains a subsite that has features that are activated.
• Sending e-mail for blog posts might not work correctly.
• Some Japanese content is translated incorrectly.
• Indexed columns may not be indexed after a view is deleted.
• The SharePoint timer service may stop working on 64-bit servers.
• SharePoint uses more memory than necessary for some operations.
• 32-bit systems may perform badly in low memory conditions.
• The operation fails when you try to import a site that has a workflow that is running on uniquely secured items.
• Invitation e-mail messages have broken links.
• Search may not work correctly in certain languages.
• Changing the usage log directory may prevent additional logs from being created.
• Survey questions do not display new lines correctly.
• List view Web parts that use groups do not page correctly when they are filtered by another Web part.
• A search may attempt to crawl sites that were removed.
• When a user selects [today] from the Modified field in a document library view, the following error message is displayed: “Filter value is not in a supported date format.” This issue is fixed in SP2.
• When a user selects [today] or [me] from the Modified field in a document library view, the following error message is displayed: “Filter value is not in a supported date format.” This issue is fixed in SP2.
• When a user selects [today] from the Modified field in a document library view, the following error message is displayed: “Filter value is not in a supported date format.” This issue is fixed in SP2.

A few interesting bits – I’ve highlighted the issues I’ve experienced myself – e.g. “When a workflow changes a list item and is set to trigger when items are changed in the list, the workflow continues to trigger itself indefinitely.” Waiting to see how it’s implemented – detection of workflow loop conditions would be really good.

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While I’ve been generally happy with IE8. However, the IE8 Datasheet View issues are really annoying – the datasheet view is really useful for bulk data entry/edits and I do use it almost every day.

Up till recently I’ve been running IE8 on my desktop but I’ve kept one of my servers running IE7 just so I can connect to it and use the datasheet view when needed.

What I only realised yesterday is that the IE Tab Firefox extension seems to be using an IE7 engine to render pages in Firefox.

What it means is I can open a list in Firefox and use datasheet view with all pre-IE8 features. Perfect!!

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Firefox compatibility with Sharepoint is not ideal. While pages will generally display fine there are little issues and quirks (e.g. lack of rich text editing for CEWP) that make Firefox rather unusable for your daily Sharepoint customization.

Using Firefox as your primary browser and launching IE for any Sharepoint-related tasks is an option. A rather cumbersome one though. Did you know you can keep your beloved Firefox as your default browser and use it for working with Sharepoint?

The IE tab Firefox extension will allow you to display pages in Firefox but render them using Internet Explorer engine.

The add-on works great – once you’ve installed it, go to the IE Tab Options dialog box and add the path to your Sharepoint site on the Sites Filter tab. From now one anytime you click on a link to your Sharepoint pages (e.g. workflow notification email link) the page will load in Firefox but will still offer all the formatting and features you’d expect from IE.

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As I mentioned yesterday I’ve decided to give blogging another chance. I’ve also decided I’d try posting relatively often by simply blogging about the different Sharepoint issues I run into everyday. Issues small and big. Most often small ones that nonetheless take quite a bit of time. An example of such an issue today:

Scenario:

We’ve got a top-level site called “Clients” which, in turn, contains over 170+ individual client sites. I sometimes need to perform an operation on each and every client site. I obviously try to automate things as much as possible. Very often I can achieve my goal using stsadm or one of the great Gary Lapointe’s STSADM extentions. I’ll write the command and use a batch file that reads through the list of client sites and executes the command for each file.

Problem:

New client sites are added on a daily basis – how do I get a list of all client sub-sites so I can use it with my batch file?

Solution:

1) Use the stsadm –o enumsubwebs command to list all subsites and export the output to a .csv file.

STSADM.EXE” -o enumsubwebs -url http://vit-intranet/clients >d:\clients.csv

2) Open the clients.csv file in excel

You’ll find that the stsadm output is formatted as follows

<Subweb>http://vit-intranet/clients/ABW</Subweb>
<Subweb>http://vit-intranet/clients/ACL</Subweb>
<Subweb>http://vit-intranet/clients/AGI</Subweb>
<Subweb>http://vit-intranet/clients/AGT</Subweb>
<Subweb>http://vit-intranet/clients/AKC</Subweb>
<Subweb>http://vit-intranet/clients/ALP</Subweb>
<Subweb>http://vit-intranet/clients/ALT</Subweb>
<Subweb>http://vit-intranet/clients/ASH</Subweb>

Obviously, in order to use a list of my sites in a batch file I need to get rid of the leading and trailing <subweb>  strings

3) Parse the client sites paths

Here are the steps:
a) Select the column containing the exported site paths
b) Switch to Data tab (Excel 2007) or open the Data menu (earlier versions of excel)
c) Choose “Text To Columns”, this launches the Covert Text to Columns Wizard
d) Choose the Delimited option on the fist page of the wizard, click Next
e) In the Delimiters section select “Other” and type in ” > ” (no quotes), click Finish

f) Repeat the steps for the “<” delimeter.

You now have a nicely formatted list of your subsites you can feed directly to a batch file.

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So after a long break I’ve decided to get back to blogging

Yesterday a new requirement was made that forced me to look at XSL to achieve my goal. I’d looked at some seemingly cryptic XSL code snippets before and found it to be very unappealing (to put it mildly). Turns out it can actually be fun and is definitely something I’ll delve into a bit more.

Scenario

We have a holiday booking system in place. Currently when requesting a holiday a user will be able to see his holiday allotment for the current year, the number of holiday days taken (or approved) and the number of holiday days remaining

Requirement

When booking a holiday users should also see the number of holiday days accrued to date.

Now, the holiday days accrued figure itself is easy to calculate – simply by dividing yearly holiday allotment by 12 we get a monthly accrual. Multiply it by the number of months up to today and you get the holiday accrued to date figure.

Calculated column and [Today]

The problem is in order to calculate the holiday accrued to date figure I need to use today’s date to parse the number of months passed from beginning of the year up to now.

This would be really easy to achieve using a calculated column. Unfortunately, Sharepoint doesn’t offer a Today() function that would consistently return today’s date. Sure you can use the [Today] variable in calculated columns – it will correctly return today’s date. However, visit the list tomorrow and you’ll find the variable is still stuck at it’s original value – it won’t automatically update to show today’s correct date. You’d need to update the list item (edit it) to force [Today] to update. This problem has been discussed many times – in fact there’re plenty of people out there who still think the work-around suggested by many people (creating a dummy [today] column, creating your formula and deleting the [Today] column) works. It doesn’t – Sharepoint will simply not update the value of [Today] dynamically (see The truth about using [Today] in calculated columns and Calculated columns – the useless [Today] trick for more details).

So how do I get today’s date I need to compute the holiday days accrued to date figure? I can’t store the value in my list itself – however, with a bit of XSL I can take the underlying list data, parse the dynamic Today value, perform my calculations and overlay the result in a ListViewWebPart.

Below are the steps I followed:

1) Create a new .aspx page in SPD
2) Add a new web part zone
3) Add a ListViewWebPart that displayed the Holiday Register list to the new web part zone (the Holiday Register list is used to Track each employees holiday allotment, holiday days taken or approved and holiday days remaining).
4) Convert the webpart to XSLT (“Covert to XSLT Data View” command.)

(Note: Real Employee names have been replaced by “Employee Name”

5) Add a new column to the far right, call it “Holiday Days Accrued to date”
Note: Since I can’t store the value of Today()  or Days Accrued to date in the list itself I will instead take the data available in the list and use XSL to dynamically generate and display the figures I need.

6) Now the fun begins. How do I display today’s value? I’ve looked through a few articles and found the ddwrt Today) function (for a good post about it see Displaying today’s date using XSL and SharePoint . )

I highlighted the Holiday Days Accrued to Date column, switched to code and replaced the auto-generated line of code:

<xsl:text xmlns:ddwrt=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/WebParts/v2/DataView/runtime” ddwrt:nbsp-preserve=”yes” disable-output-escaping=”yes”>&amp;nbsp;</xsl:text>

with

<xsl:value-of select=”ddwrt:Today()”/>

Cool, I now have today’s date displayed.

7) What I need here though is just the number corresponding to the current month (e.g. November – 11). Turns out there’s another function I can use

FormatDateTime(string szDate, long lcid, string szFormat);

Where:
string szDate - either an existing date column or a function (e.g. ddwrt:(Today())
long lcid - a number corresponding to the locale id (e.g. British English is 1033)
string szFormat - e.g. ‘yyyyMMdd’, ‘dd/MM/yyyy’ etc.

Combining the two functions together and using MM as my string szFormat I get the current month’s number

<xsl:value-of select=”ddwrt:FormatDateTime(string(ddwrt:Today()),1033,’MM’)”/>

8) So far so good, what I need now is to calculate the average monthly  holiday accrual. The monthly accrual would be my yearly holiday allotment divided by 12

I create a new monthly holiday accrual column and put in the following XSL string there:

<xsl:value-of select=”format-number(@Holiday_x0020_allotment, ‘#,##0.00;-#,##0.00′) div 12″ />

The string above takes the value of my Holiday Allotment column and divides it by 12. I’m not sure why but I had to use the format-number() function to format the number (I’m sure there are better ways to do that) – even though the holiday allotment is a number type column.

I then use the Round() function to round up (or down) the monthly holiday accrual figure:

<xsl:value-of select=”round(format-number(@Holiday_x0020_allotment, ‘#,##0.00;-#,##0.00′) div 12)” /></td><td class=”ms-vb”><xsl:value-of select=”ddwrt:FormatDateTime(string(ddwrt:Today()),1033,’MM’)” />

9) Almost there, all the remains now is to multiply the figures

Accrual days to date = monthly holiday accrual * (current month –1)

<xsl:value-of select=”round((ddwrt:FormatDateTime(string(ddwrt:Today()),1033,’MM’)-1)*(format-number(@Holiday_x0020_allotment, ‘#,##0.00;-#,##0.00′) div 12))” />

Note: XSL is quite particular when it comes to spaces and certain characters – I found it easier to use the built in XPath Expression Builder – you can invoke it by starting to type your xsl statement – e.g. <xsl:value-of select=  – the dialog box will appear allowing you to craft your code using an editor rather than typing stuff by hand.

10) We now need to filter the list so that each employee only sees his/her own holiday allotment.

Chose Common Data View Tasks > Filter and specified the following filter

Employee equals [Current User]

11) Now it’s just a matter of pasting the code behind the ListViewWebPart into my customized NewForm.aspx

Done. The above approach may not be ideal as the holiday accrual data in not tracked in the list itself. However, till the next release of Sharepoint (when the [Today] “issue” will hopefully be fixed) using XSL offers a workable solution.

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Was really sick for two weeks – hence the lack of posts. While I definitely didn’t enjoy the experience it was a good thing – made me really realize I need to change my lifestyle (exercise, diet etc.) if I want to enjoy plenty of energy and general health. Funny how sometimes you need a kick in the butt to get yourself into action…

Just a quick tip today. I often need to check the version of SharePoint running on a given server (e.g. to verify that certain updates have been installed). Simple enough – just open the Central Administration, navigate to the Operations tab, click on Servers in farm link in the Topology and Services section and verify the version. The problem is it’s a lot of clicking plus I support many deployments that have Central Administration web apps configured to run on different ports which makes things confusing.

What’s an easier solution? Open your SharePoint site in SharePoint Designer (can be the main site or any sub-site), click Site Settings under the Site menu on the top toolbar. Presto, you’ll find the version of SharePoint running the site on the general tab under SharePoint Services version (see picture below). You can then reference a site like this one to find the update level that corresponds to your version number (e.g. 12.0.06318 is WSS3.0 or MOSS 2007 with SP1 and Infrastructure Update KB951695 & KB951297).

Nothing special but tips like this one can save quite a bit of time.

Working with SharePoint every day I keep learning new things – techniques, tricks and hacks, great new resources in the blogosphere as well as the various issues and gotchas everyone familiar with SharePoint has become to expect . I intend to post my findings on this blog with the intention of giving something back to the amazing SharePoint blogging community.

I hope I will be able to post an interesting mix of information that will make this site worth your time.