Michael Wilcox's Blog » sharepoint

Logging into Sharepoint Designer

Michael — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 10:43:09 +0000

This may be obvious to others, but I was having some problems with not being able to control how I logged into SharePoint Designer. I have a couple of accounts – one for normal work, and one with admin privileges. What I found was that SharePoint designer would log in variously with one or the other of these user accounts, without any obvious way of amending it to log in with the other account.

The solution was to go to Internet options, and remove my sharepoint site from the trusted zone. This requires me to log in to the sharepoint site with IE (i.e. not automatically from my domain login), and SharePoint Designer shares this behaviour.

Preselect a tab in the 'New SharePoint Site' page

Michael — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 10:38:41 +0000

I tried to find the answer to this one for too long. It may be obvious to most intelligent people but this one’s for the rest of us.

In our SharePoint site we make an individual site for each project and these are all kept under one Project Management uber-site. This means that we’re often creating new project sites using a custom template I’ve developed.

I wanted to provide a simple link which would shortcut to the create a site page and pre-select the appropriate custom template. Thanks to some advice here I’ve got halfway there and can now make my link show the appropriate tab. The trick is to simply add ?DisplayCategory=TabName to the URL.

In my case because I’m using a custom template I want the custom tab selected, so:

https://sharepoint.oursite.ac.uk/IS/Projects/_layouts/newsbweb.aspx

becomes

https://sharepoint.oursite.ac.uk/IS/Projects/_layouts/newsbweb.aspx?DisplayCategory=Custom

Any help with pre-selecting the actual template would be appreciated.

SharePoint vs File Server

Michael — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 13:40:03 +0000

OK – so it can’t directly replace a file server. Probably obvious, but this post neatly describes why. I’d summarise – if:

it’s not big
it’s not clever, and
it’s not a movie

then it’s probably Ok.

Show all subsites in a webpart

Michael — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 22:44:20 +0000

I’ve been looking for a while to find a webpart that would show all the subsites of a particular sharepoint site. If you google this, there appear to be lots of people looking for the same thing.

Well, I’ve just found an old reference which, a slight update for MOSS 2007 seems to work at a basic level. The source is: Show Sub Sites in WSS Sites but you have to look out for the “Attachment launch now!” bit. I’m going to repeat the relevant bit here but updated for 2007 (apologies if this is done elsewhere…)

Show sub sites in MOSS sites

You can use SharePoint Designer to show a list of sub sites in a MOSS site.

An example of a sub site is a document workspace. An overview of all available sub sites provides an easy way for users to navigate to these workspaces.

1) Open your site in SharePoint Designer

2) Open the Data Source Library task pane

3) Connect to the XML Web Service that provides information about the sub sites.

Click on Connect to a web service in the XML Web Services section.
In the Data Source Properties enter the Service description location: http://ServerName/sites/YourSiteName/_vti_bin/Webs.asmx?WSDL
Click on Connect Now and select:
- Port: WebsSoap
- Operation GetWebCollection

4) Add the information to your home page

You can drag and drop the newly created data source to your home page. A list of sub sites will be shown.

5) Change the way the information is shown.

By default a plain list of the sub sites will be shown. You can change this list, and for instance make the URL’s clickable. As you hover over the title field, right click and select:

Data Field: Title
Format as: Hyperlink

6) Amend the rest of the layout to suit your design.

That’s it – I’m no coder so this comes with all usual warnings but it seems to work for me.

My Sharepoint site templates are missing content in the wiki

Michael — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 14:24:19 +0000

(About time I started this again… beware though, you may notice a sharepoint theme developing.)

SharePoint allows you to create a site template by simply saving a site as a template. This is fine, but buggy and I’ve come across some holes recently.

The latest problem for me is that the site template I’m trying to create needs to have some content in it. Should be easy enough as the screen for saving a template has an option for this.

This works fine on my customised Project Tasks list, but unfortunately seems not to work on my Wiki which contains 4 pages. All pages appear to be in the list, named correctly, but only the first page retains it’s actual content.

Any help appreciated! I’ll post an answer if I find one.