When Software Attacks!

Displaying a SharePoint 2010 library on a page in a different site within the same site collection

One of our customers contacted us the other day with a problem. They wanted to put a view of a document library that was located in the top level site of a site collection onto the landing pages of all the second level sites in that collection. The customer had consulted the internet hive mind and found a blog post with instructions which had been diligently followed and yet whenever a user clicked ‘New’ on the ribbon bar an error occurred.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Fundaments of planning your beautiful SharePoint web site

This article is all about preparation. It’s about the thinking and planning you need to do if you’re going to successfully build your wonderful, unique and striking website on the SharePoint platform. I’ve been helping customers implement SharePoint solutions for quite a while. Life gets interesting when those customers want to use SharePoint to host their public website or an intranet of published content. SharePoint is a great platform with a host of powerful features that make it a solid choice for large or complex websites, sites that have to deal with large volumes of traffic or simply sites that need real business processes wrapped around the publishing model.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Making SharePoint 2010 search pages work with a proper master page

If you talk to those who know me about my pet hates in SharePoint, the search pages will come up every time. It’s not that I hate search itself – that’s great, but the minimal.master is just plain annoying. It makes the search centre a black hole into which you can fall but not navigate out of – there’s no navigation and the portal site connection doesn’t work. I’ve been meaning to get search working with a real master page (step forwards, v4.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Thursday, May 12, 2011

Content type replication not working on imported or migrated site collections

A while ago I posted about a hidden feature that was needed if you want to use Managed Metadata columns in your SharePoint 2010 sites. We were doing some 2007-2010 migration work for a client recently that also involved exporting and importing sites and site collections to rework the content structure. Once we’d got the new structure sorted we discovered that content type replication was not occurring on the site collections we had imported.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Monday, April 4, 2011

Content Types programmatically added to SharePoint libraries not appearing on New menu

This one caused some consternation, I can tell you. As usual, the solution could be found on the great wide web, but it took some digging, so as usual I am repeating it here. As part of a SharePoint migration we did recently, we replaced a SharePoint 2007 feature that the client was using (which added content types to libraries from a central list) with a mix of content type replication and PowerShell to add the content types to the libraries.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Monday, April 4, 2011

Avviso Page Templates and Editing Video

We’ve just put a video of the page templates and editing process up on the AvvisoSharePoint YouTube channel. Our plan is to add more videos over time to show the different things Avviso can do. Enjoy!

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Monday, February 21, 2011

Demonstrating Avviso at NEBytes on 23rd February 2011

avvisohead I am really chuffed to have been invited back to NEBytes for a follow-up to my last session on content publishing with SharePoint 2010. This time I’ll be demonstrating Avviso and talking about the thought processes that lead to its development, the problems we are trying to solve and where we’d like to go next. If you’d like more information about Avviso, take a look at my recent post.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Powershell to find missing features in SharePoint 2010

When migrating from SharePoint 2007 to 2010, no matter how hard you try there’s always the chance the the content database upgrade process will throw out errors about features being referenced that are not present in the farm. We have used Stefan Goßner’s WssAnalyzeFeatures and WSSRemoveFeatureFromSite (see his original article) to track down the references and exterminate them. It’s not the fastest thing on two legs though, and I have a fondness for having my SharePoint 2010 tooling in PowerShell because of the flexibility it gives me.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Friday, November 19, 2010

Enabling the TaxonomyFieldAdded feature to fix ManagedMetadata Column errors

We’re working on a solution at the moment that uses a custom site definition. For various reasons we stated with the Blank Site definition and worked from there. Our customisations include content types using custom columns that link to managed metadata term sets. We create all those through features – great! The tricky bit came when after deployment our managed metadata columns were greyed out. Examining the column we say an error telling us that the feature supporting the functionality was not activated.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Thursday, November 11, 2010

Powershell script to rename files for use as SharePoint 2010 User Profile thumbnails

User profile photos have changed in SharePoint 2010 in that they are now stored in a single image library in the MySite Host root site collection. They have also changed in that when you change the profile photo, SharePoint takes the file and creates three new images at specific sizes, then discards the file you gave it. These files have specific names to link them to the user account and come in small, medium and large flavours.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Thursday, July 29, 2010