Just Enough SharePoint to be Dangerous

SharePoint Saturday The Conference D.C.

Joy Adkins — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 14:50:43 +0000

The first SharePoint Saturday “The Conference” was held in DC this month, promising to help meet the huge demand in both the government and private sectors for SharePoint knowledge from information workers, business leaders, developers, and IT Pros by extending the SharePoint Saturday experience to three days. I was honored to be asked to present alongside some well-known international and domestic speakers. The turnout was fabulous, and the nominal fee ($39, $59, or free for volunteers) provided for a well-staffed event and a grateful group of attendees, many of whom expressed that the quality of the training was on a par with the larger paid conferences. This small fee, however, was a much easier sell to their government and non-profit employers.

My sessions on SharePoint in State Government and Business Consideration of the 2007 to 2010 upgrade went well, with lots of audience participation. As I’ve developed new sessions, I’ve enjoyed it more in more, because the sessions I present now are the ones I wish I had attended before learning the lessons the hard way. In addition to the great educational and networking opportunities at the conference, we had a huge response to another initiative, a ShareLove charity drive to gather personal grooming supplies and used cell phones to benefit domestic violence shelters. While the initial request was for folks to bring in their complimentary hotel toiletries, that request was one-upped with several people purchasing razors, hair spray and other items to donate. Special thanks to Dux Sy, Mack Sigman, Michelle Marie Strah, and Rima Reyes for making the collection of the items so easy by providing a single drop-off point for donations. The FEDSPUG user group plans to continue the initiative at their regular meetings as well.

Thanks to everyone for a great conference and charity initiative. The SharePoint Community rocks!

ShareLove Donation Box - Photo Courtesy of Michelle Marie Strah

ShareLove Call: Help Domestic Violence Victims with a Tiny Gesture as You Travel

Joy Adkins — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 14:44:45 +0000

“Does anyone at the hotel have any hair gel?” – Paraphrase of a tweet that made me laugh from Becky Isserman (@mosslover) while at a SharePoint conference. Who hasn’t experienced being far from home and forgetting a basic item you needed to feel clean and refreshed?

While this is an example of a minor personal grooming emergency, that feeling is universal. As my sister would say, “There are very few situations that a hot shower and a cold beverage can’t improve.” (Wise woman, that one!)

Of course, this blog post is about folks with situations a bit more dire than forgetful packing.

Among the many jobs I’ve had as a state employee, I’ve worked in the Victim Services division of the Oklahoma District Attorneys Council. It was there that I learned of an initiative to help shelters provide basic grooming supplies for people displaced from their homes because of domestic violence. Often, these clients arrive with little but the clothes on their backs and their children under their arms. It’s difficult to imagine the psychological abuse that goes into making a person think there is no other option but a violent relationship, or the pressure of knowing a victim is at the greatest risk of being killed when she attempts to leave. Small things, like clean clothes, personal care items, and a safe place to sleep, go a long way toward starting to counteract that damage and make a victim feel human again.

So what’s the initiative?

You know those little bottles of shampoo, lotion, and other personal grooming items hotels provide? The ones that, 9 times out of 10, you don’t use because you brought your own? Could you help a sista out by packing those into your suitcase for donation to a domestic violence shelter? These toiletries are the perfect size for people in temporary transitional housing, and you’ve already paid for them with your hotel bill.

What can I do?

If you’re going to see me at a SharePoint gathering in the next couple of months, you can save up your hotel toiletries and deliver the goods to me (in a plain brown package with no markings…just kidding!) and I’ll provide them to my local domestic violence coalition. Or, you can get contact information from the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence at http://www.ncadv.org/resources/StateCoalitionList.php / for a coalition office near you for use in local shelters. For security reasons, the addresses of shelters are not publicized, so the items can be dropped at the coalition office.

While you’re at it, if you happen to have some defunct cell phones in your closet of drawer, throw those in, along with the chargers. These phones can be reprogrammed so they only make 911 calls, even without a service carrier, and can be an emergency lifeline when an abuser refuses access to phones within the home during a violent episode.

My next speaking gig is SharePoint Saturday the Conference in DC. So if any of my SharePoint friends have supplies to drop off, find me! I appreciate any help you can give.

–UPDATED– The Federal SharePoint User Group (@FEDSPUG on Twitter) and Women in SharePoint DC (@WSPDC) have offered to collect the donations at their booth at SharePoint Saturday the Conference DC. Having a central location will make it easier for folks to bring in their items. My thanks to Marie-Michelle Strah, Mack Sigma, and Rima Reyes for their help on this.

SharePoint Login Screen Defaults to Wrong Domain

Joy Adkins — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 20:01:57 +0000

Problem: When users are prompted for login credentials, the login screen defaults to an incorrect domain. While users can continue the login by providing their user name in domain\username format, non tech-savvy users find this annoying and confusing. This behavior may not be consistent from one client machine to another.

Cause: The client machine was joined to the wrong domain. This situation occurred after all users and computers were moved from one domain to another in Active Directory. The client machine in question was missed during the move of computers between domains, so that the machine retained a setting of the old domain. Windows Authentication defaulted to the domain of the client machine.

Resolution: Join the client machine to the correct domain. In Windows 7, with an account with admistrator privileges, Control Panel>System>Change Settings. On the Computer Name tab, click Change… Provide the full domain name. OK.

Many thanks to systems administrator Dino Jaha who discovered the root of this issue and provided the workaround.

Document Library Prompts to Save PDF Although Web Application Set to Permissive

Joy Adkins — Fri, 13 May 2011 16:06:05 +0000

Problem: Users are prompted to save the file when clicking a PDF document link in SharePoint, and no option is given to open the file without saving. This behavior may not be universal, and may affect only a single or a few document libraries, while the remaining libraries open the document as expected.

Cause: By default, SharePoint 2010’s handling of documents in the browser is set to “Strict,” a setting which, with some file type exceptions, will not allow documents to be opened directly in the browser. Most users notice this when attempting to open files of type PDF. While this setting is set in Central Administration* at the web application level, and making a change there should affect the BrowserFileHandling property of all libraries within the web app, in some cases a library may “lose” this setting and may retain a different property setting than the rest of the libraries within the web app. Most cases mention some type of customization of the library (adding a content type, creating the library from a template, etc.) as the action initiating the setting change.

Resolution: Each library has a BrowserFileHandling property. Craig Lussier (http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepoint2010setup/thread/95a9f8fa-3da6-4bb7-9983-2102910ff4aa ) offers the following PowerShell commands to verify and/or update the property for the given library:

#Get Web
$web = Get-SPWeb “http://yourspweburl”

#Get Document Library
$docLib = $web.lists["Your Document Library Title"]

#View all properties/methods of the Document Library and you’ll see that BrowserFileHandling is a property
$docLib | Get-Member

#See the current BrowserFileHandling setting for the Document Library
$docLib.BrowserFileHandling

#If you need to change it from Strict to Permissive
$docLib.BrowserFileHandling = “Permissive”
$docLib.Update()

Another user states that this issue is reportedly fixed in the Dec 2010 Cumulative Update.

Cautions: While this script fixed the problem, researching the issue reveals the potential security risk involved with the “Permissive” setting. As an all-or-nothing setting, SharePoint will not only open PDFs in the browser, but may also open other types of files, including those that may contain malicious content. As an alternative, administrators may choose to add the PDF file type to the list of exceptions to the strict file handling setting, as described here: http://www.pdfsharepoint.com/sharepoint-2010-and-pdf-integration-series-part-1/ .

*From Central Administration, Manage Web Applications>Select the Web App>General Settings>General Settings> Browser File Handling

Domain Users with Foreign Email Addresses Unable to Get SharePoint Alerts

Joy Adkins — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 20:45:32 +0000

Problem: A small group of external users were given AD accounts and domain user group membership, allowing them login access to the SharePoint intranet environment. These AD accounts were set up with the user’s email account from a different domain (in this case, a Gmail business account with an @contoso.com alias). These users were able to successfully set up a SharePoint alert on a document library without errors, but the users never received a confirmation email or any subsequent alert emails.

Cause: The Exchange server was preventing relay of the messages from SharePoint to the external domain.

Resolution: Within Exchange, the foreign domain was added to the list of Accepted Domains in the Hub Transport.

From within the Exchange Management Console:

Microsoft Exchange- Organization Configuration- Hub Transport – (tab) Accepted Domains – Add the needed External Relayed Domains

Caution: allowing mail relay to foreign domains, particularly common Internet domains such as gmail.com or yahoo.com, may present added security risks. See the Tech Net article referenced below for a discussion of techniques to mitigate these risks.

Many thanks are owed to System Administrator Dino Jaha and Exchange Administrator Jeff Noyes for researching this solution.

For more discussion of the hub transport role, email relaying, and screen shots of Exchange 2007, see Tech Net’s article:

Configuring Exchange 2007 Hub Transport role to receive Internet mail

Quick & Dirty: Change the Icon in the Browser Tab & Address Bar for a SharePoint Site

Joy Adkins — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 19:06:23 +0000

We had a request to change the icon in the browser tabs and address bar for a SharePoint site from the “Weeble People” default icon to our organization’s logo. This logo is round, and the user requested that any white space around the logo be made transparent, similar to the Internet Explorer default icon.

I’m no branding expert. The fact that the change must be replicated on all WFEs makes me guess that there is likely a more elegant solution using CSS and master pages and other web designer magicalness. And glitter. Lots of glitter.

Anyway, here are the steps to an admin hack that got the job done:

Create a favicon ico file from your logo. A free generator (http://www.favicon.cc ) can create an ico file from other picture file formats (jpg, png, etc). Be aware that the number of pixels is limited, so a scaled down, less detailed logo works best.
After uploading your file, you can use the Transparent Tool to remove any undesired background.
Name your new file favicon.ico.
Locate the existing favicon.ico file in the 14 hive:

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\IMAGES

Rename the existing file and copy your new favicon.ico file to this location.
Repeat the file renaming and pasting on each WFE server.
Wait.
Wait. Seriously, it takes a bit for the change to show up. Clearing your browser history (including unchecking the IE option to retain data from favorite sites) and restarting IIS may help, but it still took up to an hour in my environment. [Anyone with suggestions to speed this up? I’m all ears!]

Note: This changes the icon for the root site and all sub sites.

Preventing Multiple Authentication Prompts on a SharePoint Intranet Site

Joy Adkins — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 19:56:18 +0000

Preventing Multiple Authentication Prompts on a SharePoint Intranet Site

Users found multiple prompts for authentication prompts annoying, and I can’t say I blame them. A few prompts in and I was ready to stab the monitor with a letter opener. The following settings were added to Group Policy to prevent the multiple authentication prompts:

The SharePoint site was added to the local machine’s Intranet Zone in Internet Explorer.

The option for “Automatic logon with current username and password” was enabled for the Intranet Zone only.

We also enabled “Display mixed content” in order to avoid prompts regarding http and https displayed on the same page. This setting is not required to avoid multiple authentication prompts, but was needed to avoid alerts on a legal research page displaying content from a non-secure public site in a Page Viewer Web Part.

: Group Policy Settings

Cautions:

Note that users may still receive an authentication prompt when opening Office documents such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or Visio stored in SharePoint. When opened from a document library in SharePoint, users can usually choose Cancel to have the document open successfully. When opened from a “recently used files” list within an Office program, or when retrieval of a document on the server is particularly slow due to document size or bandwidth issues, the user may face multiple prompts. The only solution to this I’ve found is a registry hack found in this KB article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/943280/en-us This hack allows WebClient to send the current login credentials to a particluar listed site (or a wildcard URL such as *.company.net).

Use of the relaxed settings called for in this post may be inappropriate for a publically facing site. These settings are applied to the local machine only and affect only IE browser settings. Users hitting the site from off network machines may need to configure the browser settings manually.

SharePoint Best Practices Conference 2011

Joy Adkins — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 14:27:04 +0000

It was my privilege to speak at the SharePoint Best Practices Conference in La Jolla, California last week. While unfortunately a respiratory infection had me at the Spriggs clinic for most of a day, and had the attendees enjoying the Eartha Kitt version of my voice, the conference was, all told, a success. I was excited that the debut of my presentations “Real World Business Considerations of the SharePoint 2007 to 2010 Upgrade” and “SharePoint in the Mid-Sized Government Agency” went well with lively attendees asking great questions.

Wow, you should have seen the lineup of speakers! If not for large doses of cough medicine, I would have been intimidated by association with the likes of Ruven Gotz, Sarah Hasse, Becky Isserman, Lori Gowin, Cathy Dew, Mark Rackley, Jennifer Mason, Michelle Strah, Matt McDermott and Richard Harbridge. And beautiful La Jolla was graced with a fine international presence with Zlantan Dzinic, Alistair Pugin, and Veronique Palmer from South Africa (Ok, Z is in the US now, and has lived in several countries, but I still count him as a Saffie!) and Agnes Molnar & Brett Lonsdale from Hungary and the UK, respectively. Typhoid Joy didn’t manage to cough her way through too many other introductions, but it was fun to see Todd Bleeker, Brian Alderman, Chris Givens, Bill English, and Kay McClure at least in passing.

BPC is the business-persons’ conference. Of course, we all have a stake in making the business successful, but many times, we IT folks focus soley on the technology. Bridging that divide between IT and business management is the goal of BPC. Technology for tech’s sake is not going to win the hearts and minds of our users or the decision-makers who must weigh SharePoint among the many other possible IT investments. Even for those who use the “almost free” Foundation version, investing in the business process changes necessary to leverage SharePoint’s star features represents a significant sea-change for the business, and the handling of that change may mean the difference between SharePoint’s acceptance or rejection. Addressing the business implications of SharePoint deployments, and not just the technical implications, sets BPC sessions apart. For that reason, BPC is my kinda conference.

SharePoint Alerts Not Working for Group Recipients

Joy Adkins — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 21:08:06 +0000

SharePoint Alerts not Working for Group Recipients

After upgrading from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010, we had an issue with alerts not working for some group recipients. Individual alerts worked, and some group recipients received alerts as expected.

Troubleshooting Steps

* Checked that other alerts were working normally. (If not, check the timer service)

* Verified that the group was an AD security group (not a distribution list), and that the AD group was email-enabled.

* Checked that the group had been explicitly added to a SharePoint group (such as the default Viewers group) with at least read permission to the site and to the list on which the alert was created.

* Verified that the SharePoint group’s membership was set to “Visible to everyone.” (People and Groups>SharePointGroupInQuestion > Settings>Group Settings)

* Manually triggered a full synchronization of the User Profile Service with synchronizations settings of “Both People and Groups”). Caution: this can be time consuming and may affect performance in large environments. Do this outside production hours if possible.

Resolution

When none of these efforts resolved the issue, the following forum held a suggestion from Xing-Bing Yu to change a Mail Flow Setting for the group on the Exchange server:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepointworkflow/thread/36c3b5b5-af03-4f8a-b202-b62db330c21c/

1. Go to Exchange Management Console -> Recipient Configuration -> Distribution group.
2. Right-click on the problem group and choose properties.
3. On the Mail Flow Settings tab, double click on Message Delivery Restrictions.
4. Uncheck the check box “Require that all senders are authenticated”.

After the Exchange 2007 setting was changed, the alerts emailed as expected to all recipients.

When selected, this setting restricts the ability to send a message addressed to the security group to those persons in the Global Address List. SharePoint’s SMTP address was seen as foreign, so any messages with a sending address from SharePoint were not relayed from Exchange.

Errors Opening Office Documents or Exporting to Excel from SharePoint or Project Server

Joy Adkins — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 15:16:06 +0000

Errors Opening Office Documents or Exporting to Excel from SharePoint or Project Server

Symptoms:

Attempting to Export to Excel from Project Server fails silently for some users, but works as expected for others.

When attempting to open an Office document such as Word, Excel, or Visio, the user receives an error: “The document could not be opened for editing. A Windows SharePoint Services compatible application could not be found to edit the document.”

Causes:

One or all of the reference files which handle how SharePoint interacts with Office programs are missing, or

The user has a new version of Office and has not opened the needed application for the first time.

Resolution:

To install the missing reference files and/or repair the installation of Office, follow this KB article:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/833714

To correct the “application could not be found” error in the case of an Office upgrade:

Have the user open the application directly from the Programs menu. Upon opening the application, Windows will register the file association for that document type with the new version of the application, and that information will be available to SharePoint.