Tips & Tricks

1/13/2010

There are many times when you would like to track the history of a record. For instance you have a contact list of your clients on your SharePoint site and you would love to know who has talked to the client in the past and a brief overview of their conversations so you can talk intelligently to them. Here's how to set up a Time Stamp on the notes field that will automatically record the time the record was edited and who edited it.

Step 1: Go to the list and click Settings/List Settings

Step 2: Select Versioning Settings

Step 3: Set the Item Version History to "Yes"

Step 4: Go back to the list Settings and click on the "Notes" column

Step 5: At the bottom of the Notes column stettings select "Yes" for Append Changes to Existing Text

Step 6: You are all done! Now go edit a record in your list and add a comment to the Notes field. Here is an example of what the finished product will look like:

Posted at 1:46 PM by Michael Fuchs | Category: Tips & Tricks | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

3/1/2009

Post to your SharePoint blog using your iPhone

Once you are securely logged in to your SharePoint site adding a post to your SharePoint blog is a snap. You have the same functionality that's available on your laptop or PC... Save as a draft, publish, add categories, etc. While the interface is smaller, you can publish to your blog from anywhere.

Posted at 7:16 AM by Michael Fuchs | Category: Tips & Tricks | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (1)

1/8/2009

Opening Documents in the Browser

Documents that live in SharePoint Document libraries will open by default in the documents application. i.e. Word, Excel, PowerPoint etc. In SharePoint version 3.0 you have the ability to set all documents to open in the browser window. Here are the steps:

Go to the Document Library and click Settings/Document library Settings

Next Click on Advanced Settings

Then look for the Browser Enabled Documents section and select "Open as a Web page"

Posted at 9:32 AM by Michael Fuchs | Category: Tips & Tricks | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

1/7/2009

Using Surveys on Anonymous SharePoint Sites

One of the nicer features of SharePoint are Surveys. They allow you to create a set of questions (both multiple choice and open) and have users of the site fill them in. It allows for selections from a set list, rating scales (where you rate a number of items along ascale from, say, 'not at all' to 'extremely') and even flow logic (where the outcome of one question causes certain questions to be skipped).

For intranet-type team sites, this just works like a charm. For public sites with anonymous access however, it turns out not so easy. To fill out a form, the user must have write access to the survey's library for example. Normally, we of course never allow write access to anonymous users. This article will show you how to configure your survey for use on a public anonymous web site (it involves a little trick). Note that this tutorial applies to ALL flavors of SharePoint, both WSS 3.0 as any of the MOSS 2007 licenses.

Create the survey
In this tutorial, we assume that you already have a SharePoint site set up and that it is accessible to anonymous users (check this article for a tutorial). First we create a new survey by selecting 'Survey' from the Site Settings page. You will see this screen:

We enter a title and description for the survey and select a few navigation options. When we click Next, we see this screen, allowing us to create the first question of the survey:

You can add any number of questions to the survey, distributing them on multiple pages through inserting page breaks. Eventually, you click Finish to create the survey. You will be redirected to the Survey Settings page:

From this page, two links are important to us: 'Advanced Settings' and 'Permissions for this survey'. We first go to 'Advanced Settings'.

Set advanced settings On this screen, we set 'Read Access' to 'All Responses', 'Edit Access' to 'Only their own' and 'Allow items from this survey to appear in search results' to 'No'. Setting read access to 'All Responses' seems a bit weird. After all, you will normally not want your anonymous users to see the responses of all other users. We will change this back later, but for some reason, it is necessary to select this option here.

Set Permissions
Next we go to the permissions screen:

The survey by default inherits the permissions from the site, but for anonymous surveys this will not do. By selecting 'Edit Permissions' from the 'Actions' menu, you can specify specific permissions for this survey.

The Setting menu has now appeared and from it, we choose 'Anonymous Access'.

In this screen, make sure that the check boxes for 'Add' and 'View' are selected.
Set advanced settings again
If this is alright, we can go back to the 'Advanced settings' screen to set Read Access back to 'Only their own'.

There, you're set. The survey can be filled out by all anonymous users, but they cannot see each others entries. The information entered in these forms will be stored in the survey's library and you can inspect each entry or view aggregated graphs of all entries. So what happened here? We first set the 'Read Access' to 'All Responses', because only then can we set the Anonymous Access settings (all check boxes will be greyed out otherwise). But after setting the permissions, we can safely turn access to all responses off again. This procedure is a bit odd, but it works.

Drawbacks
Some parts of the default SharePoint survey functionality may not be exactly as you would like it: Even if you set 'Allow multiple responses' to 'No', anonymous users will be allowed to enter the same survey many times. Most Internet polling applications would try to prevent this using cookies or IP address tracking, but none of this is even tried by SharePoint. For most surveys this is not a problem, but don't use this functionality for 'Voting'.You cannot use surveys of multiple pages. For these, you need to store and edit the surveys information and there is no way to set up the surveys to allow anonymous users to update their own record and not allow them to see and edit all other users' information. So don't use that Page Break type!Users can see the Survey summary page, which displays the number of entries. This may not always be as desired. You can send users directly to the form, but the survey summary will still be accessible if you know the URL.You will probably want to be alerted whenever someone enters a survey, but SharePoint does not support alerts on list that allow users to see only their own entries. Not even for administrators. You might be able to keep track of new entries by consuming the RSS feed from the survey.

Posted at 8:23 AM by Michael Fuchs | Category: Tips & Tricks | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

1/6/2009

Add Links to SharePoint Document Libraries

Document Libraries are great for storing documents so that everyone can access them in one place. In addition you have the ability to Check In & Check Out documents and they can be automatically versioned. But what if you need to link to a document or resource that doesn't reside in the document Library? What if you need to link to a web site or a white paper that lives somewhere else on the web?

With WSS 3.0 and Content Types you now have the ability. Here's how:

1. In your document library click Settings/Document library settings.
2. Under the General Settings column click Advanced Settings.
3. Select "Yes" next to Content Types and click OK

4. Next, back on the Settings page click "Add from existing Content Types"

5. Select "Link to a Document" under Available Site Content Types and click the Add button and then OK.

6. Now back on your document library when you select the New button you have the option to add a link in addition to a document or folder.

Posted at 9:12 AM by Michael Fuchs | Category: Tips & Tricks | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

5/3/2008

Formulas and Functions

You might have noticed when creating new colums for a list or library that one type of column is called "Calculated (calculations based on other columns)" This can add a world of functionality if you know how to use it. First off, here is a link to a list of functions provided by microsoft. As an example, I had a contact list that included each employee's date of hire. I created a view to show only the employees who had their anniversary this month. I wanted to sort the view by the day of the month they were hired, so that regardless of the year, those hired on the 1st were first in the list and those on the 31st were last. To do this I created a calculated column and set the formula to "=day([Date Hired])" so that the column resulted in only a number from 1 to 31. Then all I had to do was sort the view by this calculated column.

Posted at 11:02 AM by Michael Fuchs | Category: Tips & Tricks | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)