John Roe

Starting SharePoint designer workflows and "Access Denied"

John — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 19:59:00 GMT

I recently created a sharepoint designer workflow and only site collection administrators could start it. Other users, even those that had full control on a site could not start it and would get an "access denied" message if they tried. To fix it I opened the site in SharePoint designer right clicked on the workflow in the folder list and checked the whole thing out. I then checked the workflow back in and it worked.

Reports in SharePoint Designer

John — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 19:26:00 GMT

SharePoint designer provides some often overlooked reports on SharePoint sites, they are accessible through the reports button on the bottom toolbar. Summary information is provided on:

Usage Data - advanced usage reports that are site and item specific, including hits and visits
Pictures
Unlinked files
Linked files
Slow Pages - based on page load time
Older Files
Recently Added Files
Checked out files
Hyperlinks - Internal/External links and the ability to verify that both types of links are functioning properly
Pages with Component errors
Style sheet links
Master Pages
Customized Pages

In addition to this summary information it's possible to drill into specific reports and produce graphs/charts on the data. Keep in mind that usage logging must be enabled to view these reports.

Applying Metadata automatically to all files in a folder

John — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 22:57:00 GMT

Metadata can be incredibly useful for organizing files within a document library. However the process for filling out the metadata on individual documents can often be time-consuming even using things such as the data-view to apply the metadata to a large number of files. Not to mention the process of checking in and approving those files if those features are enabled. I've actually been asked a number of times if there was a way to apply metadata tags to a file based on the folder it is uploaded into. This is not possible out of the box, however with a simple event handler this can be enabled. Mark Gerow from law.com recently published an article that describes enabling this functionality for a law firm here: http://www.law.com/jsp/legaltechnology/pubArticleLT.jsp?id=1202424667503 . The nice thing about this solution is that although the event handler is custom it allows the site administrators to configure it through the out of the box interface for SharePoint by adding additional folder content types.

MOSS and WSS SDK v1.4 Released

John — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 22:29:00 GMT

A new version of the MOSS and WSS SDK was released on August 29th. Amongst other things it includes updated documentation for the records management APIs as well as several completely new articles on utilizing remote BLOB storage with SharePoint. The APIs for remote BLOB storage were added with SP1 but in my opinion have not been very well documented until now.

View the SharePoint Team Blog Post on the Release

Download the WSS SDK 1.4

Download the MOSS SDK 1.4

Best Practices Conference

John — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 19:56:00 GMT

For all those interested in SharePoint best practices, there is a conference Sept. 15-17 devoted to it. Looks like they'll have some good sessions. More info can be found here: https://www.sharepointbestpractices.com/