From SharePoint with love

I love the new Alternate Access Mappings feature in WSS 3.0/MOSS 2007 but it can be a major pain in the behind.

One of the things you probably will stumble upon when installing MOSS is the need to expose some or all of the content to the outside. So far I've been lucky enough to deal with situations where it's all or nothing, making life somewhat easier. Still, there's quite a few things that can foul up the waters, including AAM.

Now, if you're going to expose MOSS, or any web site, to the outside you will want to do this via https (at least not plain old http) which means that you'll need to make sure that MOSS understands https:/… access and, most likely, start using https internally as well. This involves, besides installing certificates, changing the AAM settings.

The thing with AAM is that it (AFAIK, correct me if I'm wrong) controls all the automatic URL generation throughout that collection. This means that if you need to change the My Site location from http://mysite.corporate.com to https://mysite.corporate.com you need to update the AAM to reflect this. To do this you change the Default mapping for the My Site AAM collection from http://mysite… to https://mysite…

If you fail to change the AAM before you update the My Site location MOSS happily and without telling you changes back to http://mysite… If you're really lucky you'll get something along the lines of https://mysite.corporate.com:80 which, of course, doesn't go over very well.

Another thing to keep in mind is that when installing certificates for both the main MOSS web application and the My Site web application they need to be assigned specific IP-addresses or one of the applications will fail to start, most likely the My Site application. This is because even if you can use host headers for port 80 this doesn't work with SSL traffic.

In conclusion; be mindful of your AAM settings as they dictate quite a bit of what's happening in your MOSS server.

Addendum: After tinkering some more with my My Site and AAM woes (I got "Unknown error" when browsing the My Site URL) I realised that I needed AAM entries for https://mysite.corporate.com (Default) as well as http://mysite.corporate.com (Intranet). I can't explain this but I'm suspecting that there are some residue from the initial setup at http://… that requires MOSS to allow access to items even though we're actually using https.

Also, don't forget to update your trusted My Site settings so that both https://… and http://… are trusted.

While fooling around with the search result page I decided that it would be useful if my employees would be able to search explicit on these custom properties. I found a couple of tutorials on how to modify the "normal" advanced search page but not much on the people search page so I dug around a bit.

This is what I came up with (sorry for the rush job but I'm in a rush):

1. Browse to your advanced people search page.
2. Edit the page.
3. Modify the People Search Box web part.
4. Expand the Miscellaneous section.
5. Click in the Properties text field and open it up in the "builder" (click the … to the right of the field).
6. Add the custom property you want to be able to search on where you want it to show up in the form. Use the following syntax:
   <Property Name="YourPropertyHere" ManagedName="YourPropertyHere" ProfileURI="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:sharepoint:portal:profile:YourPropertyHere"/>
7. Click OK to save the modified form.
8. Test or publish your page as needed.

You should probably use Notepad or a similar text editor when editing the properties as some of the code that SharePoint spits out is quite messy.

EDIT: You need to modify both the search page (people.aspx) as well as the result page (peopleresults.aspx) if you want consistency in the search options.

Let me know if you have any problems with this and I'll do my best to help you out.

I've been trying to get my modified people search result web part to behave for some time. My problem was that my custom properties wouldn't show up no matter what i did. I followed Henry Ong's guide to the T without success.

After some searching I finally stumbled upon this post and, more importantly, the final comment of the post wich solved the problem for me.

When adding custom properties to your search result you must use lower case in the XSL-editor!

If you use "BeginnerSkills" the column will not be found and you have to use "beginnerskills" as your parameter name – even if you called the column "BeginnerSkills" when you included it in the Results Query Options section.

I have created a number of templates for various types of sites for our internal MOSS. One of these are a customer site that – among other things – has a subsite for all our projects related to this customer.

When I save this site as a template I include all the content as I've created a number of custom web part pages in a document library that we use but there is no way for me to include the project subsite.

Would it be possible to use a solution file for this? According to this MSDN article it doesn't sound like a solution file is the answer.

Is there an easy way to accomplish this or am I forced to create the project subsite manually for each new customer?

From time to time I need to elevate the permissions of a group of users. A recent example was when I created a FAQ discussion forum on our top level site in MOSS. Normally all our employees are visitors to the main site as we have special content managers for this site (it's a publishing site) but for this list they needed to be able to add content (contributor rights).

I've read a couple of different ways to handle situations where permission rights conflict like this and one golden rule I've heard is never to change the rights of a predefined group, such as giving visitors contributor rights. If you violate this rule you end up with a number of lists, sites and what have you where a visitor no longer is a visitor.

The "proper" solution, I would guess, is to create a new SharePoint group and call it "Contributors to this list" or some such, give it the proper rights and then add the users to this group. This is a rather cumbersome process though.

You could also add the users to the "Contributors" group but that would give them contributor rights to the entire site and that's a no-no – at least for me.

Lately I've found myself violating my golden rule more often than not by breaking permissions inheritance from the site the list resides in and then giving the orphaned visitors group the proper rights – simply because it's the easy way out.

How do you handle situations like this? Quick and dirty or by the book? Or maybe some other way?

Our internal MOSS 2007 is getting more and more attention as we're slowly migrating content to it. In the process we're alsow re-designing a lot of workflows and procedures for managing information. One problem we're facing as we ramp up the usage of MOSS is how to handle all the various tasks that are assigned to all the users.

We're at the moment about 15 consultants that are involved in about 10 to 20 customers each. These customers all have their own web site in MOSS where we have "To do" lists – lists that contain tasks that needs to be done at this customer. Any consultant can be assigned or assign herself to this task.

On top of this we have a number of projects for any given customer. These could range from one to many at any given time. These project sites contains a list with project tasks, tasks that are assigned to a consultant or sales representative. The number of tasks per project also varies but assume that we have at least 3 per person involved.

Now – how do I as a user of MOSS get a good overview of all my tasks?

I've been trying out a number of ideas but still haven't found one that I like (nor offers the functionality I want).

The first thing I tried was organizing the task alerts in Outlook but this goes against my mantra about using the correct information carrier for a certain type of information; Outlook is great for alerting me to the fact that I have a new task to do but I shouldn't have to rely on locating the task in Outlook.

Next up was My Site but the SharePoint Sites web part has several drawbacks:
A) I need to manually select every site I want to check for tasks
B) It doesn't aggregate porjeckt tasks or issues – only "regular" tasks

I decided to turn to the Site Aggregator web part (I think – our MOSS is in Swedish so I'm guessing here) and tried to filter out all tasks but that didn't work well either as it can only display one type of task at a time as well.

While searching for information about web services in WSS 3.0 I noticed that MSDN didn't have a certain page in English so I got the Japanese one instead.

I'm not sure how they figure that it was a good replacement as my knowledge of the Japanese language is in no way related to my knowledge of the English language…

Edit: Grabbing the WSS SDK provided me with the information I wanted in a language I could understand, by the way.

I'm currently creating a rather extensive list for a customer. Extensive as in "contains a lot of columns". We could've created a list based on a spreadsheet but that didn't feel as organic as creating the columns as we go along so I'm doing it one by one.

There are two minor gripes with this approach and the problem with minor gripes is that they become major gripes when encountered often enough.

First off the "Create new column" link slowly moves down and off the page as the new columns pile up in the list above it. This means that you need to scroll down more and more as you're looking for that link.

Secondly you might want to check out the actual form for various reasons and although you can (and should) have a separate tab/window/instance for this I know I'm going to confuse them sooner or later and end up with the "New column" form in both tabs/windows/instances.

My solution is to simply drag the link for the new column form to the quick links bar in IE/FF/your favorite browser. It's a lot easier to find and it's a lot easier to hit. Plus it doesn't matter what page I'm on – I can always get to the new column form quickly.

Much ado about nothing perhaps but it might make someone's day a bit more endurable.

As I needed to tamper with a customer site in a virtual lab environment I decided to do a one-off backup of it via the admin GUI.

After selecting the farm I decided to back this up to \sharepointtestc$ackup – a directory that I as administrator has full access to. To my frustration I got numerous errors that in ways indicated that the SQL databases was broken.

Panic ensued until I calmed down and started troubleshooting.

It turns out that you can not use the administrative share of C: (or perhaps any path with $ in it, I haven't had time to test yet) any drive in order to make a backup. Once I shared the backup directory on it's own and changed the path to \sharepointtestackup the backup went through without a hitch.

All the help has to say about backup locations is "The file share must be configured with the correct permissions and be a valid backup location." – something my first choice of backup path lived up to (depending on what a "valid" backup location is, I guess).

I guess that there's information about this out there somewhere but it was such a frustrating error that I thought it merited a post of it's own here as well.

Edit: I've checked and there's no restriction when it comes to hidden file shares – administrative shares are off limits though.

I've been struggling with the top link tabs for a customers WSS 3.0 site for some time now. Some of the tabs would be highlighted properly when selected and some would not – reverting to highlighting the first tab in the list when selected.

Searching for a solution to this yielded nothing of value (this is as close as I got) so I set out to try and figure out the logic behind it all.

It turns out that the reason some of the tabs didn't highlight properly was twofold;

• All links need to end with an actual web page. That is, you can not link to /sitename/listname/, you need to link to /sitename/listname/view.aspx.
• The link can not contain any spaces – not even if you subsitute them with %20.

After changing the faulty links so that they complied with the above guidelines they all highlighted properly when selected.

If you find this post helpful, please link to it so that it climbs up the ranks in Google – I had a hell of a time finding anything relating to this when searching.