Strausy's O365/SharePoint KB

As of recently, SharePoint is starting to take off here at my current employer. Good and Bad. Good is that it is my responsibility and I’m happy to see the usage take off like a jet plane. Bad because everyone is starting to use it all at once and they all want to “tweak” or “change” or “customize” all the things SharePoint does. Except there is one problem. They use those terms to describe what I would consider SharePoint development. Things they want are not built-in, require custom coding of web parts, extensive use of either SharePoint Designer or Visual Studio. So what is the problem with that? 1) I’m not a developer. I have done custom pages, custom workflows, etc., but not rewriting SharePoint controls like the Contact Details web part. 2) These simple “tweaks”  are not simple. Heck, they don’t even know how to upload documents to SharePoint and they want to have the Rich Text Editor work like Word. In SharePoint 2007, that is not how it works. Back to the point, to cu...

Sometimes I’m just baffled by how SharePoint makes the simplest of things so difficult. Case in point is the lack of a link back to your SharePoint portal from your My Site. Why? Well, the SharePoint structure isn’t apparent to the average end user. They don’t know that each My Site is a separate Site Collection, but why do we need to punish them (and their laziness) and make it difficult to get back the portal? This can be solved various ways. Some tedious, some simple. This is the simplest way I have seen to do it. Launch the Central Administration URL. Go to the Shared Service Provider site specific to the My Sites (if you have more than one) Under “User Profiles and My Sites” select “Personalization site links” Add a New Item For the URL enter your Portal address, including the Default.aspx page Add a “#” symbol at the end. Enter a description and owner and your set. What does the # symbol do? It tells your browser to ignore anything after it. T...

I will reiterate that most my posts are not for the true SharePoint Developer. Those using Visual Studio to do most, if not all, of this custom application will find better ways for the most part. No, this post is for people who want to use SharePoint out of the box and then have found themselves using SharePoint Designer workflows. A reoccurring problem I have is that when I create a SharePoint Designer Workflow and decide later I need to redo it. I create a workflow that assigns a task and name that say "Task 1". This creates a list content type and a site content type. Later I delete that section of my workflow, but I go back later to add it again, choosing the name it Task 1 again, but you get an error messaging stating it is already in use. Knowing full well you were the one that deleted it, how do you go about using that same name? First, go to you Task list settings. There will be a section called Content Types. Select the one you want (in this case Task 1) and d...

Here is a new one I ran into the other day. The user was using the standard Collect Feedback workflow on a Shared Document library. Then another user noticed that they received an email stating their task was overdue, even though it stated it was Completed in the Tasks list. Initially I noticed that users were stating their Tasks were complete, but had percent complete ranging from 0 to 100%. A pet peeve of mine for sure, but why does this matter? The Collect Feedback workflow relies on this field to be 100%, otherwise the workflow never finishes. So after a chance Google search I found a Microsoft KB article with a similar issue on the Approval workflow. As it turns out the Assigned To column must be set to allow only one person per task. Allowing multiple entries prevents the workflow from marking percent complete at all. Here is how to change that setting. Go to the Tasks list Go to Settings > List Settings Under Columns, select Assigned To Make sure "Allow multiple...

Over the years I have spent countless hours trying to find solutions to different problems or bugs in SharePoint. I'm thankful that I've had the opportunity to provide these solutions for many different companies in need. What I'm not thankful for is that one power user in each company tends to find the little annoyances in SharePoint that drive me crazy. Things that have always annoyed me, things that I have to continually find a workaround for. That is why I created this blog. There has to be others out there that need this same information, that aren't SharePoint Developers, but SharePoint Administrators that need better information. I'm not saying the information already out there isn't good, it's usually just poorly organized. Sometimes it is just really poorly written. And lastly I have seen many posts that are technically correct, but just don't follow through with a good solution that others can easily digest. I'm also going to spend so...