Installing MOSS

I read Paul Swider’s blog post “Best Practice for User Accounts When Installing MOSS” today.  He is right on target, “there should be no surprises on install day”.  It is ironic that I read this blog today because I created a similar table to the one he has in his blog post earlier this week, to prepare for my SharePoint install this morning  (I installed MOSS, did basic configuration setting up a couple of web applications and SSP’s easily well before lunch).  Paul’s table was nicer, and I like his idea of phases which I thought of  in a similar way but couldn’t vocalize it as nicely as he did.

The point of this post is that he made me think a bit more about best practices, especially when installing MOSS.  Here are some off-the-cuff random thoughts I had on that topic:

• Did you download any service packs or patches that you might need installed PRIOR to your SharePoint install?
• If so, are they all in one easy to find folder, ready to go?
• Where are your CD’s/DVD’s – do you need them?
• Are you documenting your install in any way?  How?  Where?
• Do you have a scheme for naming your web applications, ssp’s, content db’s?
• What services are you going to configure?
• What is your indicator that you have successfully installed MOSS?  When do you stop this task, and move on to the next?

I like to have these things mapped out, in my mind and documented.  The process of install and initial configure should be straight forward and easy.  Just make your own check-list, include the critical details, and follow the steps.  Write down what you do as you do it and you won’t have to hunt for a port number or database later.  Being a bit anal pays off sometimes…my install day today was kind of relaxing.  By the way, I had Thai for lunch.

Enabling e-mail in a Document Library

There are many reasons why you might want to e-mail enable a Document Library in SharePoint.  One of them could be simply because some manager doesn’t want to navigate to the library to upload a file.  Another, better reason is because they are traveling and want to post a document  on your Intranet without having to VPN into your network.  Regardless of the reason, the steps to make this happen are easy so let’s get started.

Step 1 – Know what you want

• Do you want the documents to all go into the root library or into folders?
• Do you want anyone in the world to post files to this library?
• Will your e-mail system allow incoming email to route to SharePoint? (not sure, see references below)

I will assume you get those questions answered and are ready to go now.

Step 2 – Navigate to the Document Library you want to e-mail enable.  I will use “Shared Documents” for this example.

Step 3 – Select Settings > Document Library Settings

Select Document Library Settings from the Settings drop-down

Step 4 – Select Incoming email settings from the Communications section of the Library Settings page

Select Incoming e-mail settings

Step 5 – Enable Incoming e-mail

• Allow the document library to receive e-mail – yep, that is why we are here.
• Enter an e-mail name for users to send files to this library.  You may want to use some form of the document library name.  Since this is a test run for me, I used ‘testtony’ and plan to change it once I know it is working fine.  Note that the full email address contains “@sharepoint” dot your company domain.  This is something you may have to ensure your e-mail system will allow.  You also may have to setup a specific e-mail box and use that address here to allow it to work.  See the references at the end of this post.
• Select the appropriate options for E-Mail Message, and Meeting Invitations (if you are not sure just say No, it is likely the best option).
• Read the Caution under E-Mail Security and set the E-mail security policy.

Incoming E-mail Settings screen

Step 6 – Click OK and Test

Send an email to the address defined and see if it post to the Document Library.  In my case I am using the Subject line as the folder, so I am making sure that works by sending several emails with different subject lines/folder names.

REFERENCES:

Planning for Incoming E-Mail: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263260.aspx

Reference this article for details on configuring your SharePoint SMTP services:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262947.aspx

User Group Topics 9/17/2009

The Southern California SharePoint User Group meeting for September is this Thursday 9/17.     The groups meets monthly in San Diego.

Topics for this month are:

“ESRI MapIT for SharePoint”

and

“SharePoint from a Project Manager’s View”

Details can be found on the SoCal SUG site (link above).

Document Library Read Access

A user reports that they cannot see any files in a document library.  They have Read access, what is going on?  Yep, there are files in the library.  Here is the nitty gritty:

No ERROR will display, however a user with Read access to a document library (or folder or specific files depending on how permissions are enabled and if inheritance is broken) may not be able to see files in the library/folder.
If a Library has Versioning turned on, then by default files that are uploaded are marked as Draft’s.  Also by default people with Read access cannot see Draft documents.

Resolution options:

1. Turn Versioning off if it is not really needed for that library.
2. Change the versioning settings to allow draft’s to be seen by Readers.
3. Approve the draft document.
   

Additional Info about versions in SharePoint Document Libraries:

Versioning On – If approvals are setup, then a draft can be Approved and become visible to people with Read access – even if the versioning setting to view drafts is not set for readers.

When in the Versioning Settings screen for a Document Library, follow the link “Learn about specifying who can view and edit drafts” in the Draft Item Security section to learn more about these settings and how the permissions are impacted.

When content approval is required:

• You can specify whether files that are pending approval can be viewed by people with permission to read, people with permission to edit, or only the author and people with permission to approve items.
  
• If both major and minor versions are being tracked, the author must publish a major version before the file can be submitted for approval.
  
• When content approval is required, people who have permission to read content but do not have permission to see draft items will see the last approved or major version of the file.

Can’t browser enable form

Refer to: http://blogs.msdn.com/wael/archive/2008/08/27/this-form-template-is-browser-compatible-but-it-cannot-be-browser-enabled-on-the-selected-site.aspx

You need to do at least 1, 2 and 4 (3 may have been done already is doesn’t need to be repeated)

1.

stsadm -o activatefeature -filename IPFSSiteFeatures\feature.xml -force -url http://URLToYourSite

2.

stsadm -o activatefeature -filename IPFSWebFeatures\feature.xml –force -url http://URLToYourSite

3. You need to activate the ‘Office SharePoint Server Enterprise Site Collection features’ feature on Site Collection level.

4. iisreset

Workflow tidbits

I meant to post these awhile back, and I may add to this post over time as I collect or recall  the handy little learning’s that I have stored up in the nooks and cranny’s of my brain.

Starting a Workflow Manually

In order to manually start a workflow created in SPD (SharePoint Designer) the user must have Manage Lists permissions on that list.   The workflow can start “on new” or “on change” with just standard contribute permissions…but, starting it manually is considered “managing” the list.

EMail link to list item in a Workflow

If you want to go directly to the details of a particular list item (basically reconstructing the URL used by SharePoint) use the SPD workflow properties below to build your link:

“<a href=” & workflowProperties.SiteUrl & workflowProperties.ListUrl & “/DispForm.aspx?ID=” & workflowProperties.ItemId&”>”

List View Filtering

 

Here is something that I had to figure out that may help others…

Looking for NULL’s:
In your view, for the filter choose:

“Show items only when the following is true:”
then “Show the items when column”
Select from the dropdown [name of your column that can be blank]”
choose “is equal to”
then leave the text box blank.

  See my example using a blank Due Date:

 

Filter within a List View

 

 

 

 

Going back to your list, if you now use this view, it’ll only return results where the column is empty.

 

Filtering a View for a SharePoint List

Naming Custom Themes

Creating a custom theme in SharePoint isn’t very painful, especially if you are able to use most of an existing theme. I do this frequently enough that it isn’t a dreaded task. However, I was working on a custom theme today and l learned a new painful lesson.

It appears that your custom theme name cannot contain underscores ("_") or hyphens ("-").

Each time I attempted to implement a theme with either of those characters I ran into problems. Most common was a message that the theme "custom_theme 1011" already exists on the server, or is invalid. Sometimes it mentions the folder name or file. Regardless of the error message, the real culprit is your naming scheme if you are using the special characters mentioned above. I don’t have time to test now, but I suspect that most or all special characters will cause problems for custom theme names.

Renaming the ‘problem’ theme by removing the special characters (and modifying the associated XML and INF files) made the problem disappear. Previously, I had read blog posts saying that there was a character limit of 8 or 9 for the theme name. I have found this to be untrue. I have custom themes with 14 character names which work fine…as long as they don’t use special characters.

Authentication reference

Authentication

This post is reference material on a topic that can cause confusion and not everyone that should read this has read it.  I can’t word it better than has already been done so I am simply posting it with my formatting and emphasis added.  I hope SharePoint Magazine doesn’t mind.

In order for people to use a MOSS web application, the web application must validate the person’s identity. This process is known as authentication.  MOSS is not a directory service and the actual authentication process is handled by IIS, not MOSS.  However, MOSS is responsible for authorization to MOSS sites and content after a user successfully authenticates.  Authentication happens like this: A user points their browser at a MOSS site and IIS performs the user validation using the authentication method that is configured for the environment. If the user authentication is successful, then MOSS renders the web pages based on the access level of the user. If authentication fails, the user is denied access to the MOSS site.

Authentication methods determine which type of identity directory can be used and how users are authenticated by IIS. MOSS supports three methods of authentication: Windows, ASP.NET Forms, and Web Single Sign-On.

Windows Authentication is the most common authentication type used in MOSS intranet deployments because it uses Active Directory to validate users.  When Windows Authentication is configured, IIS uses the Windows authentication protocol that is configured in IIS.  NTLM, Kerberos, certificates, basic, and digest protocols are supported.  When Windows authentication is configured, the security policies which are applied to the user accounts are configured within Active Directory.  For example, account expiration policies, password complexity policies, and password history policies are all defined in Active Directory and not in MOSS.

When a user attempts to authenticate to a MOSS web application using Windows authentication, IIS validates the user against NTFS and Active Directory, and once the validation occurs the user is authenticated and the access levels of that user are then applied by MOSS.

REFERENCE (taken from): http://sharepointmagazine.net/technical/administration/microsoft-office-sharepoint-server-2007-security-model