Folders and Metadata

Andreas Strothmann has an excellent post about using metadata on folders in SharePoint 2007, in combination with content types.

I know there are many good reasons not to use folders and stick to metadata and views, but large libraries might require the use of folders for performance or manageability reasons. It is always recommended to use metadata on your documents in the first place, but using this tip you can also apply this metadata on a folder.

Check it out: http://www.mindbusiness.de/blog/2007/05/02/sharepoint-folders-and-metadata/

BDC Definition Editor

Microsoft has released a tool to assist in the creation of a BDC (Business Data Catalog) definition file. More information can be found here: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb736296.aspx

The BDC Definition Editor is also available in the latest SharePoint 2007 SDK: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms550992.aspx

Hiding Site and List Templates

There may be occasions where you want to disable certain site templates or list templates to prevent site administrators to create specific lists or sites.

The mechanism for hiding a Site template in SharePoint 2007 is still the same as in 2003:

• Look for the file webtemp.xml in "web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\1033\XML"
• Make a backup copy of this file first
• Open the file in notepad and look for the site template you want to hide
• Change Hidden="FALSE" into Hidden="TRUE" (case sensitive) and save the file
• Do an IISRESET

This will hide the specific site template from the list of templates available when you create a site.

Hiding a List template in SharePoint 2007 works slightly different due to the new Features concept but is equally simple:

• First find the template/feature you want to modify in "web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\FEATURES"

If you want to be able to show or hide the list through the Site Features option in a site, do the following:

• Make a backup copy of feature.xml
• Open the xml file in notepad and change Hidden="TRUE" into Hidden="FALSE" (case sensitive) and save the file
• Do an IISRESET

If you want to hide the list alltogether, do the following:

• Open the subfolder ListTemplates
• Make a backup copy of the .xml file
• Open the xml file in notepad and add this line somewhere around the Type or BaseType line: Hidden="TRUE" (case sensitive)
• Do an IISRESET

SharePoint Capacity and Performance Planning

Joel Oleson last year posted an article on capacity and performance planning guidelines for both SharePoint 2003 and 2007, a very useful reference for the most important capacity metrics.

And on TechNet you can find a chapter all about performance and capacity planning for SharePoint 2007 providing a lot of detail on this subject.

Add link to People Search for Author name in search results

The SharePoint 2007 Search results return the name of the Author of each document in the results, but this name is not clickable and thus you can not easily drill down to the Author.

You can change the XSL for the Search results and link the name of the author to the People Search of SharePoint. Follow these steps:

1. Go to your SharePoint search results page (results.aspx) and click Site Actions, Edit Page
2. Click Edit next to the Search Core Results web part and select Modify Shared Web Part
3. In the toolpane on the right click the XSL Editor button
4. Select all XSL code from the pop-up window and replace with the code that can be found here...
5. Click Save and OK
6. Click Publish on the editing toolbar at the top

Now all author names should link to the Search page!

Internet Explorer crashes when you try to open an Office document in SharePoint 3.0

Microsoft has made a hotfix available for an issue that might crash your browser when opening a document from a SharePoint 2007 site in Office 2007.

This problem occurs if the following conditions are true, in the order in which they are presented:
• You install a Microsoft Office 2003 product on the computer.
• You install one or more 2007 Office system programs on the computer.
• You repair or update the installation of an Office 2003 product.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/938888

Domain migrations and SPUserUtil

Although SharePoint Server 2007 is here there might still be people out there using SharePoint 2003 who will want to migrate users into another AD domain. Keith Richie has created the excellent SPUserUtil for this and there is plenty of information about using this utility to migrate domain users.

I ran into an issue while testing a domain migration and using SPUserUtil where certain stored procedures could not be found that should have been installed by the hotfix or SP2. Comments to a post on BlueDogLimited describes the same issue: "Could not find stored procedure 'dbo.sps_hMigrateAreaContactSids'."

The most likely reason that these stored procedures (there seem to be 4 of them) are not available is that the SITE database that contains the Portal site was originally created on SPS SP1 and then restored into a SP2 environment. The stored procedures are only created when you create a new portal on SP2. You can find the stored procedures in the portal site database when you create a new portal on your SPS2003 SP2 environment. These are the missing procedures:

Orgle_UpdateOrgleRulesWithMigratedAccounts (Profile database)
profile_UpdateUserProfileSID (Profile database)
sps_hMigrateAreaContactSids (Portal site database)
sps_hMigratePersonListingSids (Portal site database)

SQL Procedure to script your data

Sometimes you need to insert a few records from a table into another table or another database. Here's the solution: http://vyaskn.tripod.com/code.htm#inserts

Tabbed web part

GotDotNet has a SharePoint 2003 web part for implementing a tabbed interface. One web part provides navigation among pages using tabs, the other allows different web parts on a single page to be controlled using tabs. Link...

SQL Server file locations

In MS SQL Server you can get an overview of all database file locations using the 'sysfiles' table. In combination with the stored procedure 'sp_msforeachdb' (which will loop through the databases) you can get a list of all database files used by the SQL Server instance.

USE master
EXEC sp_msforeachdb 'use ? SELECT ''?'' as dbname, filename FROM sysfiles'