Monthly Archives: June 2010

“Can Do” versus “Should Do” in SharePoint Projects

I think that many of us are occasionally presented with, for lack of a better phrase, young-child requirements. The end user really, very badly wants a certain specific look and feel, or a very specific sorting structure or a to cut out one click or menu option to ease navigation or [insert passionately held belief that happens to be wrong]. As SharePoint pro’s, we can generally meet almost any kind of requirement with the platform, but for some of them, we know in our hearts that:

They are going to take a disproportionate amount of time to implement (and therefore cost more)
They are going to be highly custom and therefore difficult to maintain and troubleshoot
There is is some easy SharePoint approach that meets 80% or more of the requirement (i.e. meets the sprit of the requirement, but not the letter of the requirement)

Bottom line, we know that the “requirement” is really just a nice to have or even legitimate in some sense, but something that people should live with rather than spend a lot of time trying to “solve.”

I think of these as “young child” requirements because I’ve seen this pattern many times before. Kids will pine away and nag you for some new toy for weeks at a time. You get them the toy, they play with it for a few hours or days and then put it down, never to pick it up ever again. Or, you don’t get the toy, the nagging stops and the kid moves on to become President of the free world. I’ve seen this happen in SharePoint projects. Decision makers either get what they want and it becomes an unused or underused function or they don’t get what they want and the project still succeeds anyway.

I was reminded of that today in a forum post and I liked how Clayton Cobb tried to get the forum poster to push back on one of these kinds of requirements: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepointinfopath/thread/af8a1941-92ad-4f1a-b1bf-875e28ea79b7/

I’m really curious how people view this topic and how you deal with it. Am I missing the point? Do you have strategies to steer decisions makers away from overinvesting in trivial requirements? Please leave a comment.

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Quick Tip: Adding jQuery to MOSS Publishing Pages

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When enhancing MOSS publising pages using jQuery, I hit the following speed bump:

Server Error in ‘/’ Application.

Parser Error

Description: An error occurred during the parsing of a resource required to service this request. Please review the following specific parse error details and modify your source file appropriately.

Parser Error Message: Only Content controls are allowed directly in a content page that contains Content controls.

Source Error:

Line 10: Line 11: Line 12: <script Line 13: type="text/javascript" Line 14: src="/jQuery/jquery-1.4.min.js">

Source File: /_catalogs/masterpage/KCC_FacultyMember.aspx Line: 12

Version Information: Microsoft .NET Framework Version:2.0.50727.4927; ASP.NET Version:2.0.50727.4927

It was easy enough to fix (h/t to my colleague, Uday Ethirajulu). Be sure that the jQuery code lives inside the “PlaceHolderAdditionalPageHead” as shown:

<asp:Content ContentPlaceholderID="PlaceHolderAdditionalPageHead" runat="server">

<script

    type="text/javascript"

    src="/jQuery/jquery-1.4.min.js">

</script>

<script type="text/javascript">

$(document).ready(function() {

   // Brilliant jQuery stuff goes here.

   });

</script>

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A Little Annoyance Carried Forward…

New Article, “Mastering SharePoint”

BPOS 2010 and “Superset”

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I was reading one of these pretty generic blah-like articles on BPOS (Microsoft’s exchange and SharePoint in the cloud) and thankfully waded through to the end:

In terms of other near-term deliverables, Microsoft is commiting to provide in BPOS v.Next native PowerShell scripting via a PowerShell endpoint build on PowerShell Version 2. Authentication will be done through Online IDs, with a single credential being able to be used for both PowerShell and the portal.Keane echoed the message other Microsoft execs have been voicing at TechEd this week: Cloud capabilities, over time, will become a superset of what is available on-premises. Currently, the reverse is true, and Microsoft’s Online services offer a subset of the functions available in the software equivalents of each product.

The notion that the cloud will provide more capability than on-premise is new to me. I wonder how true that is going to be in the end. It feels counterintuitive to me. I totally get the idea that a lot of companies will move stuff to the cloud (or start off in the cloud) but I normally think they do it because the pro’s (easier admin, SLAs, etc) far outweigh the cons (reduced functionality).

I’m having a little bit of a hard time believing that cloud offerings will exceed on-prem capabilities. Multi-tenant is hard and seems like it must force compromises in order to provide good SLA and ease of use…

I’ll probably be eating my words on this. I remember thinking that no one could possibly need more than 650 mb of data and therefore, the CD was never going to be improved upon.

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SharePoint Saturday Baltimore Poll

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I hesitate to pass this along given that “banjo jokes” is not an option, but … The end-of-August SharePoint Saturday (Baltimore edition) organizers have a poll up asking for suggested topics. Go here to fill it out: http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/baltimore/default.aspx

Vote early and vote often 🙂

But seriously, only vote once.

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Use Workflow to Simulate Content Type Security

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Another day, another MSDN-forums inspired post.

Someone was asking whether they could secure a content type such that when a user clicks on the “new” button on a custom list, only content types to which that person is granted access would appear in the drop-down list. As we know, this isn’t supported out of the box.

This question comes up now and then and this time, I had a new idea. Let’s assume that we have scenario like this:

We have a helpdesk ticketing system.
The helpdesk ticketing system allows users to enter regular helpdesk ticket info, such as problem area, problem status, etc.
We want to allow “super” users to specify an “urgency” field.
Other users don’t have access to that field. The system will always assign “medium” level priority to their requests.

What we could do is create two separate SharePoint lists and two different content types, one for “super” users and the other for everyone else.

Workflow on each list copies the data to the master list (the actual helpdesk ticket list) and the process proceeds from there.

This approach might work flow a kind of column level security as well.

I haven’t tried it, but it feels reasonable and gives a fairly simple, if pretty rough, option to implement a kind of content type and even column level security.

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Content Approval as Poor Man’s Automatic Item Level Security

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There’s a common business scenario with InfoPath forms. We want allow people to fill out InfoPath forms and submit them to a library. We want mangers (and no one else) to have access to those forms.

This question comes up now and then on the forms (e.g. http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepointadmin/thread/76ccef5a-d71c-4b7c-963c-613157e2a966/?prof=required)

A quick way to solve this is to enable content approval on the form library. Go the library’s version settings and set it up as shown:

Click on “Require content approval” and that will allow you to pick a value for Draft Item Security.

It’s a little counter-intuitive because we don’t think in terms of “content approval” when all we want to do is prevent people from seeing other users’ forms. However, it works well (in my experience). Just don’t approve those forms and they’ll always be considered “drafts”.

Give approval rights to the people who should be able to see them and you’ve closed the loop.

This isn’t exactly big news, but the question does come up with some regularity, so I thought it would be worth posting.

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SharePoint Online and InfoPath

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I may be the last person to realize this, but SharePoint Online (which I often hear people say is a glorified WSS) supports InfoPath Forms Services. That’s pretty powerful stuff, especially considering that IP FS is a MOSS Enterprise feature and BPOS is something like $1.99/month for 10,000 users. Maybe it’s a little more than that.

So, SharePoint Online defies easy definition. It has this enterprise feature, but no anonymous access (which even WSS supports). You can do some interesting stuff with search (MOSS-ish, since you can define site level scopes), but if you need access to the SSP, you can’t do it. You can play the “on the one hand and on the other” game all night long with this product 🙂

Microsoft is due to release a new version of SP Online in the next few months. I wonder what weird hybrid it’s going be?

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Taxonomy Discussions Will Never Go Away