Information about SharePoint, Microsoft 365, Azure, Mobility and Productivity from the Computer Information Agency
Office Web Apps provides you an online preview of documents created by Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. This is available with SharePoint Online as part of Office 365. Exchange Online will soon be enabling Office Web Apps as well.
This is one of the major benefits of a cloud offering like Office 365, new features become available and are automatically rolled out.
I’m looking forward to bringing you details of how this works.
I’ve decided to re-release my “Windows SharePoint Master Class:Optimizing Search” e-book given that SharePoint Foundation 2010 is now available. Here’s the description:
This book is designed for those that want to take Windows SharePoint Services v 3.0 Search beyond the default. Did you know that Windows SharePoint Services v3.0 could index the contents of Adobe Acrobat documents and TIFF files? It normally can’t do either of these by default but the information inside this book will show you how to that and more. You’ll learn how to configure Search Server Express 2008 (free from Microsoft) to index information beyond SharePoint sites including Exchange Public folders, web sites and network shares. Implemented correctly Search Server Express can provide you the power of an internal search engine allowing you to make better and faster use of your digital information. If you want to make the most of Windows SharePoint Services then this book is for you.
I’ve made the price only $2.99 now so if you want a copy visit:
http://www.lulu.com/product/ebook/windows-sharepoint-master-classoptimizing-search/16967915
I plan to release an updated version focusing on SharePoint Foundation 2010 real soon.
Installing Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) onto a Windows Server 2008 R2 all went fine but when I attempted to create a Collaboration Portal site collection I was greet by the message:
The Office SharePoint Server Standard Web application features feature must be activated at the web application level before this feature can be activated.
After trying a few things I came across this:
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepointadmin/thread/8b96663a-ed87-4ab4-bd59-33c7245a76d4
which basically confirms the issue and attributes it to the MOSS setup configuring IIS on Windows Server 2008 R2 incorrectly.
The solution? Re-install MOSS, only this time manually configure IIS before running the MOSS installation OR simply re-apply MOSS Service Pack 2.
Once I reapplied the service pack I could create the Collaboration Portal site collection.
Working with a test Windows 2008 R2 server with SQL 2008 R2 installed, onto which I was trying to install Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS). Every time I tried I get the error:
“Failed to created the configuration database”
during the setup and configuration wizard.
However, when I looked in the SQL manager the configuration database was there.
Tried many, many things thinking it was a software compatibility issue with Windows Server 2008 R2 or SQL Server 2008 R2. Nope, not those those applications BUT I also had Office 2010 installed on the machine (since I was using it as a stand alone demo).
Problem turned out to be Office 2010, which I uninstalled and everything then worked fine.
Today’s lesson = MOSS and Office 2010 don’t work together on same machine.
Many locations in SharePoint can also be accessed directly via Windows Explorer (file manager). To do this simply navigate to the location you desire.
Then click the Library tab in the top centre of the window (to the right of documents in this case).
This will reveal the command ribbon as shown.
To the right hand side of the ribbon, under the Excel icon you should see an icon that appears as a computer and folder as shown above. If the icon is greyed out it probably means you are using a non IE browser. Such interactions with Windows requires viewing SharePoint in Internet Explorer.
Once you click this icon, and wait a few moments as Windows Explore is launched, you should see a list of the items from SharePoint displayed.
You can now drag and drop as well as work on these files directly as you would any other normal file in Windows.
Beware that one of the down sides to using Windows Explorer to manage files in SharePoint is that additional columns (metadata) are not active.
Customer was recently greeted by this nasty looking error when they tried to access their Windows SharePoint v3 Server. My first impression when I saw this was that it didn’t look like a ‘standard’ SharePoint or IIS error. I checked the Central Admin site and that was working as expected.
I then proceeded to check the obvious things like the services, IIS site and so on. All working as expected (since the SharePoint Central Administration site was also working).
The issue? .NET v4.0. To fix run IIS Manager on the SharePoint Server. Locate the SharePoint site (under Sites) and click on it. Then on the right select the Basic Settings hyperlink.
Here’s what the typical SharePoint site config should look like. See the Application Pool is the typical SharePoint – 80? Here’s what the problem configuration looked like:
For some reason SharePoint was using an ASP .NET v4 Application pool. How it got that way I’ll never know but all you need to do is pull down the list of Application pools and select the standard SharePoint Application pool that will typically look like:
In this case Windows SharePoint Services v3 liked .Net Framework Version 2.0 much better than .Net Framework version 4.0.
One of the biggest issues I currently see with Office365 SharePoint is the fact that it doesn’t allow you to directly open and view PDF documents in a browser. This has to do with browser file handling on the back end of SharePoint. I have previously detailed in my blog how to change that for on site SharePoint but in Office365 you don’t have access to this to make the change.
So, if you try and open a PDF stored in Office365 SharePoint you are only given the option to save the file locally. Given how common the PDF format is this is really something Microsoft should change in Office365 as soon as possible as it is causing plenty of people grief (including me).
I was faced with just this issue when working recently with a client using Office365 for secure storage and viewing of PDF documents. The solution devised was to use OneNote.
When you install OneNote on your system it also installs a Send to OneNote printer on your system. If you print using this printer the output not only ends up in OneNote but it is also indexed for searching (pretty neat).
Now if I print that same PDF document into a OneNote file saved on Office365 SharePoint I can click on the OneNote document and view the contents quickly and easily like shown above right in the browser. I agree that this would be a pain if you had lost of PDF documents but at this stage it is the best solution I have found.
For this client, being able to restrict user rights to these files was also important, so users were added to the standard Viewers group in SharePoint. According to the definition of the Viewers group:
“Members of this group can view pages, list items, and documents. If the document has a server rendering available, they can only view the document using the server rendering.”
To my way of thinking this means that because Office Web Apps (viewing) is installed by default with every Office365 SharePoint account people in the Viewers group will automatically see the OneNote file displayed in a browser. However, because Office Web Apps is considered “server rendering” as noted above, they won’t be able to open the file in a local copy of OneNote.
As you can see from the above screen shot, firstly, trying to edit the OneNote file in a browser fails as expected as they don’t have write permissions as Viewers.
But if you go to the document library and display the properties for the OneNote file you’ll see that there is not the option to save the document locally or open in a local Copy of OneNote.
However, it is also important to note that if people can view a document they can always take a copy (even if they take a photo of the screen). The above screen shot shows that they can simply right mouse click on the printed PDF inside the OneNote file and copy and paste it elsewhere.
However, overall I think this isn’t a bad solution for viewing PDF’s in a browser but honestly it is a solution to a problem that should never exit to my mind. I understand why Microsoft have denied the ability to open PDF’s in a browser (given the fact that PDF documents can launch javascript locally, which can do nasty things). But honestly, the PDFs as such a standard these days and people expect them to open directly in a browser, I feel it is doing more harm than good to Office365 by prevent this.
+1, Microsoft please allow PDFs to open directly in the browser OR allow me to make that decision in my setup.
SharePoint on Office365 allows 50 extranet users by default. What is an extranet user? Basically they are users that can that can have access to a SharePoint site (i.e. subsite only) without the need to have an Office365 license, however they are a full user of that site just like a standard Office365 user. The restriction is, that they are limited to accessing just that site.
These extranet users are not enabled by default, so the first thing you will need to do after you have created your SharePoint site is to go into the Office365 admin console for SharePoint and select Settings option and then Manage External Users from the sub menu as shown above.
You will then need to select the option to Allow as shown above and Save the settings.
You then need to go into the Site Actions, Site Settings then select Site Collection Features from under the Site Collection Administration section. One of the options is External user invitations as shown above. If that features is not Active then press the Activate button to enable it.
To invite an externals user now select Site Actions again and select Share Site from the menu that appears.
Now simply enter the email addresses into the desire site groups and press the Share button.
If you haven’t correctly enabled Extranet users you will see a message displayed in this box as shown above telling you that “Invitations to users outside your organization are currently disabled”. If so check the above enabling steps.
If the invitation is sent successfully you should see a message like that shown above indicating that the users will be added to the site once they accept the invitation.
The external user should receive an email like shown above inviting them to join the SharePoint site.
The link will take them to a page where they can select to either connect using a Windows Live Id or a standard Office365 login. If the user doesn’t already have a Windows Live Id they will be able to create one via a link shown on the above page.
Once they have logged in they will have access to the SharePoint site.
If you now look at the securities for that group which you added the external user to you will find them listed by the email address as shown above.
They will now be treated as a normal SharePoint user for that site.
Can you have more than 50 extranet users? Yes, but you need to purchase an additional license for each one after the first 50 I believe.
CIAOPS 