Using Windows Explorer in SharePoint

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.

Server Application Unavailable – SharePoint

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.

Solution to a problem that shouldn’t exist

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.

Office365 SharePoint extranet users

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.

Great book on SharePoint Foundation 2010

Mastering Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 by Callahan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

If you don’t know, there are two distinct version of SharePoint, Server and Foundation. SharePoint Foundation 2010 is available as a free download from Microsoft and is the base of the enterprise version known as SharePoint Server 2010. Thus, if you want to learn SharePoint, no matter what the version, you are going to need to learn about the features found in SharePoint Foundation 2010.

Too many SharePoint books I have read simply gloss over SharePoint Foundation 2010 and concentrate solely on SharePoint Server 2010. It is very refreshing to find a book totally dedicated to the base version of SharePoint that is available to anyone for free. Because SharePoint Foundation 2010 provides the building blocks for SharePoint Server 2010 I believe that everyone looking for information about the capabilities of SharePoint would greatly benefit from investing their time in reading this book.

The author has provided a very comprehensive guide for the SharePoint product, in many cases I believe the information provided in this book is far more comprehensive and relevant than other SharePoint books I have read. It takes through the whole process, from installing a single server, customizing, all the way through to configuring multi-server ‘farm’ environments. The book focuses more on the technical aspects of managing and maintaining SharePoint rather than designing solution or modifying the branding. However, there is very scant information about this available elsewhere and this book does a fantastic job of pulling it together in one place as a reference for the SharePoint administrator.

If you are looking to learn more about SharePoint or do indeed have the SharePoint Foundation 2010 product this book is probably the best for ‘cutting your teeth’ and getting up to speed with administrating the product. It provides a single source of information that is generally very hard to locate elsewhere. Best of all, it won’t confuse you when it comes to which version of SharePoint it is talking about as it squarely focused on SharePoint Foundation 2010, which remember is freely available but rarely mentioned (unfortunately).
View all my reviews

If you plan on purchasing this book, and you liked my review, appreciate it if you could do so through my Amazon store at:

http://astore.amazon.com/c00ef-20/detail/0470626380

helps me in a small way to buy more SharePoint books for review.

That’s why I use SharePoint

Just came across this site from Microsoft promoting the benefits of SharePoint:

http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/iusesharepoint/landing.aspx

and all I can say is well done Microsoft. You’ll find a number of short videos to chuckle at but they do get the message across about what the benefits of SharePoint to average users. All the videos are worth watching.

You’ll also find pointer to more helpful information such as tutorials and download about SharePoint.

Great site. Bravo Microsoft, bravo!

Installing SharePoint 2010 Service Pack 1 on SBS 2011

You’ve read the walkthrough, now see the video!

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRwO6zlVVOs

You see the installation of the service pack and the command line options required to complete the update. I’ll also show you where the logs are located in case you get into problems and need to check them out.

SharePoint 2010 Service Pack 1 installation walk through

Here’s a walk through of the installation of SharePoint Foundation 2010 Service Pack 1 on a stand alone server not connected to a domain with a default install of SharePoint Foundation 2010. I’ll look at doing something for SBS 2011 Standard soon.

The first thing you’ll need to do is download the Service Pack 1 file which can be found at:

http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=26640

Right mouse click on the file and ‘Run as administrator’

Next, accept the license terms at bottom.

The Service Pack will now commence installation.

You will receive a message indicating the process is complete. However, all that has happened that the binary files have been updated. You need to now apply the update to SharePoint Foundation 2010 manually. This is because now you must manually run PSCONFIG after installing SharePoint 2010 patches on ANY server that SharePoint Foundation 2010 is installed on.

To check to see whether the Service Pack has been installed correctly, firstly run the SharePoint Central Administration. Select System Settings and then Manage servers in this farm.

Note the Configuration database version. Unless it is 14.0.6029.1000 Service Pack 1 has not yet been applied to the SharePoint farm.

To apply the downloaded update to the SharePoint farm run a command prompt as an administrator.

Change to directory c:\program files\common files\microsoft shared\web server extensions\14\bin and execute the following command:

PSConfig.exe -cmd upgrade -inplace b2b -force -cmd applicationcontent -install -cmd installfeatures

You should see the process complete 6 stages in total like shown above.

If you now check the version of the configuration database in Central Administration as shown previously it should be 14.0.6029.1000.

One of the additional features that Service Pack 1 provides is the ability to view the storage usage on a site. To see this go into your site and select Site Settings. You should now notice a new option under Site Collection Administration called Storage Metrics.