Category: SharePoint

The ribbon in SharePoint 2010 – tutorial

I have been getting a lot of questions about tutorials on how to use the ribbon in SharePoint 2010. Of course, creating a “general” tutorial about this is not so obvious, because the ribbon is context-sensitive, and what you need to know about it, actually depends on the functionalities you use in SharePoint. But I think the movie below (by Lynda.com) gives you a good overview.

Users who are familiar with SharePoint 2007 and are looking for a familiar command in the ribbon, can download the SharePoint Server Ribbon Reference on the Microsoft Office website. This is an Excel spreadsheet that lists the new locations of SharePoint commands in the 2010 version.

Stubborn OneNote: cannot rename notebook section

My favorite note-taking tool, Microsoft OneNote, has been bothering me for quite a while with a strange issue: for some reason, it renamed a section called “Customer notes” to “Customer notes 2”, and I could not change it back.

After some investigation, this was the origin of the problem:

  • My notebook was synced to a SharePoint document library
  • It was probably called “Customer notes” before, but a sync conflict added a second section “Customer notes 2”
  • I deleted “Customer notes” and tried to remove the 2 in “Customer notes 2”, but no luck.

The cause: when you have a section that contains attachments, OneNote creates a subfolder called <name of section>_onefiles. When I deleted the section “Customer notes”, it did NOT delete the folder “Customer Notes_onefiles”. That’s why I could not rename “Customer notes 2” to “Customer notes”, because the corresponding subfolder “Customer notes_onefiles” already existed.

I deleted the old “Customer notes_onefiles” and then I could rename my section. I’m a happy OneNoter again !

Readings to prepare for the SharePoint 2010 IT Pro exams

A couple of weeks ago, I passed the beta version of the two SharePoint 2010 IT Pro exams:

  • Exam 70-668: PRO: Microsoft SharePoint 2010, Administrator
  • Exam 70-667: MCTS: Microsoft SharePoint 2010, Configuring

Of course, I can’t tell you much about the actual content of the exam (NDA, you know…) but as long as there are no official “exam preparation guides”, I would recommend you to prepare for the exam by reading the Planning, Upgrade and Deployment guides for SharePoint 2010. The Technet site has a good overview of the downloadable content for SharePoint 2010.

Duplicate categories when creating new blog post from Word 2007 in SharePoint blog

Our marketing department is using Word 2007 to post articles on a SharePoint 2007 blog. Today, a weird issue came up: when you select a category from the drop-down list, that category was created on the SharePoint blog every time, no matter if it existed already or not. This results in duplicate categories in the SharePoint blog.

The solution to this problem is very simple: on the SharePoint site, check the Categories list for items that have a space at the end. If an item in the category list has a space, it gets recreated again when you select the category in Word.

Co-authoring with Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010

I have been playing with the co-authoring function in Office 2010, SharePoint 2010 and the Office Web Apps. Co-authoring allows simultaneous editing of the same document by multiple users. It took me some time to figure out which apps actually support this functionality, because not all of them do.

The following site gives a good overview: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint-server-help/document-collaboration-and-co-authoring-HA101812148.aspx

The table below (taken from the article) is a good summary:

Application Server Requirements Common Scenarios
Word 2010 SharePoint Foundation 2010 Any document including proposals, plans, vision statements, minutes, newsletters, and reports
PowerPoint 2010 SharePoint Foundation 2010 Any presentation including training, conferences, post-mortems, product overviews, handbooks, and project status reports
Excel Web App SharePoint Foundation 2010
and Office Web Apps		 Any spreadsheet, including team financial modeling, business-to business product line update on a web page, and real-time trading spreadsheet trackers
OneNote 2010 SharePoint Foundation 2010 Any notebook, including recurring meeting minutes, project brainstorming (“group-think”), shared research and reference material, and shared training courses
OneNote Web App SharePoint Foundation 2010 and Office Web Apps