Category: SharePoint

Versioning and Content Approval

A lot of SharePoint users are confused about when to use Content Approval and Major/Minor versions. And indeed, some functionality seems to overlap, especially the fact that you can hide draft/pending items from users with read access to the list/library.

Some considerations:

  • Think about your user: the more advanced the options you activate, the more complicated it will be to have something published in the library. And what happens if it is complicated? Yes, the file ends up on the C: drive or in the e-mail.
  • Content approval can be interesting in lists, as you do not have Major/Minor versions in lists, only in document libraries.
  • If you are using Content Approval and you need to approve an item, you need manage list permissions. The Approve items is for Major/Minor versions, and has nothing to do with content approval!

SharePoint Search: where to go from here…

search_smallA lot of users are disappointed with the search function that is in MOSS 2007. Some of them are looking for other alternatives, or just leaving SharePoint because of this.

First, I still believe that you can get a decent user experience with the out of the box search engine. It is just not something you can turn on and forget about it. Best bets, customisation of the search results, authoritative pages, scopes… just don’t come there by themselves, you need to create, maintain and promote them.

But for those who are still looking for a more enhanced search, there is some light in the darkness: Microsoft announced yesterday that the FAST search engine WILL be included in the next version of SharePoint, and offers an solution for customers who need the enhanced search today.

SharePoint and Office 14 for web

I watched this video this afternoon, and there was one specific sentence that drew my attention (around 3:20″): “Customers can run these (web versions of Office) on the SharePoint servers in their enterprise”. 

Very interesting! So in the future, we won’t even talk about a tight integration between Office and SharePoint, it might just be the same thing. Client applications that today run on top of SharePoint to keep users away from the browser and on their familiar desktop will be useless. Offline use of SharePoint will be a non-issue, you need to be connected all the time. 

Have a look at the video yourself (requires Silverlight).

Watch out for metadata!

Metadata is a great feature for easy retrieval of files in any document management system, not only in SharePoint. But sometimes people forget that in some cases, the metadata is stored in the file itself, not only in the repository.

This can lead to painful situations, as Microsoft experienced recently with their new “I’m a PC” ads.

If you are storing Office files on SharePoint, the same thing happens: metadata such as SharePoint columns or content type info gets stored in the file itself.

If you are using Office 2007, you can use the Inspect Document function to search for hidden metadata, and strip this from the document. This screencast shows you how SharePoint metadata remains in a Word document, and how you can use Inspect Document to remove the metadata.

Groove sync error with SharePoint

Today, a colleague had an interesting issue with Groove and SharePoint: he had synced a document library to a Groove workspace, but when he created a new folder in Groove, syncing with SharePoint failed with an error indicating that the folder already existed. The actual error was “Synchronization completed with errors”, and the detail: “The file “Shared%20Documents/xxx” could not be located: It may have been deleted, renamed, or moved.”

It took me a while to figure this out, but it has something to do with the default document library view in the SharePoint library. If this one has the option activated to hide folders (Show Items without folders), syncing with Groove fails. If you turn the folders back on in SharePoint, all goes well. Life is easy, isn’t it? Have a look at the screencast below for more info.