SharePointDIY.com

What happened to me recently was while installing Visual Studio 2008 Team Edition in a demo virtual machine I got an error saying “Error 1330:  A file that is required cannot be installed because the cabinet file DRIVELETTER:\SOMEPATH\cabNUMBER.cab has an invalid digital signature.  This may indicate that the cabinet file is corrupt.”.

I was trying to install Visual Studio 2008 in an existing Virtual Machine on Virtual Server 2005 R2.
At first I thought it was happening because I mounted the .iso image over the network, however when this happened a second time with the ISO image on my harddisk I figured that that couldn’t be the issue.
For the installation the third time I chose ‘custom’ instead of the ‘default’ option.

I went through the list of options that were there and unchecked the option C++ and SQL Express and the installation was successful after that. You can always install SQL Express afterwards if you want to, even download it from Microsoft’s website. I really didn’t need SQL Express or C++ – so in my case I was actually happy that I was forced to look over the options.

From the various posts I have been reading it has something to do with the way an .iso is mounted and the software you use. Different people have had success with using other software to mount the iso image.
Since I was just using the built in Virtual CD/DVD drive it could be that there is some kind of an issue with that.

If you found some other solution for the problem or the solution mentioned above worked, leave a comment and tell others about it!

For MOSS, there are a number of web parts available that you do not have in WSS 3.0.  These web parts can be used with any site including the My Site function for each individual.  A friend of mine wanted to use a very common one known as the Page Viewer web part for his personal SharePoint site.

So he simply ran through the steps.  He went to Site Actions >> Edit Page.  He selected the zone where he wanted to place his web part and went to the Add Web Part list.  The Page Viewer web part is located in the Miscellaneous section.  When my user went to this section, it wasn’t there!

There was only one web part under Miscellaneous known as Contact Details.   This can be a common issue for any site.  But there is a simple solution.  You need to activate certain functions for sites.  For the purpose of My Sites, here is what you can do.

Go to Site Actions >> Site Settings.

Go to Site Collection features under the Site Collection Administration column.

 
You will see that some features are active and others are not.  
 

If you want to play it safe, activate all of the features.  This will give you the ability to use all the web parts and features that MOSS has to offer. Otherwise, activate the ones you need.

Now when my user went back into editing the page, he found his Page Viewer web part under Miscellaneous and many others. 

For a future reference, if web parts are not available on a Site Collection, have the site collection administrator activate features.

There will come this time, either in development or maybe even in production when you are presented with that annoying ‘friendly?’ error page that SharePoint displays when there is an issue somewhere in the code.

Of course this makes debugging a pain, however – there is a solution to turn the ‘friendly’ SharePoint error messages off and get the ASP.NET error message along with the call/stack trace outlining the issue.

By making two quick adjustments to the web.config file for the particular site we can turn the ‘friendly’ SharePoint Error message on / off.

1. Follow the following instructions to do so:
2. On the Web server, navigate to the site directory: [Drive Letter]:\Inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\[directory for site]
3. Make a quick backup of the web.config file (simply copy / paste the file in the same directory)
4. Open the web.config file in Notepad.
5. Search for “CallStack”. Change the CallStack status to “true”. Example: <safemode maxcontrols=”200″ callstack=”true” directfiledependencies=”10″ totalfiledependencies=”50″ allowpageleveltrace=”false”>
6. Search for “CustomErrors”. Change the mode to “Off”. Example: <customerrors mode=”Off”>
7. Save and close the file.

And there you go, now you will see the the ASP.NET error message along with the call stack/stack trace screen outlining the issue.

To turn the SharePoint ‘friendly’ error messages back on, just walk through the steps setting the CallStack to “false” and customErrors mode to “On”.

As a user is working in SharePoint, a number of lists and libraries can be created.  These lists or libraries might not be relevant for everyone.  But due to the nature of MOSS and how its search crawls sites, these irrelevant lists or libraries will show up in search results.  Here is a simple but often overlooked function to optimize search results for your users.

Go to your list or library you want to exclude.  For example, I will be using list of Links that was created.  Once in the Links list, I click on the Settings drop down and choose List Settings.
 
Go to Advanced Settings under the General Settings column on the next page.
 
On the Advanced settings page, go to the Search section and choose the “No” radio button for “Allow items to appear in Search results”. 
 
Now, this list will be excluded from your next search crawl.  This will assist your users in getting the most relevant search results and they won’t have to drudge through miscellaneous lists and links.  Anyone with the appropriate permissions is able to set these criteria in the advanced settings.  Hopefully, this will save a headache for your SharePoint site administrator since I know how much you all love to give these guys tasks to do.

The other day I came across an issue with a user.  My user was uploading a number of documents by the click and drag method that I have discussed in a previous blog about mapping a shared document location.  He had all the permissions set up correctly for other MOSS user to view his documents.  However, he was the only one that could see the documents he uploaded.  He was using the out-of-the-box Document Center that comes included with the Collaboration Portal site template.

As with any concern with a document library, it is always good to start with the Document Library Settings. 

Go into your Document Library in question.  Click on the Settings drop down and select Document Library Settings.

On the next page, select Versioning settings from the General Settings column.

On the Versioning settings page, you will see options for setting up content approval as well as version settings.  For this blog, we will pay attention to the last setting known as Require Check Out.  To turn off all the documents being automatically checked out to the user uploading, select No for Require Check Out.

Now all the documents my user uploaded are visible to everyone he has set a viewing permission for. 
Required Check Out can be useful to assist in keeping changes limited to one user at a time.  However, for my user it became a pain because he was uploading 20+ documents at a time and then he had to check them in individually.  Experiment with it to see what works best for your SharePoint environment.

On a number of the site templates such as Team Site, you will find that you get an Announcement web part to begin with.  After you have used the Announcement web part that the SharePoint template provides for you, you may decide you have another list of Announcements to add. 

So as the site administrator, you go to Site Actions >> Edit Page.  You then figure out which web part zone you want to add your new Announcements web part to and click “Add a Web Part”.   In the “List and Libraries” section, you simply click Announcements and hit OK to add this as a new web part.

Seems simple enough, right? …………..  WRONG!  The web part you have added is tied to the same announcements list as the first one.

This will actually duplicate the default Announcement web part that the site template provided for you.  You need to take a couple of different steps to add a different Announcements web part to the same page.  What you need to do is to create a new announcements list first.

Go to Site Actions >> Create

Choose Announcements from the Communications section.

Give it whatever name suits the purpose of the announcement.  For this demonstration, I will name it Announcements2.  Click Create.

Now go back and go thru the original steps I described earlier. 

Site Actions >> Edit Page >> Add a New Web Part. Now I can see both my existing Announcements and my new Announcements2.  Choose your newly created Announcements2 or whatever you named it and add you content.

 
For a future reference, when you’re adding a web part, the List and Libraries section is directly linked to any lists or libraries you have created within your site.  They will be there if you choose to show them as web parts.  The world of SharePoint makes sense again!

SharePoint makes uploading documents easier than ever.  “Out-of-the-box”  SharePoint has an upload button located within every Document or Picture library.  But wouldn’t it be easier to simply click and drag documents to a specific location within SharePoint?  Here is how to do it.

These directions are for Vista but you will find many similarities with whichever Windows OS you are running.

Go to My Computer

Click Map Network drive

Choose a Drive: Letter.  Copy and Paste in the address of SharePoint where you want to click and drag documents to.  Then Click Finish

After this is completed, a window should open up.  Now you can click and drag documents to this location.  Then the next time you are in SharePoint these will appear in your document library!  It is the easiest and fastest way to upload documents.

Continuing with further exploration of custom permission levels, I feel it is very important to create a Group to put users in specifically.  For example, you may have an Accounting team.  You want to make sure they all have equal rights to do things within their site collection. You have already created an “Accounting Team” permission level.  The next step is for a site administrator to create a new group with this specific access. 

Go to the same area for adding new users:  Site Actions >> Site Settings >> People and Groups.

Under the New dropdown, select New Group

Here you will have similar options you see elsewhere in MOSS or WSS 3.0.  You can name the group, give certain rights to viewing, and set permissions.

In the bottom section, select your custom Permission level you want for this group.

Click create and you now have a new group with the permission levels you set.  Add users to this group and you are finished.

By the previous post by me, I showed you how to create a custom Permission level.  Now I will show you how to assign this to users.

If the user is new, go to Site Actions >> Site Settings >> People and Groups.

Add a new user.

When you select a new user from your Active Directory, you should see a section where you can assign access.  Select “Give users permission directly”.  Then you can check any out-of-the-box or custom created permission levels.  For this purpose, select the one you created.

Click OK.  Now the user has been granted that access specifically.

You can also create a new group with this specific access. 

Go to the same area:  Site Actions >> Site Settings >> People and Groups.

Under the new dropdown, select New Group

Here you will have similar options you see elsewhere in MOSS.  You can name the group, give certain rights to viewing, and set permissions.

In the bottom section, select your custom Permission level you want for this group.

Click create and you now have a new group with the permission levels you set.  Add users to this group and you are finished.

1. Create a calendar list on your WSS site.
2. Export your Outlook Calendar into a Excel file format with the following column:
   - Subject
   - Location
   - Start Date
   - Start Time
   - End Date
   - End Time
   - All Day event
3. Go to the Calendar list and switch to All Event View
4. Export this empty view to Spread and open it.
5. Open your exported Outlook Calendar, merge Start Day and Start Time to a fingle column
6. Merge End Date and End Time to another single column. Both of these two column should have two sapces between date and time and YY as year, not 4 digits.
7. Copy Subject from exported to Title column of the Calendar list. The rest are straight forward. Do not put naythng to WorkSpace column since it’s read-only.
8. Correct any errors if you have. Then sync this list.