SharePointDIY.com

With SharePoint it is possible to go beyond the out-of-the-box permission levels that are given.  Perhaps you like the out-of-the-box permission level known as “Contribute”; however you wish you could restrict 1 or 2 things that this permission level allows.  The simplest solution is creating your own permission level for certain users to be associated with.

In MOSS, go to Site Actions >> Site Settings.

Select People and Groups under the Users and Permissions column.

On the next screen, click Site Permissions on the left Quick Launch bar.

Next, under the settings drop down, choose Permission Levels.

Then Click Add a Permission Level.

Now you are on the Add a Permission Level screen.  You have the opportunity to select certain permissions for this new permission level.  You might come across the scenario that when you check a box, other boxes are immediately checked for you.  For example, if you select “Create Groups” under Site Permissions…..”View Pages”, “Browse User Information”, and “Open” are immediately chosen for you.  SharePoint is making it easier on you by letting you know that these permissions will also be needed for the “Create Groups” selection.  When you are finished naming, writing a description of the permission level and selecting the permissions desired, just click the Create button at the bottom.

The screen will go back to the previous Permission Levels screen and your new Permission Level will appear in the list!

You might have noticed that your Web Part page is missing the Quick Launch bar that you see on you master page.  This can be easily remedied.

Open the page you want to add the Quick Launch bar to in SharePoint Designer.  You’ll see on the left side of the page there are a number of small squares that are known as place holders.  When you slide your mouse over these place holders, you will see an “arrow head box” appear.  Click the “arrow head box” and choose Create Custom Content.

After you have chosen Create Custom Content, right-click on that same place holder and choose Default to Master’s Content.

Click Yes for the message that appears.

You will have to repeat these steps for all of the remaining place holders on the left side.  We you have finished you will be able to see the Quick Launch bar.  Then save your changes to the page and you will be all set.

This can easily be done is SharePoint Designer. If you have not installed SharePoint designer as a part of Office 2007 Enterprise, I highly recommend it. If you do not have Office 2007 Enterprise edition, MS offers a free 30 day trial of SharePoint Designer to test out as well.

In SharePoint Designer, open the site where you saved the web part page you created. In my case it is located in http://wss. When I created the web part page, I chose to save in Shared Documents. Hit the + and expand the Shared Documents folder to find you Web Part page. Drag the page out of the folder and below the default.aspx page.

This takes it out of the place is SharePoint where is it was stored to prevent other people from making changes. Now it is associated with the site only.

Right click on your web part page and select Set as Home Page

Click OK to the message.

Click OK to the next message if it appears.

To test out all the changes you made, click the Preview in IE button.

Now you can see that your site has the web part page you created earlier, and you are able to edit the page accordingly. SharePoint Designer is incredibly powerful and you can do things much faster here than in SharePoint itself. Try it out for yourself

It is a common question we hear a lot times. Should we be using IDE or SCSI under Virtual Server 2005?

By default you might have noticed that when creating a new virtual machine in Virtual Server 2005 the bus is set to IDE, however you can change it to SCSI (see image below).

This blog entry will explain the difference between using an IDE and SCSI bus in Virtual Server 2005 and why you would want to choose one or the other. This blog entry is based on a post by Ben from Virtual PC Guy’s Weblog who has answered it here, but we will recap it in a bit more detail once more.

Please note that this is for Virtual Server 2005 ONLY!, when you are using Hyper-V other rules apply which we will cover in another blog post. (also note that the SCSI bus is not supported in Virtual PC)

There are a number of factors to consider:

• The emulated IDE can only support 4 disks, while the emulated SCSI supports up to 28 disks;
• The emulated IDE can only support up to 128GB disks, while the emulated SCSI can support up to 2TB disks;
• The emulated IDE controller has a higher level of driver support for various operating systems than our emulated SCSI controller.

The other, and most important item is performance. IDE will outperform SCSI when virtual machine additions are NOT installed.

When you install the Virtual Machine Additions an accelerated SCSI driver gets installed as well.  Once this driver is installed the performance of the emulated SCSI controller is significantly faster than the emulated IDE controller.

So with this in mind, it is recommended to do the following on Virtual Server 2005:

If you are running Windows NT, 2000, XP, Vista, 2003, 2008 with Virtual Machine Additions installed; use SCSI.
If you are running any other configuration; use IDE unless you specifically use more than 4 disks, or larger than 128gb disks.

So where can you choose what bus to use?

When you create a new virtual machine in Virtual Server 2005 you will find this option right there on the create virtual machine configuration page under Virtual Hard Disk. When you choose to create a “new virtual hard disk” or ” use an existing virtual hard disk” you will find the option in a drop down box. (see the image below)

Also read our blog post about switching between IDE and SCSI bus on Virtual Server 2005.

Just a quick post to make everyone aware of all the different application templates that are available for SharePoint Services 3.0. They are available for download from Microsoft’s website and also available as a package download. Perhaps someday we will blog about each one of them and show off the features!

Site Admin Templates

Site admin templates are custom templates that are easy for any SharePoint site administrator to install into the template gallery without requiring server administration access. These are available in English only.

Board of Directors
The Board of Directors application template provides a single location for an external group of members to store and locate common documents such as quarterly reviews, shareholder meeting notes and annual strategy documents. The template also tracks tasks, issues and calendar items so board members have a single location to view information relevant to them.

Business Performance Reporting
The Business Performance Reporting application template helps organization managers track the satisfaction of customers through a combination of surveys and discussions. Surveys can be sent via Office InfoPath 2007 which are then consolidated by the template to give an overall response to a series of questions.

Case Management for Government Agencies
The Case Management for Government Agencies application template helps case managers track the status and tasks required to complete their work. When a case is created, standard tasks and documents are created which are modified based on the work each case manager has completed.

Classroom Management
The Classroom Management application template helps instructors and students organize and store information related to a particular class. The site includes document libraries to store assignments and lecture notes as well as calendars and announcement capability to enable communication from instructor to students.

Clinical Trial Initiation and Management
The Clinical Trial Initiation and Management application template helps teams manage the process of tracking clinical trial protocols, objective setting, subject selection and budget activities. The site provides useful Office Word 2007 templates as well as the capability to create, track and assign tasks and issues related to a particular clinical trial.

Competitive Analysis Site
The Competitive Analysis Site application template helps teams organize information about competitors and their products. The site provides useful Microsoft Office 2007 documents to perform SWOT and other useful competitive analysis techniques. Links to industry, company and product news can also be included to provide a single location for all competitive information.

Discussion Database
The Discussion Database application template provides a location where team members can create and reply to discussion topics. Discussions are organized by categories, which are created by a site manager, and can be linked to Office Outlook 2007 via an RSS feed.

Disputed Invoice Management

The Disputed Invoice Management application template helps accounts payable departments track open invoices including the potential savings associated with paying the invoice early. The site includes useful templates for analyzing the reasons invoices are being disputed as well as tracking who to contact for more information.

Employee Activities Site
The Employee Activities Site application template helps manage the creation and attendance of events for employees. Activity owners use the site to review proposals for new activities and create event calendar items. Employees use the site to sign up as well as track which activities they’ve attended in the past.

Employee Self-Service Benefits
The Employee Self-Service Benefits application template provides tools for an organization to inform employees about available benefits as well as enabling them to enroll for each benefit.

Employee Training Scheduling and Materials
The Employee Training Scheduling and Materials application template helps instructors and employees manage courses and related materials. Instructors can use the site to add new courses and organize course materials. Employees use the site to schedule attendance at a course, track courses they’ve attended and to provide feedback.

Equity Research
The Equity Research application template helps teams collaborate on researching stocks and other equities. It provides a central location for teams to store documents, post links, track news, and hold discussions related to the equities tracked by the site.

Integrated Marketing Campaign Tracking
The Integrated Marketing Campaign Tracking application template helps marketing managers track the implementation and success of outbound marketing activities. The template allows a manager to create marketing activities and track the results of those activities, such as responses generated and sales completed. The template contains multiple methods of analyzing the success of the campaigns including automated calculations and Office Excel 2007 templates for more detailed analyses.

Manufacturing Process Management
The Manufacturing Process Management application template helps teams to model and track manufacturing processes as well as tasks and issues that arise in the upkeep of these processes.

New Store Opening
The New Store Opening application template helps a team manage the opening of new store locations or re-modeling of existing store location. The site provides a single location to manage tasks, issues, and documents for all store opening processes, enabling end users to view relevant information and providing project managers insight across the entire project.

Product and Marketing Requirements Planning
The Product and Marketing Requirements Planning application template enables teams to manage the process of collecting and documenting requirements for new products. The site provides several Microsoft Office 2007 templates providing useful techniques for Marketing, Product and Steering committee actions as well as a template for meeting notes and financial information.

Request for Proposal
The Request for Proposal application template helps manage the process of creating and releasing an initial RFP, collecting submissions of proposals and formally accepting the selected proposal from amongst those submitted. The site also helps simplify the process of notifying individuals about the status of the RFP and submitted proposals.

Sports League
The Sports League Site application template helps an intra-company league administrator manage a baseball league. The site tracks team information, players, captains and scheduled team activities such as games, practices and social events. Team members can enter in game results and perform analysis at a team, game or individual player level. The site also enables discussions between league members through a League Discussion board.

Team Work Site
The Team Work Site application template provides a place where project teams can upload background documents, track scheduled calendar events and submit action items that result from team meetings. The site also tracks the creation and purpose of ‘sub-teams’ as well as enables discussion of topics created by members of the team.

Timecard Management
The Timecard Management application template helps teams track hours spent working on various projects. The site enables team members to ‘punch in’ on a particular project and ‘punch out’ when they cease work. The system automatically generates the time worked by project, and can show managers who is working on a particular project, total hours versus budgeted time and the details of who worked on a each project entered into the site.

Server Admin Templates

Server admin templates are created as site definitions, enabling tighter integration and enhanced functionality within the Windows SharePoint Services platform. They require a server administrator to install. These are available in 14 languages: English, French, Italian, German, Swedish, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese (BR), Portuguese (PT), Japanese, Korean, Hebrew, Chinese (simplified), Chinese (traditional), Russian, and Norwegian.

Absence Request and Vacation Schedule Management
The Absence Request and Vacation Schedule Management application template helps employees manage requests for out of office days. Team members post days they will be unavailable and can use the system to assign their responsibilities to others during those days. The application template helps team leaders manage requests for vacation and provides dashboards showing which users are signed up for a set of responsibilities.

Budgeting and Tracking Multiple Projects
The Budgeting and Tracking Multiple Projects application template helps project teams track and budget multiple, interrelated sets of activities. The template provides project management tools such as project creation, assignment of new tasks, Gantt Charts and common status designators. It helps team members consolidate the status of multiple projects into a single view, tracking progress against a set project budget and timeline.

Bug Database
The Bug Database aplication template helps development teams collect and track information about bugs in their code. The template allows bugs to be logged with information such as reproduction steps, category, comments, priority and severity of the bug. Bug categories can specify category owners so users can quickly determine the appropriate bug owners.

Call Center
The Call Center application template helps teams manage the process of handling customer service requests. The application template helps teams manage service requests from issue identification to cause analysis and resolution. Role-based dashboards display relevant information for each service request and a knowledge base can help track related documents and items previously used to solve past call center issues. Management focused dashboards track performance with metrics such as average resolution time and service request performance history.

Change Request Management
The Change Request Management application template helps users track risks associated with a design change. Team members can submit a change request, notifying stakeholders of the risks involved with the change. The application template allows a team member to approve or reject the request.

Compliance Process Support Site
The Compliance Process Support Site application template helps both teams and executive sponsors to manage compliance implementation endeavors. The site allows users to specify control tasks required to meet regulation requirements as well capture compliance issues as they arise. The application template contains document libraries used by team members to store related files as well as a calendar to track key audit dates.

Contacts Management
The Contacts Management application template helps teams manage contact information that needs to be shared among team members. The application template allows teams to enter contact information through a web based interface or through Microsoft Office Outlook 2007. When used in conjunction with Office Outlook 2007, team members can ‘subscribe’ to receive updated contract information whenever other users make changes to a contact.

Document Library and Review
The Document Library and Review application template helps people manage the review cycle common to processes like new product specification, publication, knowledge management and project plan development. It combines the functionality of a version-tracking document library with a threaded discussion list to provide a feedback and revision system. This template is intended for teams that need a central location for document review, discussion, revision control and approval.

Event Planning
The Event Planning application template helps teams organize events efficiently through the use online registration, schedules, communication and feedback. Role based dashboards offer specific information for various event members such as speaker, guest, staff, vendor, and delegate and attendee home pages.

Expense Reimbursement and Approval
The Expense Reimbursement and Approval application template helps manage elements of the expense approval process, saving time for approvers. Employees can enter expense information into the application template. Approvers can then review the information and manage the payment approval. Users monitor the status of their reimbursement request through a filtered view listing their outstanding requests.

Help Desk
The Help Desk application template helps teams manage the process of handling service requests. Team members use the application template to identify a service request, manage identification of the root cause and track solution status. The application template provides role-based dashboards displaying information relevant to customer service representatives and managers, including performance history.

Inventory Tracking
The Inventory Tracking application template helps organizations track elements associated with inventory. The application template helps managers track inventory levels by capturing manual input of updated inventory information. Users are notified when each part reaches the reorder quantity and helps these users manage customer and supplier information such as historical inventory levels.

IT Team Workspace
The IT Team Workspace application template helps teams manage the development, deployment and support of software projects. The application template allows users to update information on projects, tasks, issues, milestones and bugs. It also includes help desk functionality, making it easy for team members to guide service requests from initiation to resolution. Role based dashboards provide relevant information to team members, such as unassigned tasks and performance history.

Job Requisition and Interview Management
The Job Requisition and Interview Management application template demonstrates the power of collaboration by helping a recruiter streamline the process of filling job openings within a company. The template helps the recruiter manage requisitions, capture referrals and resumes and coordinate interviews. The application template enables people to input their candidate feedback centrally and track hire / no hire recommendations.

Knowledge Base
The Knowledge Base application template helps teams manage the information that is resident within their organization. The template enables team members to upload existing documents or create new ones using web-based content creation tools. Items are tagged with relevant identifying information so that others can more easily find the documents and learn from the collective knowledge in their organization. The template can be utilized in a ‘top down’ approach, where a centralized knowledge department ‘pushes down’ relevant content to the rest of the business or a ‘bottom up’ approach, where knowledge is captured and shared by all users as a normal part of doing business.

Lending Library
The Lending Library application template helps people manage the physical assets in an organization’s library. The application template tracks general properties about the physical assets and which user has currently checked out the asset. It also provides a librarian dashboard to help identify currently available and overdue assets. Automated email notifications can be sent to borrowers who have an overdue item.

Physical Asset Tracking and Management
The Physical Asset Tracking and Management application template helps teams manage requests and tracking of physical assets. An asset manager approves asset requests and manages the properties of the assets in the system, such as location, condition, manufacturer, model, current owner and estimated value.

Project Tracking Workspace
The Project Tracking Workspace application template helps small team projects manage project information in a single location. The application template provides a place where a team can list and view project issues and tasks. Functionality is provided to help drive project status reporting, including assignment of new tasks, Gantt Charts and common status designators.

Room and Equipment Reservations
The Room and Equipment Reservations application template helps teams manage the utilization of shared meeting rooms and equipment. The application template enables team members to identify times when specific rooms and/or equipment are available and place a reservation for a specified time.

Sales Lead Pipeline
The Sales Lead Pipeline application template helps teams manage the sales pipeline by tracking leads, opportunities, contacts, and accounts. Through role-based dashboards, team members can track sales information, assign open opportunities and gain visibility into the status of overall leads entered into the application template.

Package Downloads

In addition to the individual download links above, you can get the Application Templates for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 in these three convenient packages. Registration is required for package downloads.

Site Admin Templates
Get all 20 Site Admin templates as a single package download. Available in English only.

Server Admin Templates
Get all 20 Server Admin templates as a single package download. Multiple languages available.

All 40 Application Templates
Get all 40 Application Templates for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 as a single package download. Package only includes English versions.

As you might already know if you have played around in WSS 3.0 or MOSS, there are only a certain number of templates that are available when creating sites for your Site Collections.  However, after you have chosen a site template, you might find that you need more space for web parts.  Here is a quick demonstration on creating a web part page:

In the top right, go to Site Actions and choose Create from the drop-down.
 
On the next page, under the section Web Pages, simply click on Web Part Page.
 
You are almost finished.  Enter the name of the web part page you are creating, choose the desired layout, and then decide where you would like this web part page to be saved.  Click create.
 
Now you have created a web part page that can hold more web parts for your Site Collection.  Next I will discuss how to attach this page to a site in a site collection you have already created.

Well, it is indeed official. Microsoft posted their press-release on January 27th 2009 letting us know that Peformance Point will be dropped (still supported, and a new SP coming out soon as well though).

Thankfully it is not all bad, Performance Point was a new product – not widely adopted yet and now they will start shifting the monitoring and analytics capabilities to SharePoint.

Read Microsofts official press-release: Microsoft Brings Business Intelligence to the Masses With SharePoint

Everyone, especially management, loves to have a universal calendar.  Due to SharePoint’s tight integration with Outlook, this can easily be achieved.  Thru SharePoint’s built in calendars, you can feasibly view calendars in Outlook, click and drag appointments from Personal Calendars, schedule PTO, and many other items needed from a group or department calendar.

Steps on how to create:

Navigate to a specific site where the calendar is located.

When the calendar is displayed, click the Actions dropdown and choose Connect to Outlook.

Click OK to the message to accept this calendar.
 
Go to the Calendar section of Outlook.   Check the box to view the Public SharePoint folder you just added. If you line this up side by side with your personal calendar, you can simply click and drag events from your personal to the public SharePoint calendar. 

After you click and drag the appointment to the Public SharePoint folder, Click Yes to the message displayed.

You will now be able to see the event on personal calendar and well as the calendar in SharePoint
 
If you go back to the calendar on the SharePoint site and click refresh, you should now be able to see the event you just added as well.  You can click on the event if you want to see the details.
 

On the flip-side of things, events can be entered in SharePoint by a manager perhaps.  Look at the example where a manager scheduled a meeting in the SharePoint group calendar.
 
So you don’t miss this meeting, you want to make sure that this appointment is in your personal calendar. 
Go back to the calendar section in Outlook and make sure the SharePoint calendar is lined up side by side with your personal calendar again. You can click and drag it to your calendar. 
 
OR
You can double click on the appointment you wish to add to your calendar and click Copy to My Calendar.
 

This is just another example of how easy SharePoint can be. Feel free to post any comments or questions regarding any of our blogs.  Thanks!