The SharePoint Swiss Army Knife

Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007 has a super user directory tool especially for large companies. Using the People Search/Employee Lookup you can easily search for people in your organization by name, job title, department, or any other employee attribute you could think of. But there’s a certain drawback to the results as there isn’t a friendly GUI for you to customize how the information is displayed. Instead you’ll have to edit the XSL if you’d like to change the formatting of the data. You can also include other employee attributes in the results by defining which columns in the user profile database to display such as Mobile Phone numbers.

To customize the People Search Results:

1. Search for a user so you can use that search result as a reference.

2. Go to Site Actions > Edit Page

3. Modify the People Search Core Results

4. Under the “Results Query Options” section, there is a field called “Selected Columns.” Click into this field and then click on the “…” that appears next to it.

5. In the Text Entry box that pops up you’ll be able to include new columns based on the columns you can reference from the user profile database. For example if you wanted to include a person’s mobile phone you’ll want to include <Column Name=”MobilePhone”/>

6. Now you’ll be able to edit the XSL to display the phone number using something like this:

<xsl:text>Mobile Phone: </xsl:text>
<xsl:call-template name=”DisplayOfficeProfile”>
<xsl:with-param name=”mobile” select=”mobilephone” />

That should be it. Don’t forget to check-in and publish your page!

In Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007, it is possible to create targeted Save Locations for users throughout your organization. These targeted save locations appear under the “My SharePoint Sites” tab when you try to save any documents from within any of the Office 2007 clients.

This can be a very useful tool for your users in combination with clever “Audience” configurations. It will only display relevant SharePoint save locations instead of the huge list of network paths that are usually listed under “My Network Places.”

The first thing you’ll need to do is to configure your “Audiences.”

1. Go to your SSP (Shared Services Provider) and click on the Audiences link.

2. Click on “Create audience”

3. Give it a name, description, and owner. The last setting which is “Include users who: ” will really depend on your organization and how you want to define your audiences. That’ll just take a couple of rounds of trial and error, then you should be able to figure a pattern to use.

4. Click Ok to go to the next page. This page should let you add rules that will determine who is included in your Audience.

You’ll also have to play with these rules a little bit to figure out what works for you.

5. Click Ok and you’ll be sent to the properties page for the specific Audience you just created. To test to see if your Audience was configured correctly, click on the “Compile audience” link. SharePoint will query your user profile database and depending on the rules you’ve set, it will import those users into your Audience. At the bottom you can also add more rules if you’d like to better filter your Audience.

That’s it for configuring Audiences. Note that these audiences can also be used for webparts and views throughout your portal as well. The following steps will show you how to use these Audiences to create targeted links that will show up in the Office 2007 clients as a save location.

6. From the SSP, Under User Profiles and My Sites, Click on “Published links to Office client applications”

7. Click New.

8. Fill out the fields as required. For the “Target Audience” you should be given a list of available audiences if you click on the address book. The one you created previously should automatically show up there. Hit Ok and voila! That’s all you need to do.

After some predetermined timer job or schedule, something I haven’t been able to figure out yet, the links will be available to the Office 2007 clients.

In MOSS 2007 you’ll notice that users are able to upload pictures to there personal My Sites. These pictures also get propogated to the Contact Details web part as well as People Search Results.

So it’s actually a common practice for many companies to standardize on employee photos and disable everyone from uploading their glamour shots. To do this, first go to your Active Directory Management Console and hopefully you have the Exchange AD Management Plugin installed also.

You’ll know if you have it installed if you see all the tabs below:

1. Click on the Exchange Advanced Tab
2. Click Custom Attributes
3. Use one of those extensionAttribute values to store any kind of link to your picture.
4. OK out of AD.

Now you want to go to your MOSS Central Admin and do the following:

5. Go to your Shared Services Provider
6. Under User Profiles and My Sites click on User profiles and properties
7. Click on View Profile Properties at the bottom of the page.
8. Edit the Picture Property
9. Select “Do not allow users to edit values for this property”
10. In the Property Import Mapping Section change the Data source field to map: to your corresponding extensionAttribute# and hit OK.

Do a full user import and all the pictures should get populated into SharePoint!

I got this 2003 script from SPSFAQ.com awhile back and have since customized it for the 2007 products. Here’s a script to run nightly backups for SharePoint as a Windows Scheduled Task:

———————————————-

””””””’
‘Begin Script
””””””’
Dim fso, f, fspec
dim yr, mo, dt, hr, min, sec

yr = Year(Now)

mo = Month(Now)
if mo < 10 Then
mo = “0” & mo
end if

dt = Day(Now)
if dt < 10 Then
dt = “0” & dt
end if

hr = Hour(Now)
if hr < 10 Then
hr = “0” & hr
end if

min = Minute(Now)
if min < 10 Then
min = “0” & min
end if

sec = Second(Now)
if sec < 10 Then
sec = “0” & sec
end if

destFolder = “SPSPortal-” & yr & “-” & mo & “-” & dt & “-” & hr & “-” & min & “-” & sec

Set fso = CreateObject(“Scripting.FileSystemObject”)
Set f = fso.CreateFolder(“D:\SPS2007Backups\SPSPortal-” & yr & “-” & mo & “-” & dt & “-” & hr & “-” & min & “-” & sec) <<<<<<<<< Customize this

bkFolder = f.Path
bkFolder = Replace(bkFolder, “”, “\”)
bkFolder = bkFolder

””””””””””””’
‘Run the spsbackup script
””””””””””””’
Set objShell = CreateObject(“WScript.Shell”)
objShell.CurrentDirectory = “c:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\BIN\”

objShell.Exec (“STSADM.exe -o backup -directory ” & bkFolder & ” -backupmethod full”) <<<<<<<<<<<<< You can customize this
WScript.Echo “Backup Started!”

———————————————————————————–

Save that as a .vbs file and to run it as a scheduled task go to Control Panel > Scheduled Tasks > Add Scheduled Task > And Follow the Prompts. Happy back-ups!

With SharePoint, there’s a feature that helps with source control for document templates. Using Content Types in combination with document libraries we can have a set of document templates that users can choose from, edit and save without over-writing the original document.

Here are the steps to implement this:

1. Create a Document Library

2. Within the site that contains that Document Library, go to Site Actions > Site Settings

3. Under the Galleries section, click on Site Content Types

4. Click the Create link at the top of the list.

5. Give your Content Type a name and description.

6. Under Parent Content Type choose “Select parent content type from: Document Content Types” and “Parent Content Type: Document”

7. If this is the first time you’re creating a new Content Type, then you should choose to place it in a “New Group” and give it a meaningful name.

8. After creating the Content Type, you have the option of customizing some of the settings. Click on ‘Advanced Settings.’

9. Choose to upload a New Document Template.

10. Leave the rest of the default settings and press OK.

Now we’ll have to go back to the Document Library that we had created earlier. Within that Document Library:

11. Click on Settings > Document Library Settings

12. Under the General Settings Section, click on ‘Advanced Settings’

13. If ‘Allow management of content types?’ is set to No, change it to Yes. Leave the rest of the settings, and click OK.

14. Under the Content Types Section, click ‘Add from existing site content types’

15. Now you’ll have the option of choosing the from the menus, the Content Type Group and Content Type that was created earlier. You’ll want to add it to the list of ‘Content Types to add:’

16. Go back to the Document Library, click the arrow next to the ‘New’ button and you should now have a new Document Template to choose from!

There’s been quite a few requests on message boards for instructions on how to move the default Windows Sharepoint Services ver. 3 databases and I got tired of looking up Ian Morrish’ blog so I thought I’d do a post here.

When you install WSSv3 and use the default installation method for a stand-alone server, it will also install the 2005 version of the Microsoft SQL Server Desktop Engine. That’s the free internal database so you wouldn’t have to install SQL Server although there are advantages to having SQL Server, but that’s another topic. Unfortunately the install never gives you the option of storing your database anywhere else other than on your C:\ drive.

So, in order to change this according to WSSDemo.com:

“When referring to the database server name in any stsadm commands, you should use this name:

ServerName\Microsoft##SSEE

It has many advantages over the previous WMSDE that shipped with WSS 2.0 but there are 2 downsides:

1. no database admin tools are install. The only options are the sqlcmd command line utility (replaces the old osql utility) or Management Studio Express (both must be run on the server as no remote connections to WID are allowed).
2. you can’t specify the install location of WID when you install WSS

If you don’t have another SQL Server 2005 product installed on the WSS server then you will have to download sqlcmd from here… (also install the Native Client from the same link). After installation, you will find the utility installed in the following location:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\Tools\binn

Run the following command from this directory to connect to the WID instance:

sqlcmd -S \\.\pipe\mssql$microsoft##ssee\sql\query -E

All the SharePoint database files will default to being in the C:\WINDOWS\SYSMSI\SSEE\MSSQL.2005\MSSQL\Data directory. To move them to another partition you should use the WSS Central Admin to mark the content database off-line (and note the content db name, then use the following sqlcmd commands…

EXEC sp_detach_db @dbname = ‘Content_Database_name’
Go

You will find the db and log files in the following location

WINDIR%\SYSMSI\SSEE\MSSQL.2005\MSSQL\Data\<dbname>.mdf’ and <dbname>_log.ldf

Now copy the files to the new location and run the following command

EXEC sp_attach_db @dbname = ‘Content_Database_name’, @filename1 = ‘drive:\path\Data\<dbname>.mdf’, @filename2 = drive:\path\Data \<dbname>_log.ldf’
Go

Now you can use the central admin site to mark the content db on-line.

There are 3 other SharePoint databases you may want to move to another location. The largest of these will be for search. To list them, use the following sqlcmd command:

select name from sysdatabases
go

Which should give you something like this (GUID’s may be different):

SharePoint_Config_c464b7ce-59ef-4820-9f75-f46a0937c08e
SharePoint_AdminContent_451452bf-9dc0-40c9-be18-14f14bc23007
WSS_Search_NETSERVER_86a140c5958d4a5d97c8c2cbee745424

Before trying to move these you should stop IIS and all the Windows SharePoint Services. Then you can use the same steps as above. “