Time Zones in SharePoint

I recently had to deal with time zones for individuals across the world for their My Sites. Rather than letting people choose their time zone, the goal was to populate the field from a third party ... read more

Notes on Azure, SharePoint, and Windows Live

Notes on Azure, SharePoint, and Windows Live Recently I needed to authenticate an external SharePoint site using Windows Live. So, I logically thought of using Azure since that is way Microsoft... read more

Don’t be a file hoarder!

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After watching an episode of Hoarders, I realized that there are many of those people (and whole departments) strewn throughout organizations across the world collecting and storing files for years... read more

Defaulting to “Sign me in automatically” when using FBA

One of the issues with working with documents on a Forms Based Authentication (FBA) site is that when you go to edit it you are prompted to login again (if you didn’t check the “sign me in automati... read more

Sending SMTP email from an SSL site

I ran into this problem when I was configuring a password recovery option (pulled from codeplex) for an SSL enabled FBA site. I could send smtp email just fine from all the other SharePoint sites b... read more

Enabling the Admin

SharePoint has been a great success and can now be found in most companies throughout the United States and the world.  With this great success have come great challenges. Now an organization might... read more

Get the publish field to work correctly in blog posts sites

The home page of the blog post site can sometimes fail to work with the publishing date.If it doesn't work or stops working the only way i have found to get it working again is to modify the errant... read more

Changing the "We did not find any results" on the search page

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When you do a search in SharePoint and it doesn’t return any results you get something like this. We did not find any results for wwwww. Suggestions: Ensure words are spelled correc... read more

The SharePoint Life Balance

SharePoint is great, the people are great, and the work can be very rewarding. The combination of those three things can lead to SharePoint overload if you aren’t careful. I have noticed that Share... read more

Using Profile Properties to redirect users

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There are many cases where you want to redirect users to a particular home page based upon who they are. An excellent example is if you have extranet users that fall into different categories or ne... read more

Deleting sites with SharePoint 2010 SP1

Service Pack 1 for SharePoint 2010 (which can be found here http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=26623) add the functionality of being able to restore deleted sites from the recycle... read more

A Steaming Pile of SharePoint

SharePoint 2010 has greatly increased its scalability. We can now add millions of documents and create content databases in the terabyte range. Storage is cheap with everyone seeming to have virtua... read more

Getting rid of that annoying drag and drop text on the Note Board

On the Tag profile page (and other places where the Note Board exists) you get this text Right click or drag and drop this link to your browser's favorites or bookmarks toolbar to tag external ... read more

What sites have been Visually Upgraded

For many of us, we are in a state of partially upgraded SharePoint. We have upgraded to SharePoint 2010 but many of our sites still have the old look and feel. In other words they haven't been visu... read more

The Ninja way to add Twitter to your My Sites

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With a little effort you can add a twitter feed to a My Site Host so that when you visit your profile page or somebody else’s you can see the twitter feed they have chosen. It is fairly easy to get... read more

Automatic login for Windows users on a multi provider Claims site

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If you have the option to login with multiple providers you are presented with a login page that lets you choose which option you want. The default file for this is in the hive under TEMPLATE/IDENT... read more

Replicating User Profile Data in SharePoint 2010

There are two ways to get user profile data on your farm from an existing farm in SharePoint 2010. The first is to consume the User Profile Service of the host farm, but this causes issues if you w... read more

Using Managed Metadata from another farm in your My Sites

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Maintaining a central term store has obvious advantages, but using that term store for your User Profile Service (and hence the data in your My Sites) isn't exactly straight forward. The basic step... read more

Some cleanup CSS

This is just to have this CSS handy. It basically hides the check boxes and the Title fields on list views on your page making it look clean and not hop around when the mouse hovers over it. ShareP... read more

Notes on Provisioning the User Profile Synchronization Service

The User Profile Service has changed a lot in SharePoint 2010. It is a much more challenging beast these days. Despite your best laid plans it can stop working. This happened to me recently when I ... read more

SharePoint Down Under

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Over the past few weeks I was fortunate enough to speak at SharePoint conferences in Sydney, Australia and Wellington, New Zealand. Both were world class conferences and showed me just how truly gl... read more

Does Office 365 save you money?

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Seems like everyone is getting into or looking into the cloud these days. I started looking at Office 365 from a SharePoint point of view and started to get interested in the bigger picture. So, wh... read more

Getting rid of the 10016 error on SharePoint Server

If you are getting a 10016 error in the Application Server part of the Event Viewer then you are having Distributed COM error. It is most likely due to the NETWORK SERVICE not having the correct DC... read more

Users losing permissions? This might be the reason.

This is something that came up recently and I thought I would I would share in case you are running into the same problem. The scenario is this. A user is deleted from AD and then a profile import ... read more

Site Collection permissions demystified

The best thing about site collection administrators is that they can do anything in a site collection. It is also the worst thing. If a normal user is also a site collection administrator then they... read more

SharePoint Conferences Q1 2011

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SharePoint Conferences Q1 2011 There are a lot of options to learn some SharePoint at a conference this year. I am not going to try and sway you on which ones to go to (even if I happen to be s... read more

Is your search database bloated?

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Are you searching lots of content? Does your database running out of space constantly? The problem may be with the crawl database (the one with CrawlDB in the name. The actual name will depend on t... read more

Connecting to the User Profile Service Proxy

Step 1. Set up the Application Discovery and Load Balancer Service Application   Before any farm can provide services to another farm, the consuming farm must be able to use the Application... read more

Does your My Site matter?

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The simple answer is yes, but to how much it matters depends on your organization. If you are a small group of people that all work in the same office it might not matter as much but if you organiz... read more

User Profile List in SharePoint 2010

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The User Information List is a list of every user that has ever been to your site collection or that has been added as an individual user. You may want to use this list for your own purposes. One o... read more

Restarting Audience Compilation

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This is going to be a short but extremely useful post about how to get your Audiences compiled if it gets stuck. If your audience compilation gets stuck it is really hard to get it going again. Res... read more

Themes in SharePoint

Themes are new in SharePoint 2010 and they are really easy to use, but modifying them in SharePoint is cumbersome. I recommend using PowerPoint 2010. The first step is to open PowerPoint 2010. If y... read more

Some notes on upgrading 2007 Content Databases

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If you are upgrading from SharePoint 2007 to 2010 there are some different ways to upgrade, but one of the most useful if you are not doing an in place upgrade is to use the stsadm command with add... read more

Working with PDFs in SharePoint

It is a simple fact that there are a lot of PDF’s out there and odds are you are going to have them in your SharePoint environment. You can’t make them as friendly to work with as Office documents ... read more

Modifying People Search Results

If you want to change how the people search result look, you are going to have to delve into the world of XSL. The first step is to create an XSL file on your SharePoint site. I would recommend put... read more

Office Web Apps

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To me, Office Web Apps is one of the coolest things to happen to SharePoint in a long time. Users can now view and edit their Word, Excel, OneNote and PowerPoint documents without ever leaving the ... read more

Profile Pictures in SharePoint 2010

Profile pictures are handled differently in SharePoint 2007. In SharePoint 2007 the photo was simply a URL or file location in one of the fields of the User Profile store. So every time it was acce... read more

Hiding the Activities I am following section of edit User Profiles

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There are situations where you may want to keep users from changing their Activities I am following settings on their edit profile page as shown below.  It is not exactly straightforward t... read more

What happened to My Links?

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If you were using My Sites in SharePoint 2007, there was a high likelihood you were using My Links. It was a convenient place to store and organize links that went with you from browser to browser.... read more

How I became the SharePoint Ninja

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I am not exactly sure when I became the SharePoint Ninja, but once it took hold it stuck. Now more people in the SharePoint community know who the SharePoint Ninja is than who Michael Doyle is. Tha... read more