Ian

Andy Ginn on HP white papers and sizing tool (not a great picture, blame the iPhone)

Below, Lee Fedder describes his SharePoint integrated web application for managing shipping insurance claims

Below, Mark Macrae on Reporting Services in SharePoint integrated mode

See you all at the next one, which will be in Southampton!

Ian

We’ve been getting an error message “An unknown user profile error has occured. Try recreating this user profile or updating this user profile from the directory service to resolve this problem”.

This occurs when users edit the visibility of picture property on page “http://mysite.somesite.local/_layouts/Editprofile.aspx” and then try to save the page.

We have set up all users to be able to set the visibility of the picture, but we do not give them permission to edit the URL of the picture themselves.

One workaround is to enable users to edit the picture property itself, but for our particular situation this wasn’t acceptable.

On further investigation I found this in the SharePoint log:

w3wp.exe (0×0D64) 0×07E8 SharePoint Portal Server User Profiles 7i0i Medium Profile Edit: Error saving property ‘PictureURL’ with value ”: Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.PropertyNotEditableException: Property Not Editable: This property can only be modified by an administrator. at Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.UserProfileValueCollection.CheckUpdatePermissions() at Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.UserProfileValueCollection.set_Value(Object value) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal.WebControls.ProfileUI.SavePropertyValue(UserProfile objProfile, Property prop, Boolean bIgnoreEmpty).

Also if I give users the “Manage User Profiles” right then the save succeeds, and any picture URL that was set by an administrator gets deleted and replaced by an empty string. Nice!

I’m pretty sure that this was working up until the application of the April 2009 Cumulative Update.

Have opened a support call and the good news is that Microsoft have reproduced the problem. I was told that a fix will be made available, but no timescale has been set for that yet.

So in the meantime, if you want users to set the visibility of their pictures, but not to set the pictures themselves – if you haven’t applied the April 09 CU (or later) then don’t!

Ian

Back to PointBeyond web site

Three options, and which is best really depends on what your requirements are – from simple sharing of emails, to organisation wide records management, or somewhere in between!

1. Use Exchange 2007/2010 managed folders in conjunction with email enabled SharePoint document libraries. Allows emails to be dragged and dropped to a folder in Outlook, and for those emails to be copied to SharePoint, using the journaling feature of Exchange. Best done as part of the implementation of an organisation wide records management system. See George Khalil’s article for an example of setting up Exchange and SharePoint to do this.
2. Use one of a number of third party tools to enable drag-and-drop between SharePoint and Outlook, from within Outlook. Examples are Colligo Contributor and KnowledgeLake Connect.
3. If you want a fairly low tech way to get emails into SharePoint by dragging and dropping from within Outlook, use a discussion board. Simply ensure incoming email is enabled on your farm, create a discussion board in SharePoint, then from within SharePoint click on Actions/Connect to Outlook. You can now drag and drop emails to the discussion board from within Outlook, and they will be copied across to SharePoint.

If you have any other ideas or suggestions please leave a comment!

Back to PointBeyond web site.

The Records Centre capability in SharePoint 2010 provides relatively straightforward, easy to use, ERM capability. It may lack the sophistication of some specialist high end solutions, but it lacks the price tag as well. For all but the largest, most complex of ERM scenarios, SharePoint 2010 is a product worthy of consideration. In this article, the capabilities and features of SharePoint 2010 Records Centre are reviewed. The target audience is information officers, records managers and similar, who are interested in finding out a bit more about how Records Centres work in SharePoint 2010.

SharePoint 2010 provides two options for ERM, namely Records Centres and In Place Records Management. The latter is suitable for content that is already in SharePoint, and it does not allow for implementation of a fileplan. This article gives an overview of Records Centres in SharePoint 2010.

The home page of an out-of-the-box Records Centre is shown below.

Records can be added by users clicking the “Submit a Record” button, or if content is already in SharePoint there is an option to “Send to Records Centre”, which can be configured to leave a link to the record in the original location. Multiple Records Centres can be configured if required.

Records added to the Records Centre are initially placed in a document library named “Drop Off Library”. At this point they are subject to Content Organizer rules. Content Organizer rules determine the final location of a record, based on its content type and metadata. If a matching Content Organizer rule is found for an incoming record, it is automatically moved to its final destination. If no Content Organizer rules are applicable then the record will remain in the drop off library until correctly classified by a records manager. An overview of Content Organizer rules is given below.

Incoming records are also assigned a unique document ID, which is retained even if the document moves location. This ID can be used to search for the record in future.

The Records Centre Management page is shown below.

Content Organizer Rules

Content Organizer rules specify the target location for records, based on their content type, and metadata. The target location may be a document library or a folder within a document library. A sample rule is shown below.

Rules need to be set for each content type and if multiple conditions are set on metadata then they must all match for the rule to be applied.

Retention Schedules

Retention schedules can be set for content types, or for document libraries and folders. Retention schedules comprise one or more stages, with each stage being triggered by an event (typically a certain amount of time elapsing since the record was created or last modified). When an event occurs the actions that can be performed are

• Move to Recycle Bin
• Permanently Delete
• Transfer to Another Location
• Start a Workflow
• Skip to Next Stage
• Delete all Previous Drafts
• Delete all Previous Versions

The page for setting up a stage is shown below.

Holds

Holds can be used to retain content related to litigation, investigation or other content. Holds are created by searching for content, as shown below.

It is also possible to manually add or remove items from a hold, subject to having appropriate permissions.

Summary

Overall the Records Centre capability in SharePoint 2010 provides relatively straightforward, easy to use, ERM capability. It may lack the sophistication of some specialist high end solutions, but it lacks the price tag as well. For all but the largest, most complex of ERM scenarios, SharePoint 2010 is a product worthy of consideration.

Of course, there is far more to implementing ERM than the technology, and investment in requirements gathering, information audit, RM policy, file plan and project management is essential. The key, as with all ERM implementations, is to ensure that this work is done thoroughly, and that the fit with the chosen technology platform (SharePoint 2010 or other) is validated.

The article describes booting from a Windows 7 virtual machine, note that you must use either the Enterprise or Ultimate edition of Windows 7 for this to work, not Professional, otherwise a licence error will be encountered.

Topics include the latest research from HP labs on sizing and configuring SharePoint, plus SUGUK’s own Mark Macrae on getting the most out of SQL Server Reporting Services in SharePoint integrated mode.

Sign up here: http://suguk.org/forums/thread/21874.aspx, see you there!

There are some problems associated with this nested subfolders approach. Firstly, navigation is more complicated and time consuming, clicking through trying to find the content that you require. Secondly, search may not be as effective due to important metadata not being filled in and available to search on as classification is based on folders as opposed to metadata. Thirdly, excessive url length can become an issue when there are many subfolders and long file names. Instead, Document Libraries can be managed by using metadata classification and views. Let’s look at the example below…

Suppose we have a Correspondence folder on our file share. In it there may be the folders – Emails, Letters, Faxes, Memos. The Letters folder may have subfolders relating to the month in which they were received/sent.

In SharePoint this can be represented by setting up 3 additional columns on the document library, then creating a custom view of that document library.

We can set up a choice column called ‘Correspondence Type’ with the values Email, Fax, Letter, Memo.

We can then setup another choice column called ‘Category’ with the values Received and Sent, then finally a Date column called ‘Correspondence Date’ to record when the correspondence was received or sent.

Now we can configure a view grouping and sorting on the columns created above. Create a standard view, choose to group by ‘Correspondence Type’, then by ‘Category’ and sort by ‘Correspondence Date’.

The resulting view of the document library now looks like this

This presents a much more useful view of the content than just folders. Plus search can be configured so that users can search on values contained in the additional metadata we have set up.

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