SharePoint Learning Kit 1.3.1 breaks backward compatibility with previous versions. Once it is installed then any pages with the Assignments web part will not be able to display them, it will show an error instead.
It’s a simple command line application which includes the executable and source code.
From the help within the tool (UpgradeSlkWebParts.exe /?)
This utility replaces web parts which render as errors with the SLK 1.3.1 assignment list web part. The aim is to upgrade SLK to 1.3.1 which causes the errors on the previous assignment list web part, and this then swaps them for the web part which comes with 1.3.1.
baseUrl: The url of the web which is the parent of the class sites e.g. http://wss/sites/school/classes page: The actual page on which the web part appears e.g. it would be Pages/default.aspx for the url http://wss/sites/school/classes/Ma10A/Pages/default.aspx
Optional Parameters:
Parameters without values
siteOnlyOff : If present sets Show site only to false, if not present it’s set to true queryControlOff : If present sets Show Query Control to false, if not present it’s set to true allSites : Update all sites under the base Url. Otherwise use the maxNumber argument
Parameters with values : use like maxNumber=7
maxNumber : The maximum number of subsites to update. Defaults to 2. Use to test on a limited number of sites first. querySetOverride : The Query Set Override value to use. Defaults to blank. index : The position on the page. Defaults to 0. controlWidth : The width of the control. Defaults to not setting it.
If you use Outlook 2007 you probably already know that you can preview attachments from within Outlook. However, the built in support in fairly limited, being restricted to common types like office files, video and audio files.
However, this list is extensible using custom preview handlers. If you search on the internet for Outlook 2007 file previewers there’s a lot of hits. I’ve just downloaded some sample ones from a MSDN magazine article. Now I can preview files such as xml and pdf from within Outlook without saving them to disk and then re-opening them.
Windows Explorer in Vista can also take advantage of the same handlers if you turn on the Preview pane under Organize | Layout. I’ve now got this turned on and am finding it really useful as I generally have a lot of xml files which I need a quick look into.
So an example of previewing an xml file in Outlook is:
I’ve had several conversations with several schools about MOSS My Sites. A lot of people are finding that they are too powerful and the pupils have too much control over what they can do in them. Personally I think that they are a great tool for collaboration and would let them loose with them, possibly after some modification to the default (see my previous post) and trialling it with a subset of the school, but I don’t actually work in a school and deal directly with the problems that might cause.
However, for those who don’t want to do this, an alternative would be to create sites for the pupils within your normal SharePoint structure, just like your class sites under the Classes tab in MLG. You’ve then got all your normal permission levels and restrictions you can use, and generally tie it up a lot tighter. You can even define custom permission levels. I’m working with a few schools on implementing this for pupils and staff using Salamander SharePoint.
Taking it to another level, a request I’ve just received from one school is:
I am quite interested in developing a
SharePoint site, similar to the class sites for every teacher.Giving them a kind of My Site where they could post resources, links and a profile etc. I would need the script to create a site for each member of staff based on a template and then assign permissions for the teacher and then for all the students that the teacher teaches.
This is actually quite powerful and really easy with Salamander SharePoint. It sets up collaboration sites and also the community which can use them, and automatically keeps this community up to date. It’s requests like these which can add another level to how SharePoint is used in your school.
I’ve been asked a few time about how to customise the MOSS My Sites. Unlike SharePoint 2003, the reality is that it’s not easy. It may seem like a retrograde step, but as they are so powerful, adding a facility to modify all of them becomes difficult.
The easiest and most obvious way, altering the templates, is not supported as they are considered a core part of SharePoint. It will work, but Microsoft do not guarantee that they won’t be overwritten in any upgrade.
That leaves the only way is by running some custom code. This isn’t great for anyone who isn’t a developer. If you want how it’s done, Steve Peschka has some great information on how to do this on his blog. Even better than this, he has wrapped it all up as part of the Community Kit Project for SharePoint on CodePlex and released it as MySiteCreate.
What MySiteCreate allows you to do is specify a different master page for the My Sites and also specify web parts and their properties in an xml file. No more messing around with code, just a great tool to let you get on with the job.
Learning Essentials for Microsoft Office provides education specific tools and templates for pupils and teachers. Best of all it’s free for those of you on Microsoft Academic Volume Licensing.
The top features include:
SCORM authoring tool. The SCORM tools are a component of the comprehensive THESIS 3.0 e-learning solution from Hunterstone.
An integrated Content Development Kit with simple templates help teachers create their own materials for Learning Essentials.
Templates with Project Assistance for teachers and pupils help you quickly prepare classroom handouts, grading rubrics, assessments, worksheets and more.
Learning Essentials unlocks tools in Microsoft Office specially designed for foreign language study, providing templates for completing assignments in Spanish, French, and German.
Click through tutorials and side-by-side Project Assistance from leading educational publishers provide academic guidance for students and best practices for educators so they can do their best work.
After seeing a post on Edugeek, I’ve knocked up a quick utility to extract pupil and staff photos from Sims. It might be useful to you if you need to use them elsewhere, but you do have to bear in mind who owns the copyright, which might limit what you can do with them.
BETT is finally almost here. For those outside the UK, BETT is the leading exhibition for information and communications technology (ICT) in education in the UK. In fact it’s the world’s largest educational technology event, so there’s lots to see and many people to meet.
I’m going to be at BETT on Wednesday, Thursday & Friday. I will be present on the Serco stand (F20), in their partners area on
Wednesday 1700-1800
Thursday 1100-1200, 1500-1600
Friday 1100-1200, 1500-1600
and will also be spending some time at the LP+ stand (C76).
It would be great to meet up with any of you, especially those I haven’t met in person before. Either drop by the stands and ask for me, or give me a call when you’re free and we’ll meet up.
Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 come with a very handy utility for capturing the screen shots and saving them. It’s called the Snipping Tool and can capture almost any region you want. You’re not just limited to the whole screen and the current window like you are with the Print Screen button, you also have the options of rectangular select (the one I use most) and free-form snip.
It’s also got a couple of basic editing tools such as pens and highlighter.
I use it all the time when I need screen shots. Just type snip into the start menu and it will appear in the list at the top.
Sometimes you want to restrict who can add a specific web part to a page. Maybe it can access sensitive information, or it can be connected up in a dangerous way, or even it places too much load on your server and you only want it in one place. Well the good news is that you can limit exactly who has access to add particular web parts to pages in SharePoint 2007 using the standard method of setting permissions. The web parts are kept in a list in SharePoint so you can use the normal list setting permissions to limit access.
You need to remove permissions to the web part itself. The process is
1. From any site settings go to the top level site setting.
2. Open up the web part gallery.
3. Click the edit button for the web part you want to limit permissions to.
4. Click Manage Permissions from the edit page.
5. You will then see a standard Manage Permissions page. As with any permissions on a list, you will first need to break inheritance. Then set up the permissions so that the users you don’t want to be able to add the web part, don’t have any permissions on it at all, either directly or via a group membership.
Note: These permissions only affect being able to add the web part to a page and modifying the actual web part entry in the list. Once the web part has been placed on a page, these permissions are not used, the site permissions then control who can edit properties and delete the web part from the page. So you still need to consider the page level permissions carefully.
Every now and then an automatic update fails and leaves a directory in the c: drive with a Guid for a name, along the lines of C:\3baf1f42abd933d331f0d49f. The most annoying thing about these is that you can’t delete them, even when running as administrator. This is because the SYSTEM account owns them and no-one else has any permissions on them.
To manually delete them, you need to take ownership and then give yourself permission on every folder and file individually. This obviously would take forever, so a scripting solution is required. I finally came up with this solution:
1. Run PowerShell as administrator. 2. Navigate into the root of the folder to process. 3. Take ownership of all the files and folders by running
gci -r | %{takeown /f $_.FullName} This gets all files and folders below the current directory, then for each one runs takeown filename. Takeown is a utility which comes with Vista.
4. Once you have ownership you need to run icacls on all the files to get permissions on them. icacls is the Vista and Server 2008 replacement for xcacls. The command to run is:
gci -r | %{icacls $_.FullName /grant:r username:F} username is either you log on name on a stand-alone machine or domain\accountname in a domain.
5. Once you have permissions you can then run del -r
