If you ever need to quickly delete multiple web parts from a SharePoint page, there’s a quick and easy way.
Just add ?contents=1 to the end of the url, directly after the .aspx. If there’s already a query string there (the bit after the ?) then delete it and replace with contents=1.
I’ve finally got round to booking this. It’s on 6-8 April in London and looks like it will be a great conference. Don’t miss Andrew and Alex’s lunchtime session on Wednesday about SharePoint in Education. Find out more on their web site.
If anyone else is going it would be great to meet up. If anyone is interested we could try to find some space for an SLK discussion group. Let me know if you are interested in either of those and I’ll see what we can arrange.
I’ve just come across a great free tool for SharePoint 2007. It’s SharePoint Manager 2007 and is hosted over at CodePlex. It’s quite simply an object model explorer for SharePoint, allowing you to drill down into any detail of SharePoint, from server properties, to web users even down to individual list items. It will even let you modify the properties if you’re feeling brave.
I’ve lost count of all the little console utilities I’ve written to dump things like list fields, view CAML etc, all of which you can browse to with the tool. I think that it’s going to save me a lot of time and increase my knowledge of SharePoint.
What you may not know is that there are a couple of tools/techniques which can help you find areas in your code where you are not disposing of objects correctly.
SPDisposeCheck. This is a tool which will analyze your assemblies to search for coding patterns which lead to objects not being disposed correctly. It’s a great tool and worth running regularly on your assemblies.
SPRequestStackTrace registry value. Creating the registry key
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\HeapSettings SPRequestStackTrace: DWORD = 1
Will cause the SharePoint runtime to log a stack trace everytime a SPRequest object is not disposed of correctly. This will actually pick up all the types of objects not being disposed of as internally the problem with not disposing of them is that they contain a reference to SPRequest.
At this point I have to say thank you to Jared Kahlil who pointed out a memory leak in the SLK by using the second method above and started my research into both of these methods. Unfortunately we can’t use SPDisposeCheck on SLK as it checks to see if the file name begins with Microsoft and if there are any namespaces beginning with Microsoft, and if so ignores the assembly.
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.
SalamanderSoft has been mentioned in another TechNet article, this time about Blatchington Mill School which is titled Example Solution Architecture: Blatchington Mill School. Congratulations to Mark & Sue for all their hard work developing their portal being recognized by Microsoft.
Interestingly it the My Documents web part which is explicitly mentioned, while Salamander SharePoint which is used to generate the class sites is referenced as a third-party provisioning tool. Salamander SharePoint is much more powerful than My Documents so it’s strange we’re mentioned in relationship to one and not the other.
I’ve just finished a beta release of a list view web part for SharePoint. It allows you to display a list from another site even if it is in another site collection. It designed to be as simple as possible to set up.
To use it there’s 3 properties which you need to set:
Site Url: The url of the site the list in on.
List Name: The name of the list.
View Name: The name of the view to use to display the list.
The connection to the list is made as the user viewing the web part, so will use their permissions. So if they don’t have permission on the list, they won’t see it.
If you want to display a list from another site collection, then it needs to be on the same server.
Microsoft have published an article on TechNet about using SharePoint at Twynham School titled Example Solution Architecture: Twynham School Learning Gateway. I’ve worked with Twynham for quite some time now and know how much work they’ve put into their portal. It’s great to see them recognised by Microsoft and am pleased to see that SalamanderSoft is mentioned in the article.
Yesterday I attended a meeting of the East Anglia SharePoint Network, where I had been invited to give an overview of SalamanderSoft’s products. The network runs as a series of regular, informal, face-to-face meetings and an on-line community for schools in East Anglia to share information / good practice / problems etc with their Sharepoint implementations.
This was only their second meeting, but the meeting was well attended with a good mix of schools who have been using SharePoint for years, together with those who were just starting to use it, or even just thinking about it. There was a lot of useful information, just seeing what other schools are doing with SharePoint raises all sorts of possibilities – I certainly learned a lot and have come away with some ideas.
If you are interested in joining, attending a meeting or just finding out more then just email David Wilson (david.wilson (at) swaveseyvc.cambs.sch.uk).
