Home - Jennifer Mason

2/1/2010

I had the great privilege to present this past weekend at SPSIndy. I was responsible for the introduction to SharePoint for Business & End Users. We had a great group in the audience and I loved hearing all of the things they had started to do or were interested in starting within SharePoint!

I did tell everyone I would make my deck available and here is the link. I hope that you will find the deck helpful as you go back and share with the rest of your organization! I'd love to hear any feedback you have from the presentation as well as any additional questions you have since we ran so close on time. I enjoyed getting to meet all of you and hope I will see you again at another event!

Posted at 8:38 AM by Jennifer Mason | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

12/22/2009

SharePoint 2010 – Enforce Unique Values

The option to enforce Unique Values is one of the small changes in 2010 that makes a big impact. Many times with SharePoint 2007, I have wanted to enforce that values only exist one time in a list. With the release of SharePoint 2010, this feature will be available OOTB. When you configure a new column, the option to enforce unique values is listed as one of the additional column settings.

If a user tries to use that same value in the list item, an error will be displayed prompting them to select a new value.

It is good to note that this setting can only be configured if there aren't any existing duplicate values in the list. If you already have existing duplicate values, those would need to be removed before turning on this column setting.

Posted at 2:11 PM by Jennifer Mason | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

12/14/2009

SharePoint 2010 – Configure Views for this Location

In SharePoint 2010, you can configure views for different locations within the lists. For example, I can have a set of views available for the top level of the library and a different set of views available for the folders within the library.

You configure the views available using the "Configure Views for This Location" option in the views drop down list.

From the configuration screen you can determine which view inheritcance or what specific views are able for display in the specific location.

Once the views have been configured, the view drop down only shows the available views.

Posted at 9:01 AM by Jennifer Mason | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

12/10/2009

SharePoint 2010 – SharePoint Designer Settings

SharePoint 2010 allows for more granular control of the use of SharePoint Designer within web apps and site collections for Site Owners and Site Designers. The table below represents the different configuration options available.

Site collection administrators can configure any of these settings for Site Owners and Designers. (Note Site Administrators will be able to do all items listed below, unless they are blocked in Central Admin for that web application):

Item	Description
Allow SharePoint Designer to be used in this Site Collection	Specify whether to allow users to edit sites in this Web Application using SharePoint Designer.
Allow Site Admins to Detach Pages from the Site Template	Specify whether to allow site administrators to detach pages from the original site definition using SharePoint Designer.
Allow Site Admins to Customize Master Pages and Layout Pages	Specify whether to allow site administrators to customize Master Pages and Layout Pages using SharePoint Designer.
Allow Site Admins to see the URL structure of their Web Site	Specify whether to allow site administrators to manage the URL structure of their Web site using SharePoint Designer.

Out of the box for a team site, the settings are as follows:

They can be configured for the web application:

Once disabled at the web application level, site administrators would see something similar to the following:

Posted at 8:45 AM by Jennifer Mason | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

12/9/2009

SharePoint 2010 – Calendar Overlay

There are some great new features with Calendars in 2010; specifically I am referring to the overlay feature. This feature basically allows you to add additional calendar views to your view and display the entries with a specific color. Here are some screenshots of the feature. It looks like the limit is 10 calendars and you can add either SharePoint or Exchange calendars. I didn't have easy access to exchange, so I just tested the SharePoint calendars. I added 2 new overlays to my view – another calendar (Calendar 2) and a Tasks Lists Calendar View (Tasks). This shows that any list that has a calendar view can be displayed in the overlay.

Posted at 11:42 AM by Jennifer Mason | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

12/7/2009

SharePoint 2010 – Customize List Form Using InfoPath

One of the new features in 2010 is using InfoPath to create and modify custom list forms. In this blog I will be walking through the process of customizing a list form. Since I am just trying to highlight the functionality, I am only going to make a few changes:

Add an Image & Title
Delete the Attachments Control
Add Rules to the Unit Price Field
- Show Screen Tip if > 50
- Change formatting to Red on Red if > 50

To get started, select the Customize Form option in the lists ribbon:

InfoPath will open and you will see your form with the Fields menu open:

From here, you can edit and modify the form like any other InfoPath form (notice that I added another table row and inserted an image and some text). When you select any of the fields you will see that there are additional menu items in the ribbon that can be used to modify the properties of the fields.

Another great improvement / feature is the new interface for creating rules:

Once you finish designing your form, you need to publish it back to the SharePoint site:

Now, when you select any of the forms (edit or new) you will see the new custom form. Here is the new form:

Here is the form, when the Unit Price is > $50, which applies the rules I created:

And here is the display form:

I can't wait to start using this feature! I still have some research to do to figure out how this works with lists with different content types and list templates, but I wanted to at least post what I had found so far.

Posted at 1:22 AM by Jennifer Mason | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (1)

12/3/2009

SharePoint 2010 – Check Permissions & Show Me Unique Content

I was messing around with site permissions and wanted to share what I found. In my scenario, I had given a co-worker read access to one of my document libraries, but not my entire site. When I went back in to the site to view the site permissions here is what I saw:

When you click this link, another screen opens and shows you what lists have had unique permissions applied.

The other feature I found helpful, was the Check Permissions option. When you select this you are able to enter a username and it will display for you if that user has been added directly to the site or if they have been placed in a group.

Here is one for a user that was added directly to an item:

This small improvement will be great for troubleshooting access issues!

Posted at 5:13 PM by Jennifer Mason | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (1)

12/1/2009

SharePoint 2010 – Add Web Parts Interface

There are several great improvements to the interface that allows you to add web parts to the page. When you choose to edit a SharePoint 2010 site you are given several different options in the Ribbon for the addition of web parts. The screenshot below shows the three options I am referring to:

What is great about this is that you are able to easily able to add new web parts, or create new lists if needed. If you know that the web part you want to add is an existing list you can click existing lists, otherwise you can select Web Part to see a list of all available web parts.

When you add an existing web part, the ribbon is expanded to show the web parts grouped by categories. This is a big improvement over have a long list that you have to scroll through to find the web part that you are looking for. For each category the web parts are displayed, along with a description of the web part.

If you notice that the list you need has not been created for the site yet, you can select the option to create a new list. When you create the new list, the new list web part is added immediately to the page, in the same way it would be if the list had already existed.

To me this is one of those small improvements that can potential save some time and frustration when creating sites. I know many times I have been working on a site and realize that the list / library that I want to reference doesn't exist on the site yet. This could definitely help reduce the steps required to get the site built.

Posted at 9:27 PM by Jennifer Mason | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (2)

SharePoint 2010- Summary Task Content Type

I was playing with SharePoint 2010 today and noticed that when I went to create a new item in my tasks list that there was an option to create a "Summary Task. Curiosity got the best of me, so I decided to check it out to see what it does.

When I created the summary task, it allows you to enter the same information as a normal task item, however it is creating a folder for you to store and organize additional tasks.

Here is a screenshot of the Summary Task Content Type configuration:

Out of the box, it doesn't appear that anything you do with the items stored in the summary tasks item are updating the summary task entry, however I am guessing that this could be accomplished using workflows. Maybe a post on that in the future! J

Posted at 9:05 AM by Jennifer Mason | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

11/30/2009

SharePoint 2010- Lookup Columns Additional Column Options

When creating a new lookup column type in SharePoint2010 you are given some additional column options that allow you to pull in multiple field values from the list that is being used as the lookup. Here is a screenshot of the configuration using a lookup to a Document Library-

In addition to the ability to show more of the lookup columns, we are given the ability to control how the list handles the relationship. This means that we can force the target list to not enable deletes for any items that are referenced in this list.

Here is the error screen I get when I try to delete the item in Tasks that I am referencing as a lookup in my custom list:

When you go to enter a new list item you select the lookup value and then the additional columns you selected are populated and available for display in views and on the view properties page for the list.

You can also, from this list select to edit the lookup value. For instance, in the example above, if I select Task 1, the display form for Task 1 is opened in a new window and I can select to modify the values. I click save and then my lookup values are immediately updated.

Now…the real question…how many times did you wish you could do something like this with SharePoint 2007? J This opens up a whole new realm of possibilities for quickly creating powerful out of the box SharePoint applications!

Posted at 1:28 PM by Jennifer Mason | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

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Jennifer Mason