The SharePoint Megathread: Making life miserable since Great Plains

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware / Software Crap > The SharePoint Megathread: Making life miserable since Great Plains

hirvox: Sep 8, 2009

FlyWhiteBoy posted:

A sister site of ours that has been running SP for years now while we are just installing SP has sent me a bunch of .spt files with no instructions for how to use them. I have assumed they are site template files and I've loaded them as such but when I try to use it I get an error in the log files along the lines of features are not installed. How can I get more information about these files to know exactly how to use them. I dont even know how to build these spt fiels or what program was used to create it. SharePoint Designer or Visual Studio? I'll be back in work tomorrow to get more detailed error information if thats needed.

Try extracting the feature IDs from the error messages and searching in the C:\Program Files\Common files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\FEATURES folder for those. If you get no matches from the various feature.xml files in the subdirectories, you probably have a different edition of Sharepoint installed. Or they didn't give you the custom solution packages (.wsp) that contain those missing features. If they tell you to copy a bunch of files manually to each server, refuse for the sake of your sanity.

STP files are created by going to the Site Settings menu and selecting "Save as Site Template". It'll save the IDs of various features activated on that site, the lists that were created and optionally the data in them. The template will then show up when you choose the type of a new site that you're creating. The site template gallery is site collection-specific, so you'll have to upload the templates to every site collection you plan on using them in.

# ¿ Jan 10, 2012 20:12

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# ¿ May 23, 2013 09:22

hirvox: Sep 8, 2009

Sab669 posted:

My boss was wondering if there was a way to just have all the libraries look at a drive we already have, as opposed to trying to transfer ~20GB to Sharepoint over the weekend (Took me like 9 hours for 1 GB, ugh).

So instead of uploading that 20GB to a Microsoft-hosted Sharepoint site, you want Sharepoint to show the contents of a shared folder as a library? I don't think it's possible. With on-premise Sharepoint installations you can point the search crawler to shared folders so old stuff shows up in search, but that's not the same thing. And external lists and BCS only deal with table-like data, not files.

Sab669 posted:

I found this on Microsoft's website and it seems to be what I'm looking for but I'm not positive. So I follow the Win7 instructions, get to Step 4 and when I type in companyName.sharepoint.com I get an error "The folder you entered does not appear to be valid".

This describes the opposite: Making a Sharepoint library show up as a mapped drive. The data would still need to be uploaded to Sharepoint first.

# ¿ Mar 6, 2012 04:29

hirvox: Sep 8, 2009

FlyWhiteBoy posted:

Now I need to figure out how I declare the content area where people can add web parts. Glad to know what I'm doing is possible, just will take time.

Those are in the page layouts (if you use the Publishing feature) or in the pages themselves (if you aren't).

# ¿ Apr 8, 2012 06:58

hirvox: Sep 8, 2009

Silas the Mariner posted:

My company want to implement a system by which CVs come into the office, are scanned in, then the data from the CVs is manually copy-pasted into Sharepoint fields. A workflow is then created which monitors action on the CVs (like when someone calls a potential recruit or arranges an interview). Also each CV that was inputted would create a staff file that could be updated with pictures, scans of training certificates etc. Phew.

My question is, is this possible?

A state machine workflow tied into a document library could fulfill most of the requirements, but the devil is in the details. Folders could be used for the staff files, but Sharepoint's own metadata model is bad when it comes to relational data. In this case, representing multiple work experience entries or certificates within a single CV could be problematic. You can do it with Sharepoint, but having a custom SQL database for relational data would probably be faster to develop for and be less error-prone. Depending on your hosting, that might not be possible.

# ¿ May 3, 2012 14:10

hirvox: Sep 8, 2009

Corvettefisher posted:

I am having a brainfart, can you link Sharepoint foundations to a full SQL or is it limited to express, I think foundations is limited to express and standard gives you full everything. I think the client needs standard anyways but they are cheap.

You're thinking of standalone installs. Foundation can handle full SQL servers and multi-server farms just fine.

# ¿ May 9, 2012 14:13

hirvox: Sep 8, 2009

boo_radley posted:

Setting up indexes on list columns can prevent list view threshold errors.

Indexes keep query performance acceptable on large lists, but if your result set is bigger than the limit you're screwed anyway; Sharepoint doesn't know how to iterate through it without running into ADO.Net's parameter limit.

# ¿ May 20, 2012 14:58

hirvox: Sep 8, 2009

ghostinmyshell posted:

1) We are an office of 50 with no more expected growth so I am going with the one-server solution but I wan't to keep the option open of growth and expanding the system open from the start. Is there anything to avoid shooting myself in the foot when they want to add more servers to the mix? We will probably be installing this on a shitbox for eval and then starting fresh with a real production system.

Just don't install it in standalone mode. Even on development installations, I always install it as a farm, because it'll allow me to move the databases away and add new servers later.

ghostinmyshell posted:

2) Next the files themselves, how do I add them to Sharepoint, can I point a directory and it indexes them? Or do I need to add them manually? What happens to the files, do they get moved or do they stay where they are located?

If you get the Search Server, you can set it to index other file and web servers, but you really do want to upload the files themselves to Sharepoint. That way you can use Sharepoint's version control and metadata features. After you've uploaded everything, you can delete the originals if you need to free up space; Sharepoint doesn't do it for you.

How much data do you have? If you have more than 100-200GB, you'll have to think about how the files will be organized within Sharepoint. Dumping everything into a single site collection will prevent you from transparently splitting the data into multiple content databases later.

# ¿ Jun 17, 2012 15:47

hirvox: Sep 8, 2009

ghostinmyshell posted:

We are looking at about 100GB of documents all over the place with wacky permissions that the bosses set up that I need to re-org. About 10-15 layers deep of folders and all permissions removed in areas except for c-levels, this includes any system related permissions, it's a mess. Can you go into what site collections are?

They're like drives, if you look at them from a file management perspective. They're the top level where you assign permissions, create user groups and set up quotas. Each site collection can have multiple subsites in addition to the root site, which can inherit stuff like permissions, UI settings and content types from the root site. A site in turn can contain multiple document libraries, calendars, task lists and other lists. A list can contain files (binary + metadata), list items (just metadata) or folders. Folders can contain other items.

The overall hierarchy within a site collection looks like this:

code:

Site collection
  Root site
    Page layouts
    Master pages
    Content types
    User groups
    Subsite
      Document library
        File 1.docx
        Folder 1
          File 2.pptx
          Folder 2
            File 3.pdf
      Task list
        Task 1
        Task 2
      Document library 2
        File 4.txt
    Document library 3
      File 5.doc

For example, file 2's URL would be:

code:

http://mysharepointsite.example/Subsite/Document library/Folder 1/File 2.pptx

If you have multiple site collections, you'll have to assign each additional site a name and one of the (configurable) prefixes. For example:

code:

http://mysharepointsite.example/sites/someothersite/Subsite/Document library/Folder1/File 2.pptx

# ¿ Jun 18, 2012 10:09

hirvox: Sep 8, 2009

ghostinmyshell posted:

Can I just do a standalone Microsoft Search Server 2010 Express install if all I really need is the file indexing and site crawling? Seems like I don't even need to bother with installing Foundation at all.

Sure, if you don't need version control or more metadata than you can embed into the files themselves.

# ¿ Jun 21, 2012 11:55

hirvox: Sep 8, 2009

Urit posted:

That's lowballing, too. To get a good professional design you're looking at around $1-2 mil USD if you want one that actually works and is not a lovely photoshop job that regresses 80% of sharepoint's existing out of the box functionality.

Or tries to customize something that Microsoft really, really wants to be left alone. There are parts that you either need to (partially) re-implement or render your farm into an unsupported state if you want to make any modifications to them. Microsoft's been pushing customers to accept the default look-and-feel for internal sites and only slightly tweak it with themes.

# ¿ Jun 28, 2012 04:21

hirvox: Sep 8, 2009

BaconBeast posted:

Is this even possible? How would any of you tackle this?

Like Urit said, no. Even the out-of-the-box columns like the survey filler's name just fake it by changing how the field is displayed for non-administrators. The data itself is still accessible by anyone.

The proper Sharepoint way for letting people manage their own information with selective visibility is Sharepoint Server's User Profile Service.

# ¿ Jul 26, 2012 07:25

hirvox: Sep 8, 2009

Urit posted:

Which doesn't exist in Foundation, which BaconBeast said they were using.

Yeah, that was the reason why I mentioned Sharepoint Server specifically.

# ¿ Jul 26, 2012 16:34

hirvox: Sep 8, 2009

Urit posted:

I would recommend against an iframed website just because of authentication issues. If you REALLY want to be fancy, you can just custom webpart it. Also, just using a list is not going to give you magic outlook connectivity if your list is basically a giant DB. It'll connect, sure, but it'll be super ugly and/or useless. If you're going to shoehorn this into SharePoint, do it right and do it entirely in SP or don't do it in SP at all.

Incidentally, the upcoming App model in Sharepoint 2013 is basically remote sites running either in a full browser window or in IFrames.

# ¿ Oct 16, 2012 12:25

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# ¿ May 23, 2013 09:22

hirvox: Sep 8, 2009

Cizzo posted:

Hm. I'll present this idea with my superiors and see if I can convince them to let me just redo their calendars across the board in order to implement this.

And if you get the go-ahead, you might want to take a look at LaPointe's tools for exporting the data from the individual calendars and importing them into the master calendar.

# ¿ Feb 21, 2013 15:54

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