In SharePoint 2007 there is a well known trick for opening up a list’s forms (New/View/Edit) in design mode – append ?ToolpaneView=2 onto the url – this is often used to add instructions or javascript using a Content Editor Web Part (CEWP) e.g.

• Showing a records ID on the View and Edit forms
• Setting a default duration for new SharePoint calendar events

However when I first tried to use my tried and tested shortcut in SharePoint 2010 I came a little unstuck as now the New/View/Edit forms appear in a fake popup window and modifying the URL doesn’t work.

There are two ways to do this in SharePoint 2010 – and once you know where to find them they should actually make life that little bit easier.

The first is to open up the form in a new window and then add ToolpaneView=2 onto the end of the URL, so

Right click on Add new Item or the lists Title field and select Open in New Tab or hold down CTRL while left clicking.

Alternatively you can do this using the new-fangled ribbon toolbar – select under List Tools the List tab, then on the right hand side of the ribbon you should see an icon for Form Web Parts which gives a menu of the different forms associated with the list that you can edit.

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ID’s are a convenient, often short, way to uniquely refer to something. Unless you’re the Tax man who seems to believe he can’t get through his day without giving me, thats just one person, 7 unique id’s – presumably one for each extremity that we would like a piece off…

I digress… ID’s – SharePoint uses an ID for each item in a list and sometimes its handy to know them “Ere Bob – have you done task 1234 yet?”

You can easily add them to the list view (Modify this View then find the ID column, click display)

But what about if you want to see this on the View and Edit forms? (You can’t see it on the New form as it doesn’t get an ID assigned until you’ve created it)

You can’t do this in the UI. You can create a custom View/Edit form using SharePoint designer but its quite complex, is a pain when we add new fields and its fraught with potential problems.

So instead we’re going to look into every ones favourite SharePoint UI hacking tools – the Content Editor Web Part (CEWP) and javascript/jQuery.

Not so fast though young Jedi – before embarking on any of these hacks you should understand the pros and cons and this excellent article is a good place to start – jQuery : The SharePoint band aid.

Right now you’re back (you did read it right?) and understand what you’re getting into.

Open up the View page for any of your list items and add ToolPaneView=2 onto the end of the URL to open up the page in edit mode.

Note – if you already have a query string (&ID=xzx…) on the end of the url then you need to use &ToolPaneView=2 and if you don’t its ?ToolPaneView=2 e.g.

http://yoursite/Lists/Tasks/DispForm.aspx?ID=1

=> http://yoursite/Lists/Tasks/DispForm.aspx?ID=1&ToolPaneView=2

http://yoursite/Lists/Tasks/DispForm.aspx

=> http://yoursite/Lists/Tasks/DispForm.aspx?ToolPaneView=2

Next add a Content Editor Web Part (CEWP) to the page and put the following code into it using the Edit Source button.

Content Editor Web Part (CEWP)

Add the javascript at the bottom of this article and after you click OK you will see that ID has been added at the top of the form. Do the same on the Edit form.

<script type="text/javascript"
   src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.2/jquery.min.js">
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">

$(function() {
  // Get the ID from the query string
  var id = getQueryString()["ID"];

  // Find the form's main table
  var table = $('table.ms-formtable');

  // Add a row with the ID in
  table.prepend("<tr><td class='ms-formlabel'><h3 class='ms-standardheader'>ID</h3></td>" +
	            "<td class='ms-formbody'>" + id + "&nbsp;</td></tr>");
})

function getQueryString() {
  var assoc = new Array();
  var queryString = unescape(location.search.substring(1));
  var keyValues = queryString.split('&');
  for (var i in keyValues) {
    var key = keyValues[i].split('=');
    assoc[key[0]] = key[1];
    }
  return assoc;
}
</script>

Notes

• This has been tested in WSS3 (SharePoint 2007) and SharePoint 2010 Foundation – I would expect it to also work in MOSS/SharePoint 2010 Server.
• The method  for adding a CEWP to the page in SharePoint 2010 is slightly different.
• When looking for references I found that Christophe beat me to it by about, ohh a year and a half and his version can be found here.

He doesn’t use jQuery so there is a little more code to write. If you’re just doing this or can’t use jQuery on your site (e.g. no network access) then you may be better off with his version. If you want to do other thigns on the form you may be better with the jQuery version above.

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We often hear that communication is key to the success of any enterprise or organization. Making people aware of “what’s going on” is an essential.  So for a collaboration platform like SharePoint tools for telling people what’s happening are a central part of the setup.

SharePoint has it’s built in “Alert Me” feature.  New users seeing this often expect it to deliver functionality similar to that which comes as standard in MS Outlook.  But that isn’t what SharePoint Alerts do.  They tell you when something is added or changed.  This is great for document or content management, but not so good for managing calendars or tasks or projects – when you might prefer to be alerted when something is about to happen, or is overdue – or you might actually want to alert someone else, not yourself.

So here’s a little look at some of the things you might expect to be able to do with SharePoint Alerts but can’t.  And some suggestions as to how you might get round these shortcomings.

#1: Date Based Alerts

“It’s Jenny’s Birthday tomorrow”

“Your meeting starts in 10 Minutes.”

“Your expenses claim Submission is now overdue.”

How handy would this be?  You could do all of this in Outlook. But it’s just not how SharePoint Alerts work.  They don’t recognise or react to dates.

SharePoint Reminder web part however, is a different story.

As you can see, with Reminder you have the flexibility to send due soon and overdue emails for all of your tasks and events.  And you have a great deal of flexibility in terms of choosing the timescales that you wish to work on with setting for everything from months to minutes.

#2: Customize Alert Emails.

SharePoint sends out standardized alert emails which you can’t edit. Here’s one that has been sent out on a staff absence list to a line manager who needs to approve a requested absence:

Maybe it’s just me, but from this email I would find it very hard to figure out exactly what it is I am meant to do.  And there is no way to edit the email set up without getting into coding.

The email below on the other hand has been generated by SharePoint Reminder web part, triggered by the addition of the same item to the same list:

OK, now I know what I am supposed to be doing with this!  It’s an email addressed to me, with a meaningful subject line, a relevant selection of data from the list, free text that tells me what I should be doing with it and even color and bolding to highlight important points.  All this is achieved from within a simple WYSIWYG text editor.

For full details on customizing your alert emails check out the manual.

#3 Choose who you send alert email to

With SharePoint out of the box alerts, unless you are set up as a SharePoint site owner, the only person you can send alerts to is yourself.

So this means for example that if I have a list for absence requests and I want line managers to receive an alert every time a new staff absence request is added, I have to get each of the managers to turn on those alerts themselves, or get the SharePoint administrator to do it.

With SharePoint Reminder on the other hand, I have huge flexibility in terms of who I send my alerts to:

I can email to any email address in a column in my list.  So in this case I can choose to send my absence request emails to the line manager who needs to authorize that absence.  If the people I want to send my email to are part of my SharePoint installation – registered SharePoint users – the relevant column only needs to contain the person’s name and SharePoint will select the relevant email address.

But it gets even better.  I can choose to send email to people outside of SharePoint and outside of my company.  So for example if I had an order status list with included a column for customers email addresses I could choose to have Reminder send the customer when an email when their order has been dispatched.

Reminder has even more options for who you can send your alert emails to – check out the manual to see all the possibilities.

#4: Send Alerts to People Even if They Don’t Want Them

You know the kind of situation  – department managers really need to know every time there is a new customer complaint relating to their department – but actually some managers would rather not here about it,  With SharePoint’s Alert Me feature each user manages their own Alerts.  So the department manager who really doesn’t care how hacked off customers are with him and his team can just choose to switch off these Alerts.

So any one of your department managers can choose to just opt out of receiving alerts from the list, and you, as the Customer Complaints Manager will never be any the wiser.

With Reminder, you as the Customer Complaints Manager are the owner of the Alert, you set it up to go to whoever you want it to go to. A combination of permissions and visibility of the web part page make it much more difficult for anyone other than you to tamper with the setup.

The key difference is that whilst out of the box Alert Me lets you manage your own alerts, Reminder can be much more effective as “the office nag” – setting up alerts and reminders for relevant groups based around your business processes.

#5: Reply to a Real Person

How often have your replied to an email only to have your response bounce back  – telling you that the address you are writing to is a “no reply” address? This is very likely what will happen if you ever try to reply to a SharePoint “Alert Me” email.  SharePoint is set up so that replies to emails it generates can only go to one address, for the whole web application (that will usually be your whole organization, or site).  So organizations often set this up as a “no reply” address, or some sort of a dump box address, as it is likely to get so many emails that it will become completely unmanageable.

Clearly there are lots of occasions where this will not be ideal – the customer orders scenario we talked about above for example.  You clearly wouldn’t want an email from your customer, telling you that their order still hasn’t arrived, to bounce back, or just disappear into a black hole.

With Reminder you can choose who responses to each alert go to:

Replies can go to someone named in one of your list fields (the Account Manager perhaps?) or you can manually enter an email address for all replies to a particular alert to go to.  Either way you have the ability to ensure that a reply to an alert email will be received by a real person who can act on it.

So these are my top 5 things I always thought I should be able to do with SharePoint Alerts – what are yours?

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Now we all know that SharePoint Lists are pretty amazing things: easy to use, searchable, customizable… Where would we be without them?

But did you know that each list type comes with its own special “Superpower”?

If you understand the different superpowers of each list type it makes choosing which list to use on any given occasion much easier.

Calendar Lists – Repeating Events

For the meeting every Monday, or the staff Birthday list, or the equipment that needs to be serviced every six months Repeating events are what you need.

You have plenty of flexibility to set up your events to repeat daily, weekly, monthly or yearly, when to start them, when to finish them and how many recurrences to include.  So this is the superpower you need if you want to avoid manual entry of events that repeat regularly.

It would be nice to be able to get a little Reminder of upcoming repeating events: “It’s Jane’s Birthday next week.” for example.  Of course this isn’t possible with SharePoint out of the box, as SharePoint alerts don’t offer a date based alert option, like the one you get in Outlook.  You can of course get “Due Soon” and “Overdue” alerts for your Repeating Events with our Reminder webpart.

It would also be pretty super to be able to see your repeating events on the Gantt view of you Calendar list – but you can’t do this either. On a SharePoint out of the box Gantt your weekly team meeting will display as one loooong event, whereas with a Gantt chart created from the same list using our Planner web part, repeating events will display exactly as you would want them to.

(That’s the end of the shameless product plugs now – promise.)

Task List – Assigned To

If you want to stop stuff falling through the cracks this is the one to go for.  You know the drill:

“Have you booked the flights  to the SharePoint Conference?”

“No I thought you were doing that?”

“No, I told you to book them!” . . .

With the Task List (and also Issues and Project Task lists) “Assigned To” feature this need never happen again, as you can ensure that all of your tasks have an owner and that the owner of a task gets an email every time a task is assigned to them.  But there are two things you need to do to ensure this superpower works as it should do.

First, although “Assigned To” is one of the default fields in this list type, it isn’t set up as a mandatory field, so when you set your task list up be sure to change your list settings to make entry of data into this field compulsory.

Second, you have to remember to switch email notifications on. This is done in List Settings – Advanced Settings.

Following these 2 simple steps will have your Task List Superpower fully loaded and ready to go.

Of course it would be great if the owner of the task got an email when the task is due, but that doesn’t happen with SharePoint out of the box – however, if you use our Reminder webpart . . . . .

(OK, so I work in marketing, I start to twitch if I see an opportunity for a product plug and miss it.)

Issue List – Comments History

This is ideal for when you just need to know exactly what has been happening over the course of time – who said or did what, when and to whom.  It’s ideal for service desk issues, customer complaints, maybe staff performance tracking.

Whilst all SharePoint lists offer a Version History which is great for audit and compliance, version histories can quickly get a bit unwieldy and difficult to manager.  The Issues list Comments History lets you see what has been going on at a glance – Kryptonite!

Discussion Lists-Threaded Discussions

You know those group emails, about a particular project, the annual conference, the monthly sales figures.  It’s the email that gets sent to 40 people asking for comments and feedback which quickly becomes an unmanageable mess as you lose track of who is replying to whom and exactly which email response the boss is so very angry about.

Threaded discussions solve all this be letting you see exactly who commented when, who has replied to what, and how the weird tangent that Bill and Sue have wandered off on got started in the first place.

These have some similarities to the comments history superpowers enjoyed by Issue Lists, but where version history just lets you see a chronological sequence of events, Threaded Discussions lets you see the relationship between those events.  To anyone who has ever taken part in forum discussions it will look quite familiar.

If you have any other superheroes who you think deserve a mention we’d love to hear about them.

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There is a great deal of confusion around some terms related to the different levels of SharePoint hierarchy. Some of this is buzword overload and some  has been brought about by inconsistent usage from Microsoft (and to be fair actually most of us in this industry).

So if you’ve ever wondered what things like Farm, WFE, NLB, Web Application, Site Collection and Top Level Site mean I am going to try and clarify the different terms without getting too technical as some of this stuff needs to be know by advanced, or power, users. I’ve missed out some of the more esoteric things like managed paths in the interests of readers sanity.

General Terms

Request

• When you load a page each element (including the page itself) makes a request to SharePoint and receives some data – which can be html, images, files etc.

Network Load Balancer (NLB)

• A device to distribute requests from your users browsers to the Web Front Ends

Web Front Ends – (WFE)

• A collection of servers that take requests from users (via the NLB), process them and return the data.
• This is the primary method for scaling – as the number of users grow you add more WFE’s.

Database

• The database servers store all volatile data (i.e. data that changes) in SharePoint.
• You have exactly 1 configuration database and 1 to many content databases.
• Each content database can only be on 1 server (more technically if you consider failover servers) but you can have different content databases on different servers – another method of scaling with increased load.

Authorisation and Authentication

• Authentication is the process of deciding WHO a user is.
• Authorization is the process of deciding WHAT they can do.
• IIS (the web server) handles Authentication alongside things like Active Directory and SharePoint handles authorization.
• Authentication methods include things like Anonymous, Basic, Forms, Integrated (NTML/Kerberos and Claims).

Farm

• A collection of servers (web, database, index) that together make up a SharePoint Installation – aka Topology.
• You can do all this (web/datababase/index etc) on a single server in “Simple Installation” mode in which case you don’t need a NLB. For many small businesses this is plenty enough.
• Medium sized businesses usually start with at least 2 Web Front Ends (WFE’s) and a database server.
• Multinationals can have some very complex setups involving dozens of components.

A common small SharePoint Farm topology - two WFE servers and a database server.

Levels of the SharePoint Hierarchy When you hear someone talking about ‘Scope’ this is what they mean.

Farm

• The entire installation as a whole. So if something has “Farm” level scope it applies to everything.

Web Application

• An IIS Website that has been configured to run SharePoint.
• Can only be created in the Central Admin UI (or via the STSADM tools etc)
• A Farm has one running the central administration site and 1 to many others running normal SharePoint sites.
• This is generally how the main part of the URL is defined – e.g. http://somesite.yourcompany.com and http://othersite.yourcompany.com will be separate Web Applications.
• This authentication method is set at the Web Application level – though you can have the same content (i.e. SharePoint site) delivered by two different web applications with two different authentication methods.
• Port and network card bindings, host headers and a host of other networky stuff is set at the Web Application level – so if you want external users, for example, to have access to a site that would apply at the Web Application level (you can apply more granular restrictions using authorization security though).
• The Application Pool (the account that SharePoint runs under and the resources that it can consume) are also set at the Web Application level.

Note – Used to be known as “Virtual Server” before the days of Virtualization technologies.

Site Collection

• Each web application has at least 1 Site Collection (but can have many).
• Each Site collection has exactly 1 ‘Top Level Site’.
• The Site Collection doesn’t actually contain anything itself - that is down to the Top Level Site.
• This is the level that things like the Recycle bin and Quotas are organised at.
• Each site collection can only use a single content database (though multiple site collections can us the same content database) – this has major design implications as there are maximum recommended sizes for a content database.

Top Level Site

• A Top Level Site is a site… at the top level… see – this terminology is not that confusing after all
• Most of the time we can use Top Level Site and Site Collection interchangeably - in fact Microsoft do this all the time.
• Each Top Level Site has zero to many sub-sites (simply called sites)
• This is the lowest level that many things can be scoped to, for example only the Top Level site contains a web part Gallery so you can’t say Collection X, Site A can have a web part but Collection X, Site B can’t.
• When you look at Site Settings in a top level site you will see the highlighted sections – in a sub site you will not. Both are called Sites in the UI.

Site

• (aka Web’s) – these are the actual sites that you use.
• A site can be a top-level site or a sub site of the top level site.
• A site can also have other sites – these are called sub-sites.
• Sub sites can also have other sub sites and so on.
• A site can inherit its parent’s permissions or define its own – more on this complex subject in a future article.

Finally a Site! - the thing that you actually use and what most of us think as "SharePoint"

References

• TechNet – Creating Your First Web Application, Site Collection and Web Site
• TechNet – Farm topology management

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Last year, when I first started having dealings with SharePoint, I was mightily confused by all this “MOSS”, “WSS”, “SPS” -stuff.   What did all these acronyms stand for? What was the difference between all these different versions of SharePoint? And did it really matter?

Well, one year on and I’m slightly less confused, but only slightly!  So I thought it might be useful, for me and for anyone else out there who suffers similar confusion, to list out the different versions of SharePoint, their usual acronyms and key distinguishing features – I hope it helps:

So, in the begining, back in 2001, SharePoint emerged as two distinct products.  SharePoint Team Services was a bottom up team collaboration product, SharePoint Portal Server was a top down, portal, search and document management product.

By 2003 Microsoft had gathered that although customers liked both products what they would really like was the capabilities of both, combined.  So in 2003 what most of us would recognise as SharePoint: collaboration, search, content management and portal capabilities all under one roof – was born.

WSS was the basic version, free with Windows Server OS. SPS, the premium version, built on the foundations of WSS, incorporating extra functionality primarily around the areas of search and document management. Jason Masterman and Ted Pattison writing in MSDN Magazine put it quite neatly:

In essence, WSS gives you a place to put all your content while SPS provides the means to navigate and search through your content when you need it.

In 2007 much the same formula was followed, with Windows SharePoint services as the free version for windows server users and Microsoft Office SharePoint Services the premium version.  The MOSS designation references the greater level of integration with the Office suite.

In SharePoint 2010 it’s all change again and Microsoft have dropped references to both Office and Windows, leaving SharePoint to stand alone in 3 basic flavours: foundation, the free version, Standard – the premium version, which adds lots of functionality primarily around the area of search, and Enterprise – super premium, where the extras are pricipally in the area of content management.

This is very much a whistle stop tour, not an attempt to give an all encompassing overview of what is in each of the many SharePoint versions we have seen over the years – but we hope it might help you to at least get the acronyms straight!

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As you’ve probably noticed we have had a few changes on our SharePoint blog in recent weeks.  We’ve been doing some work on making it a little more user friendly and a bit nicer to look at (hope we haven’t spoiled it with the photos!)

Whilst I was working on the blog I noticed that we have quite a few little gems hidden away in the archives. Old posts – things that were written maybe a couple of years ago, that those of you who are new to the blog might not be aware of, but might find useful.  The useful ones fall into a few categories – general SharePoint tricks, tips and ideas, and ideas and tips for users of our web parts.  So here they are, I hope you find them useful.

SharePoint tricks tips and ideas

Extend and customise SharePoint Task lists

Task Lists are one of the best loved and most used features of SharePoint and this post shows you how to better tailor them to meet your particular needs.

Advanced SharePoint View and Filter techniques

This article explores some of the uses of SharePoint Views and Filters.

Working Days, Weekdays and Holidays in SharePoint Calculated Columns

SharePoint Out of the box doesn’t automatically distinguish between working days and weekends but if you are setting things like job duration or due dates you may need to – this article shows you how.

The Truth about using [Today] in SharePoint Calculated Columns

This article explains why the often repeated trick for using [Today] in SharePoint calculated columns does not work, and suggests workarounds.

The … ehem… Truth about using [Today] in SharePoint Filters

This one looks at the differences between SharePoint 2003 and 2007 when using [Today] in filters.

Setting a default duration for new SharePoint Calender Events

So you might be a medical receptionist scheduling appointments for doctors, appointments are always 45 minutes long unless the doctor tells you differently, how much easier would it be to just have SharePoint create an end time 45 minutes after the start time automatically?

How To Use Filters in SharePoint to show items in the current Calendar Month

It’s easy to think of occasions when you might want to filter a SharePoint list to show items falling in the current calendar month: “sales this month” springs to mind, or “subscriptions due for renewal this month”. This post shows you have to achieve this using calculated columns.

SharePoint Reminder Webpart Ideas

SharePoint Reminder Webpart – Setting a variable Due In or Overdue By time

Lots of people use Reminder to send an alert when a message is due soon or overdue.  Usually its fine for the message to go out at a fixed time before or after the event, for all list items, but there are occasions where you might want to vary the times at which you send your alerts.  For example, sending alerts for overdue helpdesk items: for high priority items you might want to send an alert when an item is 1 hour overdue, whereas for low priority an alert for items 1 day overdue might be fine.  This article shows you how.

Customize SharePoint Reminder Emails with Merge Data

Whilst SharePoint’s out of the box alert emails come in a standard format, with Reminder its possible to customize the alert emails you send by merging data from your list items.

Tip – don’t send SharePoint email alerts for old items.

There are some situations where, when you are setting up a Reminder for the first time, you could end up sending out alerts for a lot of very old list items, this post shows you how to avoid doing that.

Tip – Sending an SharePoint email Alert when a Task is completed

If you are using Reminder to drive simple workflow you may very well want to send an email when a task is completed – maybe when a holiday request form has been filled in for example.  This post shows you how.

SharePoint Planner Webpart Ideas

Tip – Showing multiple columns in SharePoint Planner Webpart

There may be times when you want to display timeline or category information from more than one list column in a gantt chart. For example in the chart below we have taken information from the “priority” and “title” columns of a list to populate the category labels.

5 things you never knew you couldn’t do with SharePoint Gantt Charts

Shows you a few of the things that aren’t possible with SharePoint OOTB gantt charts, but can be done with Planner.

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There are many instances where you might want to view a set of SharePoint list records which have been filtered on a comparison between values in 2 columns.  You might want to view a list of all sales reps who have failed to hit their targets: Actual SalesCredit Limit, or employees who have not used their full vacation entitlement: Vacation Entitlement>Days taken.

A customer recently contacted me with just this type of question :-

They use a SharePoint list to keep track of orders waiting to be manufactured and delivered – so amongst other fields they have Scheduled Delivery Date (which they have promised to a customer) and the Estimated Delivery Date which is kept up to date with the latest estimate. Most of the time the two agree but sometimes for various reasons the delivery date slips.

They have been using Reminder to send out automated emails for upcoming orders and ones that had just been missed but they wanted to setup a view that would show only orders where the Estimated delivery date was later than the date they had told the customer. Account managers could then use this list to keep customers up to date – “There is a delay on that order we have scheduled for you for next month, we estimate it will be ready on the 17th”

Sounded pretty simple to me and I confidently told them how they could do it – just setup a new view with a filter to only show those records where Scheduled Delivery Date is greater than Estimated Delivery Date.

But of course you can’t do this because in SharePoint view filters you can only use one field per filter expression - the other operand has to be fixed (like the string “27th March 2010″) and you get this helpful error message :-

"Filter value is not in a supported date format" or "Fitler Value is not a valid Number"

This will happen any time you are trying to setup a SharePoint view filter to compare one field to another.

The workaround is to use a calculated column to compare the field – then filter on the comparison.

So in our example we setup a new Calculated column called “Days Late” Set its type to be Numeric and the formula to be =IF(ISBLANK([Estimated Delivery Date]) , "", [Scheduled Delivery Date]-[Estimated Delivery Date]) The key part of the formula is the [Scheduled Delivery Date]-[Estimated Delivery Date]. The IF and ISBLANK stop the calculation being performed for empty date values – otherwise SharePoint will assume 1st Jan 1900 and show values like 40,000 days early! (If you copy this formula into your calcualted column and get “The formula contains a syntax error or is not supported.” errors check that you haven’t got any extra spaces anywhere and that the field names are correct) So the result of this formula will be the number of days its going to be late - if its on time then it will be a zero and if its going to be early its a positive number of days (aka negative days late!)

The next step is to setup a new view for Delayed Orders and set the filter to only show items when the Days Late column is greater than 0. You may also want to filter out those deliveries that have already happened – you can do this by adding Status is not equal to completed or “Actual Delivery date is ” or whatever works with our data.

Automated Emails each time a delivery date slips

For a bonus point I told them how they could setup a Reminder Web Part that would watch this view and send out automated emails to the account manager (or even directly to the customer) when an orders delivery date slips – you can even set it up so that if date slips again another email is sent. Tips You can use this technique when you are comparing other type of fields in SharePoint such as Numeric or Currency or even text based fields – First use a calculated field for the comparison then filter on the result of the calculated field. You can’t use this type of technique for showing the number of days between a date and [Today] – not even with the infamous fake Today column trick because it doesn’t work. But you can use Today in the filter part so you can use filters for view such as tasks that are due in the next 7 days or overdue by 7 days or more.

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A customer recently contacted me with an interesting question.

They were using a SharePoint task list to help schedule jobs for field engineers but rather than have a Start Date and End Date field they wanted to have a Start Date and Duration field and automatically work out the End Date.

So End Date = Start Date + Duration

They were then planning to display this using Planner in the By Category view which is idea for resource booking as it makes it easy to see when a resource is booked or free (SharePoints built in gantt chart can’t do this swimlane style of view and doesn’t support using calculated columns).

Now this is easy to do if the Duration is specified in days – in fact you just use the equation above – but what if Duration is in hours or minutes?

First port of call is this page from Microsoft showing examples of common date time formula you can use in SharePoint calculated columns hmmm, adding days OK… adding months Check… adding years OK too….but nothing about hours. Back to the drawing board.

The key bit of knowledge is that SharePoint stores all date/time values internally as the number of days since Jan 1st, 1900. So the number 100.5 in a date/time field is 100 days and 12 hours from 1st Jan 1900 at 00:00

Armed with this we get the following formula (where Duration is in hours) =[Start Date]+([Duration]/24) So what’s happening here? ([Duration]/24) turns the number of hours in Duration to fractions of a day (e.g. 1 hr is 0.0416 of a day) Then we add that number to the Start Date and finally as our calculated column is defined as a date/time field SharePoint is turning the number (e.g. 40,296.50) back into a readable date/time value. Job done! Tips This will work with Durations greater than 24 or even 1/2 hours etc. If you want to specify Duration in minutes then instead of /24 above you would use /1440 (the number of minutes in a day). You can use this for anything that has a duration – tasks, service jobs, meetings, flights, equipment booking etc. Further reading Common Date Time formulas for SharePoint

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With all the furore surrounding the business release of SharePoint 2010 it would have been easy to miss the launch (or relaunch) of another little Microsoft product in the SharePoint space which quite neatly addresses some of my personal SharePoint bug bears.

Wonderful though SharePoint is there are always a few things we wish it would do better.  Personally I have always been a little frustrated by the limitations on sharing with people outside of your own organization, the difficulties around working off-line and with the difficulties of moving documents from your PC and other applications, into, and out of SharePoint.

I collaborate a lot with people outside of the organization, dealing with designers, writers and partners, often on an ad hoc basis.  Getting things set up to share SharePoint content with someone who you may only be working with on one project, for a few days or weeks, can be a real pain.  I have to admit to resorting to Google Docs from time to time.

I am lucky enough to have a lot of flexibility in where and when I work. But SharePoint puts limits on this.  Although “cloud computing” is definately the flavor of the month – if not the year – anyone who has tried to access the “cloud” from a plane, a train or even a remote part of the country will know just what I’m talking about.

Then there is the whole businesses of getting content from other applications into and out of SharePoint.  I’m a drag and drop girl myself and anything that requires more effort just puts my hackles up.  So I end up with a stack of documents on my desktop, waiting for me to find a moment to save them to SharePoint – and as you can imagine, quite often that “spare moment” just never arrives.

So I was really pleased when I noticed that Microsoft have now relaunched Groove as SharePoint Workspace 2010 – which seems to address both of my problems.

When Microsoft bought Groove back in 2005 many people wondered what they were up to – did they want Groove or did they really want its creator Ray Ozzie?  Well they got both, and Groove has now been relaunched as SharePoint Workspace 2010 and now seems to make much more sense.

Microsoft say that Workspace will be easier to deploy than Groove and will offer organizations the opportunity to “provide a more consistent enterprise information strategy based on SharePoint technology.”

For those of us on the coal face it addresses the issues of ad-hoc collaboration, working on and off line, and moving content between SharePoint and desktop applications with drag and drop quite neatly.

Workspace might present real competition for companies like Colligio who’s products address these issues within SharePoint.

But Colligio and similar companies should probably not panic just yet, as sadly it seems that it’s going to be quite difficult for us mere mortals to actually buy SharePoint Workspace 2010.  Workspace isn’t part of the 17 different versions of SP 2010, you can’t buy it as a stand alone product, the only way you can get it is as part of Microsoft Office Pro +, which can only be purchased through volume licensing, so is only really going to be accessible to large corpoarates.

Come on Microsoft – give us a break! SharePoint Workspace 2010 looks really useful – can we buy it please?

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