Why are dates so hard to work with in SharePoint?

It seems that Microsoft may have missed one of the biggest issues that afflicts any content management system.  While they do automatically calculate the date that an item was created (or uploaded, as the case may be), and they also let you know when the last time the file was edited, and who touched it, there are some other calculations that they don’t handle well, if at all.  One of the culprits is “Today.”  While there are workarounds that will let you add the “Today” value to a calculated column, there really isn’t much use to it since it won’t calculate on the fly, but only when an item is “touched.”  So, that pretty much makes it nothing more than a fancy “Modified” column.  And that’s pretty much useless.  Well, we have a help desk site at our company and my manager wanted me to create a report for the number of service tickets that we close per month, and per quarter.  Here’s where the fun really begins.

Remove “Common Tasks” from Explorer view.

I know it’s been a while since I’ve written.  We have been very busy here with a network infrastructure upgrade that has been very demanding. We also have an office move coming up so it might be a bit before I write again.  I haven’t gone away though. 

We ran into an issue recently where our external users needed to be able to download multiple files at once. (I don’t know why, but our internal users demanded it.)  After thinking about it for a bit, It occurred to me that the explorer view may be exactly what they need.  So I opened up our site, and checked to see if it would work for a Forms based user.  Not initially, but after turning on client integration in Central Admin, our FBA users could access the Explorer view.  I checked what it looked like for our internal users and I ran into a problem…

Foiled again! DWGTrueView’s evil ways.

Well damn it all to hell! I thought I had a viable fix working.  Nope.  It turns out that those registry edits I had mentioned don’t do a damned bit of good when it comes to DWGTrueView trying to jack with Internet Explorer. Read on for the latest with that mess.  (I’m seriously contemplating finding out where Autodesk’s home offices are located and calling in a bomb threat!)

Remove “overwrite current minor version” in publishing libraries.

Building off of my post from the other day about removing the “discard checkout” option, I have also figured out how to remove the “overwrite current minor version” option in publishing document libraries.  I have now forced any of my users to keep track of all of their edits, which will prevent any nonsense from taking place.  It does seem a little harsh I know, but I look at it like locking your car doors.  It keeps the honest people honest, and removes any temptation to do something that they shouldn’t, especially since there will now be a record of any change made. 

Remove “Discard CheckOut” option

We had some security concerns expressed by some of our users about the possibility of opening a file, editing it, and then discarding the checkout after printing the file.  Since we have remote users, this is not a good option to leave available.  Well, I have found one way to stymie this possible vulnerability. 

two tricks I figured out recently for copying files, part 2.

As promised, here is part two.  If you read the post from the other day, you saw where I wanted to copy a file to a different document library depending on an item of metadata.  Well, when it was discovered that this was possible, some of the higher ranking at our company wanted me to do something similar, but add a step where a file has to be approved first.  I thought this was a perfect opportunity to implement the built-in approval workflow.  (I know, it’s sad, but I have to spoon feed the employees here because SharePoint scares them.)  Here is the problem, and then my solution.  We need 3 levels of permission for a file, one group should be able to edit the file at all times, one group should be able to view the file at all times but not be able to edit, and one group should only be allowed to view the major or “published” versions of the file.  We also want to add a step where a file cannot be “published” without the consent of another group.  Sounds simple right? 

two tricks I figured out recently for copying files, part 1.

Well, had two issues recently, and solving one introduced the need for the other.  (Our users were completely clueless that I could make SharePoint dance and sing, and send their e-mails for them and, and pour their bourbon and, well you get the idea.)  First up, the whole dilemma that I have had with the difference between a client and a vendor.  Well, I had a post previously about a cross site workflow that solved the problem of how and when to move a file between sites, subsites, or site collections. 

Do you have something you would like to contribute?

Some of you may have noticed that my posts are not coming as frequently lately.  This doesn’t mean that I don’t like contributing.  This just means that I don’t always run into issues that need to be resolved.  This is where you can help.  I’m not the only person with problems or issues that need to be resolved.  I would like to know what you have run into, and what steps you took to overcome your challenges.  Other readers would like to know too.  So, if you would like to be added as a contributor here, let me know. There is no money or glory associated, just the knowledge that you are helping others out, who may have run into the same issues that you have.  If you are a software vendor, I don’t care.  We don’t need to know on a daily basis how fantastic your solution is.  If we find a plugin or addition to SharePoint that truly helps, then by all means we will share.  Here’s the catch.  It must be free.  Not all of us have a million dollar IT budget.  It should be as viable for a small 4 person company to use as it would be for a multimillion dollar conglomerate.  I look forward to having other people contribute, and I’m interested in what people have found. If you are interested, again, leave a comment and we will figure something out.  Thanks.

CadWorx, FlexCAD, SmartP&ID, and other AutoCAD plug-ins with MOSS

Well, we finally decided on a way to go for integration of AutoCAD with our SharePointimplementation.  Since it does almost everything that all of the other options do, and the licensing is dirt cheap compared to the others, we decided to go with CADtoSharePoint.  We are now presented with a new quandary though.  Some of our users are using CoAde’s CADWorx plug-in, and it uses a database to track connections between components of different drawings.  We’ve already run into issues with this before we even started loading drawings into SharePoint.

Multiple project budgeting and tracking template modifications

First off, I have not forgotten about this blog.  I’ve been very busy (trying to get Anarchy Online to connect through our corporate firewall, but busy nonetheless.) 

I uploaded Microsoft’s Fab40 template for tracking and budgeting multiple projects.  Nice template.  I also noticed something. The IT site template, is just the multiple project template, the service call template and the knowledge base template all rolled into one.  (Lazy asses.)  Well, I got the project template installed for our dept and it works well.  There is one metric that I would like to measure though, and I don’t know enough about XSL to fix it.  On the dashboard page there are many indicators to show the status of a project, the related tasks, and issues.  The project status will show when several projects are overdue.  This is awesome, except in the nature of our department we work in absolutes.  Any task overdue is a bad thing.  What I would like is a way to track the amount of time that a task is overdue, and display that in the metric.  Basically, if any task is overdue, up to 2 days, then it shows the warning, and then if any task for a project is over 2 days overdue, the danger symbol.  In trying to get that, I’m learning that the dataview webpart is extremely powerful, as long as you can tell it what you specifically need it to display accurately.  I’ll keep working on it, and if I get an answer, I will post the tutorial here for a specific side project I am working on for our dept.  On the other hand, if any of my readers have an answer, or have come across this before, feel free to post the answer here in the comments.