New blog site!

Being a staunch advocate of Microsoft and SharePoint, I have decided to move my blog site onto an Office 365 platform.

All my new posts will be going here, so please update your favourites (assuming this blog site is in them of course!).

 

http://paulkeys-public.sharepoint.com/

Using your content type hub to publish content types in SharePoint online

Publishing your content types from your content type hub in SharePoint online is an easy task. I recently posted that a content type hub is provisioned for you automatically when the tenant is provisioned.

1. Within your content type hub, go to your Site settings and then click on Site content types;

2. Now all you need to do is create your content type using the same steps you always perform in the UI.
3. Once you have completed with the content type you will need to click on the link Manage publishing for this content type

4. Make sure that the Publish option is selected and click OK

5. Your content type should be available within your other site collections in approximately 15 minutes. and will appear under the Content type publishing link in Site settings

SharePoint online content type hub

I've been looking at running a POC for one of my clients and had the need to create a content type hub for the environment. After looking through the admin section and finding nothing, and then doing a bit of research I cam across a link in the site settings of each site collection:

Content type publishing

So in a word, the content type hub is already provisioned for you in your SharePoint online tenant.

Clicking on this link will show you that your content type hub sites at /sites/ContentTypeHub/

 

 

Assuming you have sufficient permissions you will be able to create your content types and publish them from this location. I will post details of creating content types in a content hub in a later blog.

Happy SharePointing!

Adding a "sign in with a different user" link in SharePoint 2013

If, like me you're getting highly annoyed with having to close and reopen your browser while testing using different​ levels of access. You can manually add the "Sign in as a different user" link by adding the following element before the ID_RequestQccess element in the Welcome.ascx file found in \15\TEMPLATE\CONTROLTEMPLATES\

 

<SharePoint:MenuItemTemplate runat="server" ID="ID_LoginAsDifferentUser"
 Text="<%$Resources:wss,personalactions_loginasdifferentuser%>"
 Description="<%$Resources:wss,personalactions_loginasdifferentuserdescription%>"
 MenuGroupId="100"
 Sequence="100"
 UseShortId="true"
 />

 

You will now have a new menu item created.

 

 

  

You're welcome! :)

 

 

Copying pages from one site collection to another

So you want to move content pages from one site collection to another? 

Easy! Just open the pages library in explorer view copy the page/s you want to move and paste them to the destination pages library once again using explorer view.

Nope.

Invalid page layout errors!

Why?

SharePoint hard codes the page layout location URL within the .aspx page.

How do I fix this?

A) You could write some powershell using the SP object model to copy files.

or 

B) You could download the ASPX page locally, manually edit the Page Layout URL and then upload the page to the new pages library.

The problem I had was not having any access to central admin so....no powershell. So with great apprehension chose option B.

BUT...

I had about 175 pages to move and to open, edit and save 175 pages individually was just not feasible. So I went old school. How many of you remember Windows GREP? What this small utility does is it allows you to search and replace strings within an entire folder.

Result!

PS option B works!

Meetings about meetings?

I can't say I ever recall seeing people jump for joy when realising they have a meeting to attend. Personally, I find them generally unproductive and time wasting, we seem to have entered into a professional culture of having meetings for the sake of having meetings.

Here are a few steps to making your meetings more effective and less a waste of productive time;

1. All meetings must have a stated purpose or agenda. Without an agenda, meetings very quickly turn into aimless social gatherings rather than productive working sessions.
2. Attendees should always walk away with actionable tasks. In fact if there are no tasks that are derived from a meeting the meeting should be seen as time wastage.
3. Stick to your end time and be strict about it, no meetings should ever overrun.
4. Slightly more extreme: remove chairs from boardrooms and meeting rooms, people will get to the point if they are not completely comfortable.

Craig Vallis said...

5. Don't accept meeting requests that are frivolous or have no defined outcome, or if your contribution is going to be nil.

If you have any ideas, please do comment and share your ideas of how to get the most out of meetings and I'll update the post - you'll even get a sneaky mention! :)

 

XMind markers for SharePoint

For those of you using the XMind mind mapping tool, here are some useful SharePoint markers that you can import for use with your mind maps.

 

Download here

 

To import the markers once downloaded, simply open XMind and click on File > Import and select marker package. Now browse for the downloaded package and click Finish.

 

The new markers will be available under the My markers section in the markers window.