Category: General

Categories and tags are the two default taxonomies that we use at the European SharePoint, Office 365 & Azure Community website. By design, all posts must be filed under at least one category. As you can imagine, ‘General’ is where we can list almost any topics that is not filed under the other subject headings.

However, some subjects are wide and broad in subject and need to be included in our blog, but don’t quite fit under the existing taxonomies. Hence the ‘General Category’. Content covered can vary from a .NET Runtime for AOT to a SharePoint Conference North America Keynote Summary, Pulse Survey or monthly top SharePoint, Office 365 & Azure resources.

Disable SharePoint Alerts on a Specific List
Disable SharePoint Alerts on a Specific List
Blog Posts

Here’s the scenario: You have a picture library that stores employee photos. This might be the case if you’re not storing the photos in Active Directory yet perhaps. Now, HR comes to you and says that “we want to be sure that employees can’t set an alert, because then they would know if we remove a picture when an employee is terminated”. Hmmm I never thought about it in that way, you’re right

Use PowerShell to Manipulate the Values of a SharePoint Choice Field
Use PowerShell to Manipulate the Values of a SharePoint Choice Field
Blog Posts

Using PowerShell, we’re going to walk through handling a Choice field in a list. Specifically, this is a calendar list using the Category field. This may come in handy if you want to automate changing the values from another data source that BCS can’t connect to, or is too much work to get it to connect. I always prefer using SharePoint’s features, but sometimes we need to stretch it to make it work.

The Cost of Automation
The Cost of Automation
Blog Posts

The SharePoint platform has gone through some major changes over the past decade, from a loosely tied collection of disparate tools (Tahoe), to a limited product implementation (SPS2001, 2003, and 2007), to a dynamic and powerful platform (2010) — and even now it is evolving in response to the changing world of BYOD (bring your own device) and cloud-based infrastructures and services.

Juice up your SharePoint with SharePoint Cool Buttons
Juice up your SharePoint with SharePoint Cool Buttons
Blog Posts

When working with customers one often hears the following complaint: “Wow, this SharePoint is sooo ugly…”. I personally think SharePoint 2010 has very nice nice and professional design, but since customer is always right, from time to time I need to make it look more pretty. For some customers the “fix” is very simple, just add some nice looking buttons on the home page and they will be very happy with this improvement.

Couple of things that your customer needs to be able to do:
Add/Remove buttons easily
Add icons to buttons
Rearrange buttons as web parts
Change layouts i.e. order buttons vertically vs. horizontally

How to Manually Disable Claims Authentication in SharePoint 2010
How to Manually Disable Claims Authentication in SharePoint 2010
Blog Posts

In a previous post I shared some thoughts regarding changes to authentication providers in SharePoint 2010. As I worked through the issue of removing Claims/FBA and reverting to NTLM I discovered a number of issues that manifested themselves in strange ways. The first problem I encountered was the inability for a Farm account to make changes to the Authentication Providers settings in Central Administration. The System Account couldn’t even view the dialog – each attempt resulted in a 403 error. This was bad news as a lot of things happen behind the scenes when changing authentication settings in this dialog – not the least of which is propagation of changes to all the web servers. This meant I would have to undo all of the Claims settings manually and repeat them on each server. Not my idea of a fun afternoon.

Show or Hide Ribbon Tab Based on User Permissions by Johan Olivier, Qorus
Show or Hide Ribbon Tab Based on User Permissions by Johan Olivier, Qorus
Blog Posts

Recently I wanted to figure out how to show or hide a custom developed SharePoint Ribbon Tab based on the permissions of a logged in SharePoint user.

I have a custom SharePoint 2010 Ribbon Tab with the title ‘Show or Hide Tab’ and I want to hide the tab if a current logged in user is a member of the ‘Root Visitors’ security group.

I do not want to hide the entire ribbon and I also do not want to hide only the inactive buttons. The standard ribbon tabs like ‘Documents’ and ‘Library’ must be visible for all users and audience targeting must be applied only against my new custom ribbon tab.

I can imagine that the requirement is quite a common one. You might want to develop a set of custom tabs which are only visible to users who are members of a specific SharePoint group.