All posts by David Wise

SharePoint

Explorer View versus the Large Document Library

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Recently, I came across the error below when attempting to open a large document library in Explorer View :

Some/SharePoint/Folder is not accessible.  You might not have permission to use this network resource. Contact that administrator of this server to find out if you have access permissions

Folder is not accessible. You might not have permission to use this network resource. Contact that administrator of this server to find out if you have access permissions

Seeing as I am the administrator of the server, the site collection, the web application and the entire farm itself, I think I pass the permissions test.  It turns out that the real culprit has absolutely nothing to do permissions in any way.

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Buzzwords

Word of the Day : Ideation

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I’ve been in the business world for some time and am rarely surprised by Corporate-speak but occasionally something crosses the display that catches my attention.  Today’s word is “Ideation” which I ran across while reading this Forbes article.

According to Dictionary.com, this word is originally from around 1820 and means:

the process of forming ideas or images
The formation of ideas or mental images.

I would have thought both concepts were covered adequately by the common term “creativity” but perhaps there is some specificity in the term that I am not seeing.

Wikipedia has a more elaborate explanation :

Ideation is the creative process of generating, developing, and communicating new ideas, where an idea is understood as a basic element of thought that can be either visual, concrete, or abstract. Ideation is all stages of a thought cycle, from innovation, to development, to actualization.As such, it is an essential part of the design process, both in education and practice.

Nevertheless, expect to see this term more often now that it has been re-introduced to the CIOnosphere (my term for the media and community whose primary market is CIOs, VPs and Executive VPs of IT).

To use this word in a sentence : “SharePoint is an ideal tool to support and promote ideation in a company, even across business boundaries” – at least, I hope that’s right.

Development, SharePoint

Bizarre Problem Using a Custom User Control as a Delegate

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I was creating what I thought was a very simply custom user control to be deployed as a delegate in order to enable custom analytics on a SharePoint site.  Everything came together quickly and I deployed the solution via Visual Studio, reloaded the site but my custom control was nowhere to be found.

The custom control’s ASCX file is deployed to a subfolder of the CONTROLTEMPLATES folder as per best practices but no matter what I did the control would not load.  The ULS logs showed the theoretically simple “User control “~\_controltemplates\Analytics\FooterCalls.ascx” is not in safe control list.”.  I rechecked everything related to SafeControls, directories, features, activation and deployment but everything was as it should be.

It turned out that the problem had nothing to do with SafeControls but was actually in my Elements.xml file where I was activating the control as a delegate.  The line that was causing the issue was:

<control id="FormFooter" sequence="110" controlsrc="~\_controltemplates\Analytics\FooterCalls.ascx" />

This particular portion of SharePoint is apparently very sensitive to the direction of the slashes.  Changing them to forward slashes fixed the problem.

<control id="FormFooter" sequence="110" controlsrc="~/_controltemplates/Analytics/FooterCalls.ascx" />

Hopefully this will save someone the hours I spent tracking this less than obvious fix down.

SharePoint

April 2012 Cumulative Update – All Changes

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Here is a single list of all of the changes that Microsoft has included in the April 2012 CU.  I had to prepare this list for work so figured I might as well share it and it might save people from having to click through all of those KB’s to put together the info

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SharePoint

SharePoint Updates and Service Pack links

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I’ve been looking for official links to all SharePoint service pack and version history information for some time and have only been able to find various blogs out there, none of which are updated regularly.  Fortunately, Microsoft actually does have official pages for updates and service packs.  Here are the links (mostly so I don’t lose them again 😉 )

Official Microsoft Pages

There is also an RSS Feed for updates to all office products that includes all version of SharePoint, among other things.

Microsoft also has pages that show all of the specific version numbers for SharePoint by Product/Service Pack/Cumulative Update and, best of all, they are current as of this writing – including the August 2013 Cumulative Update.

Hopefully these will help more people than just me as these official pages were never near the top of my Google searches for any SharePoint topic and were hard to find if you weren’t searching on just the right keywords.

 

Update 09-Sep-2013 – Added links for SharePoint 2013 and revised text to reflect the changes