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Unable to edit / change existing Alert

Or how to change existing Alerts.

See this post if you want to know how to set up Alerts or RSS feeds

Alerts in SharePoint are a really nice and easy way to keep yourself updated on key documents or lists.

I had a colleague that was perfectly able to add a new default alert on a document. She then found out that she was editing the document very frequently, so it was not very practical that she received emails informing about changes she made herself.

She proceeded to the change so that she should only receive updates if anyone else made changes to the document. This did not work for her at all. She kept getting huge amounts of mails from SharePoint about changes she made.

What she experienced is something that happens to a lot of SharePoint users, me included .

Alerts in SharePoint are really easy to set up, but it may not be apparent to everyone how you can modify an already existing alert.

The page you add your Alerts on is also the page most users turn to when they want to make changes to the existing Alert and that will only cause you to create another Alert.. In other words, the menu choice that says “Alert Me” should have been named “Create new Alert” or something because it is not the same page that lets you modify existing Alerts.

Let’s change an existing Alert:

To edit an existing Alert either open the actions menu or a list items context menu and click the Alert Me link.

There is a small link on the top of the page. It is easy to miss since it looks like the small help links that I rarely use.

On the page that opens, you will see all the alerts that have been added to the current web site and you will also be able to delete the alerts you don’t want anymore.

Click on any of the alerts to open up the page where you can edit it.

It’s a tad bit hidden, and the wording on the menus should perhaps have been different or the link for the website alerts emphasized.

Posted in SharePoint.

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By Code-Journey – June 23, 2010

How to receive email notifications / Alerts on changes in documents or lists

In this day and age we don’t expect users to crawl through all of the sites and lists in a company intranet or website. We are naturally going to give the user a way to get updated on changes they are interested in.

SharePoint has 2 ways to receive updates on changes or new additions to a list.

RSS feed:

RSS is short for Really Simple Syndication (somewhat debated), and is a web standard on how to receive updates on new blog posts, news etc.
Microsoft has embraced this is SharePoint as well, and every list, be it document library, picture library, accouncement list etc will automatically create an RSS feed everyone can subscribe to.

By subscribing to the lists RSS feed, you will be able to get new documents, list items, pictures etc directly in your favorite feedreader.
This feedreader could be Feedburner or just Outlook or Internet Explorer.
Please note that this will only send you the information once. If any changes are made to the original document, listitem etc, then you will not receive any news on the update.
You will not receive “Live” news. There is a delay to getting feeds as the feedreaders don’t query SharePoint very often. It can take several hours before you see the newly published announcement in your feed reader.

Alerts:

Alerts is a very easy way to get swift updates on whatever you wish in SharePoint. You can set up alerts for document libraries, custom lists, picture libraries etc, but you are also able to subscribe to individual items in lists which you are not able to cia RSS feeds. Another good thing about alerts is that you get the alert within 5 minutes, and you will receive it in an email.
This closes the gap in what you can’t get from RSS feeds.

What updates to get and when

You have a lot of freedom to what you wish to get updates about. I will sum it up below.

You are able to choose what type of change to be informed of:
All changes
New items
Modified items
Deleted item
Web discussion updates
See only changes made by:

For these changes:
Anything changes
Someone else changes a document
Someone else changes a document created by me
Someone else changes a document last modified by me

When to send:
Send e-mail immediately
Send a daily summary (what time of day as well)
Send a weekly summary (time of day and weekday can be specified)

Subscribe to alerts for an entire list:
To get alerts for an entire list, open up the list, and choose Alert Me in the Actions menu.
Choose what to get updated on and click OK and you are set.

To get alerts on individual documents place the mouse over the items title and open the menu for the item by clicking the little triangle that appears.
You are only able to specify the “Send alerts for these changes” (who changed it and is it your document), and not the type.

How to edit / modify an existing alert

Changing the settings of an existing alert is a bit strange.
To do that you need to either open the menu for list or listitem alerts and then click on the “View my existing alerts on this site”.

A new page appears where you can click existing alerts and edit them. If you use the normal “Alert Me” menuitem from the Actions menu, og the item context menu you are actually creating a new alert.
In my opinion there should be a menuchoice for altering the existing alerts if there are any, but better help users understand how to alter alerts.

Yes you can have more than one alert for each list or item… This makes sense if you want to receive updates on a document only if someone else changes a document created by you or last modified by you.

Posted in Uncategorized.

1 comment

By Code-Journey – June 23, 2010

Missing websites in the SharePoint flyout menus for everyone but the site collection owner

Recently we had some strange problems with our navigation top navigation in SharePoint.

The problem was that I as a site collection administrator could see all websites in our 3 level deep navigation.
An owner of the root website could only see some of them, even though that person was owner of all the sites.

Our navigation is pretty large since we are a global company and we have a site for all regions, countries, offices and departments plus various other sites.

There was also a problem with visitors not being able to see some newly created sites.

I spent some time on this, and I will give a short explanation of what caused both problems.

Problem 1: Only Site collection owner could see all websites in the flyout menus

A new SharePoint colleague of mine suggested the problem might be because there were too many sites in the navigation.
This did not seem logical since no matter what the limit was, I as a site collection administrator could see everything.
None the less it WAS a problem with the limit of items in the navigation.

This is fixed in the web.config file. Remember to back it up before trying.

This is an excerpt of my web.config

<siteMap defaultProvider="CurrentNavSiteMapProvider" enabled="true">
      <providers>
        <add name="SPNavigationProvider" type="Microsoft.SharePoint.Navigation.SPNavigationProvider, Microsoft.SharePoint, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" />
        <add name="SPSiteMapProvider" type="Microsoft.SharePoint.Navigation.SPSiteMapProvider, Microsoft.SharePoint, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" />
        <add name="SPContentMapProvider" type="Microsoft.SharePoint.Navigation.SPContentMapProvider, Microsoft.SharePoint, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" />
        <add name="SPXmlContentMapProvider" siteMapFile="_app_bin/layouts.sitemap" type="Microsoft.SharePoint.Navigation.SPXmlContentMapProvider, Microsoft.SharePoint, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" />
        <add name="AdministrationQuickLaunchProvider" description="QuickLaunch navigation provider for the central administration site" type="Microsoft.Office.Server.Web.AdministrationQuickLaunchProvider, Microsoft.Office.Server.UI, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" />
        <add name="SharedServicesQuickLaunchProvider" description="QuickLaunch navigation provider for shared services administration sites" type="Microsoft.Office.Server.Web.SharedServicesQuickLaunchProvider, Microsoft.Office.Server.UI, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" />
        <add name="GlobalNavSiteMapProvider" description="CMS provider for Global navigation" type="Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Navigation.PortalSiteMapProvider, Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" NavigationType="Global" EncodeOutput="true" />
        <add name="CombinedNavSiteMapProvider" description="CMS provider for Combined navigation" type="Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Navigation.PortalSiteMapProvider, Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" NavigationType="Combined" EncodeOutput="true"  />
        <add name="CurrentNavSiteMapProvider" description="CMS provider for Current navigation" type="Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Navigation.PortalSiteMapProvider, Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" NavigationType="Current" EncodeOutput="true" />
        <add name="CurrentNavSiteMapProviderNoEncode" description="CMS provider for Current navigation, no encoding of output" type="Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Navigation.PortalSiteMapProvider, Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" NavigationType="Current" EncodeOutput="false"  />
        <add name="SiteDirectoryCategoryProvider" description="Site Directory category provider" type="Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal.WebControls.SiteDirectoryCategoryProvider, Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" />
        <add name="MySiteMapProvider" description="MySite provider that returns areas and based on the current user context" type="Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal.MySiteMapProvider, Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" />
        <add name="MySiteLeftNavProvider" description="MySite Left Nav provider that returns areas and based on the current user context" type="Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal.MySiteLeftNavProvider, Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" />
        <add name="UsagePagesSiteMapProvider" description="Provider for navigation in Portal Usage pages" type="Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal.Analytics.UsagePagesSiteMapProvider, Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" />
      </providers>
    </siteMap>

What we need to do is add the DynamicChildLimit tag to 4 lines:

 <siteMap defaultProvider="CurrentNavSiteMapProvider" enabled="true">
      <providers>
        <add name="GlobalNavSiteMapProvider" DynamicChildLimit="0" />
        <add name="CombinedNavSiteMapProvider" DynamicChildLimit="0" />
        <add name="CurrentNavSiteMapProvider" DynamicChildLimit="0" />
        <add name="CurrentNavSiteMapProviderNoEncode"&nbsp;DynamicChildLimit="0" />
      </providers>
 </siteMap>

I haven’t dealt with the SharePoint navigation very much, but there definitely seems to be some sort of difference in the navigation depending if you are the site collection administrator or not.

Problem 2: Some websites are not visible in the navigation for visitors

I used trial and error with permission levels to see what exactly would make the website appear in the navigation.

It was “Edit Item” permissions. This seemed a bit odd at first, but it turned out the front pages of the new websites were unpublished, and since visitors are not allowed to edit pages or see drafts, there were no page for SharePoint to show the visitors.

After just publishing the pages there were no more navigation problems.

Posted in MOSS, SharePoint.

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By Code-Journey – June 16, 2010

Test websites with multiple browsers: IE6, IE7, IE8, FF2, FF3, FF3.5 and more

As a web developer it is pretty much needed to be able to test a webpage in multiple browsers.

I have used Multiple IE for a while back, but it is no longer being updated and had some problems.

I went out looking for something else, and up came Spoon.

Using this nifty web page you can various browsers.
It does not have as many Internet Explorer versions as Multiple IE, but I only wanted to test my SharePoint pages with IE 7 and 8.
We run a citrix installation with IE7 and mostly our workstations are automatically updates to IE8.

Spoon requires you to install a plutin to your IE (no idea if other browsers work), and then you can open up the other browsers through Spoon.net. It seems to work kind of like Citrix where it looks like you actually have the browser installed.

You can install a server yourself and add as many different browsers as you wish.

The following Browsers are supported:

Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8
Firefox 2, 3, 3.5
Apple Safari 3 and 4
Google Chrome
Opera 9 and 10

That should be enough for most developers.

The good thing is you don’t have to install anything other than the browser plugin.

Oh… Did I mention that browsers are not the only thing you can stream from there, and an infinite list if you start up a server yourself. Of course if it’s only you that are going to use it, don’t bother

Notepad++
VLC Player
itunes
WinRAR
DVDDecryptor
Registry Mechanic
Xenocode .NET Obfuscator
CoffeeCup HTML Editor
WinDbg
Eclipse IDE for Java Developers
AutoIt Script Engine with Editor

And lots more. Have a look.

Posted in Web Development.

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By Code-Journey – May 6, 2010

How to add an image rotator to SharePoint

An image rotator can be a good way to let the randomly display some images on your SharePoint site.
We for instance use it in our internal timber exchange. We display some different images of timber or the processing of timber.

SharePoint does not have a built-in image rotator, so after a little googling I found a nice solution from Christophe over at PathToSharePoint.

The rotator works by adding a script to a Content Editor Web Part that randomly displays a picture from a SharePoint picture library.
You can even add a custom onClick link for each image.

It has been made easy for you since he actually made a generator!

All you need to do is go to the following site and click on the Build your own tab and follow the instructions.

Note: Notice that the url for the picture library is for the settings page of the list.

Once you generate the script, add it to a Content Editor Web Part.

Posted in SharePoint.

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By Code-Journey – May 6, 2010

How to hide the Quicklaunch in SharePoint

If there are some pages you want to hide the quicklaunch to gain that little extra real estate, then there is a really simple fix.

Remember that when adding a Content Editor Web Part, you are able to add both CSS and javascript to the page.

So the simples way is simply to hide the Quicklaunch using CSS. Actually it hides the entire area the Quicklaunch is placed in, and gives you access to the whole areas width.

Simply add a Content Editor Web Part to the page and edit it with “Source Editor”.

Page the following:

<style>
.ms-navframe
{
  display:none;
}
</style>

You can also just hide the actual Quicklaunch if you want to place something else there:

<style>
.ms-quickLaunch 
{
 display: none;
}
</style>

Posted in Uncategorized.

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By Code-Journey – May 4, 2010

Run code with elevated privileges in SharePoint

A task that is pretty common is to make some code that requires resources in sharepoint that the logged in user does not always have access to.

My latest web part warns users when their account or password is close to expiration (we have sharepoint users that do not log on to any computer using their account, so they will never get a warning otherwise).
This web part uses a list in the root web that keeps track of when a warning email was last sent to the user.
This list could not consistently be read since a few accounts does not have access to the rootweb.

I have also had to use this when writing to a websites property bag. Only owners were able to do that,
in a custom web part of mine.

There are 2 ways to do it.

1: Elevated Priviledges

protected void Button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
   SPSecurity.CodeToRunElevated elevatedGetSitesAndGroups = new SPSecurity.CodeToRunElevated(GetSitesAndGroups);
   SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPrivileges(elevatedGetSitesAndGroups);
}

GetSitesAndGroups is the method to run.
This method requires you to use methods that have no return type and no parameters.

This can also be done with anonymous methods like this:

SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPrivileges(delegate()
{
    // implementation details omitted
});

Anonymous methods is not really something I ever use, so I haven’t quite figured them out yet.
I could not put this inside my method, and have return statements inside the block.

To make this work you have to create a new SPSite object, otherwise it will continue to use the SPSite where the current logged in users permissions are located.

SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPrivileges(delegate()
{
    using (SPSite site = new SPSite(web.Site.ID))
    {
    // implementation details omitted
    }
});

More details here

2: System Account User Token
I found an even better solution online though, from Daniel Larsson

He states that he has a better way of getting things done, and suggest we do not use the SPSecurity method unless we need to use network resources.

His solution is simple, he created a new site with the system account as user token.

SPUserToken sysToken = SPContext.Current.Site.SystemAccount.UserToken;
using(var systemSite = new SPSite(SPContext.Current.Site.ID, sysToken))
{
    using (var sysWeb = systemSite.OpenWeb(SPContext.Current.Web.ID))
    {
        // Perform elevated actions here
    }
}

This worked perfectly for me.

Posted in SharePoint.

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By Code-Journey – May 4, 2010

Add A Web Part To NewForm.aspx, EditForm.aspx And DispForm.aspx (Edit Page missing in menu)

I am in the process of creating custom forms for a list of mine, and here I needed to change some styling, and doing so is easy if you just add a Content Editor Web Part and add the style tag in there.

So off to the site actions menu I went to edit the page, only to find the menuitem missing.

So in order to edit the form pages, open up newform, editform or dispform depending which ones you want the webpart to be added to.

Add this like to the end of the url after the page has loaded.

&PageView=Shared&ToolPaneView=2

You can add the webpart now, and after it’s added the edit page menuitem is “back” again.

Posted in SharePoint.

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By Code-Journey – October 22, 2009

Change from SharePoint Server name to Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN)

It is generally best practice to use fully qualified domain names when creating web applications in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint server 2007.
I am a bit excused in our environment since I was not hired when the servers and web applications were installed.

Prior to going Live with a SharePoint solution for our global company, the URLs would need to change from local server names to Fully Qualified Domain Names (FQDN). This is however not as much trouble as it seems.

Continued…

Posted in MOSS, SharePoint, WSS.

1 comment

By Code-Journey – September 26, 2009

How to change Central Administration website URL – even after messing up AAM

I made a not so funny mess-up today. I changed the Alternate Access Mappings for my virtual machines Central Administration website, but I made a mistake in the url. Then when I wanted to change it back I couldn’t load up Central Admin.

I made the url mosstest.com but it should have been moss-test.com.

To fix it I could have just added mosstest.com in the hosts file under c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts but I wanted to figure out what else could be done.

Basically I found out that the Url for central admin can be sorted out by going to 2 places.

Unable to edit / change existing Alert

Or how to change existing Alerts.

Let’s change an existing Alert:

How to receive email notifications / Alerts on changes in documents or lists

RSS feed:

Alerts:

What updates to get and when

How to edit / modify an existing alert

Missing websites in the SharePoint flyout menus for everyone but the site collection owner

Problem 1: Only Site collection owner could see all websites in the flyout menus

Problem 2: Some websites are not visible in the navigation for visitors

Test websites with multiple browsers: IE6, IE7, IE8, FF2, FF3, FF3.5 and more

How to add an image rotator to SharePoint

How to hide the Quicklaunch in SharePoint

Run code with elevated privileges in SharePoint

1: Elevated Priviledges

2: System Account User Token
I found an even better solution online though, from Daniel Larsson

Add A Web Part To NewForm.aspx, EditForm.aspx And DispForm.aspx (Edit Page missing in menu)

Change from SharePoint Server name to Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN)

How to change Central Administration website URL – even after messing up AAM

Recent Posts

Archives

Or how to change existing Alerts.

Let’s change an existing Alert:

RSS feed:

Alerts:

What updates to get and when

How to edit / modify an existing alert

Problem 1: Only Site collection owner could see all websites in the flyout menus

Problem 2: Some websites are not visible in the navigation for visitors

1: Elevated Priviledges

2: System Account User Token I found an even better solution online though, from Daniel Larsson

Recent Posts

Archives

2: System Account User Token
I found an even better solution online though, from Daniel Larsson