Writing long posts in SharePoint? Beware of TimeOut

If you're writing longer texts into Windows SharePoint Services lists be careful. By default WSS has a 30-minute security timeout. This means that if you'll click on a New Item and then write in the contents for 30 minutes and 1 second, you'll get an error message when clicking Save and close. If you click back, usually the long text you entered will be lost!

There are 2 ways to avoid this. One is if you're a server administrator:

1. In Start Menu click Administrative tools and SharePoint Central Administration.
2. Click Configure virtual server settings and select the site you want to configure security timeout for.
3. Under Virtual Server Management click Virtual server general settings.
4. In the section Web Page Security Validation you can edit or turn off the timeout settings.

!!!! Warning !!!! - With this you're increasing the security risk of the WSS website so be sure that if you're going to increase the timeout or turn it off, that you know what you're doing.

Other - simpler - client way

There is another way though and it's done by the editor:

Before hitting Save and Close - copy the long text you've written into the field, into the clipboard, then refresh the page and paste the long text back. Now you can safely click Save and Close.

Too bad this way you can only save the contents of one field, though...

My God! 2-way Sync between excel and WSS is GONE!?!

I love the new Microsoft Office 2007. It really has a lot of improvements. But now I have a problem. I'm used to exporting a list into excel, making advanced editing there and then synchronizing the data back to the SharePoint list.

But soon I realized (after a long search) that the button to synchronize data back to SharePoint is GONE!

Thanks to my friend, Pedro Serrano for confirming that fear... Here's a post in his blog. I've already installed a Send a smile tool and sent couple of frowns because of this functionality depreciated. Some of the solutions I'm using are built based on this functionality. Please, MSFT, bring it back.

Expand - Colapse with more than just clicking on + / - in a data view web part

SharePoint and FrontPage have a very nice functionality of grouping the data in a list data view according to selected group. What in my opinion can be improved, is that you expand or colapse the group with a click on the whole cell rather than targeting that small plus or minus sign in front of a group name.

Not to reinvent hot water again: this is already discovered so let me point it out:

http://dev.collutions.com/blog/Pages/Grouping.aspx

Thanks, Jim Duncan!

Special characters (č, ž, š) in Flash (updated)

Coming from Slovenia I have to face with the problem of slovenian characters in the web applications. Usually FrontPage or SharePoint designer take good care about that for me. The problem arises when I need to use Flash that reads external file.

Example: I need to embed a flash that will read the text that will say "Študija".

If I include in the text file the word Študija, Flash will not recognize this character (at least in most cases). I've found, that you have to use special codes for characters like č, ž, š, etc. But which? After some time searching the net and combining knowlege, I've come up with a table of codes for the following characters:

č: %C4%8D
Č: %C4%8C
š: %C5%A1
Š: %C5%A0
ž: %C5%BE
Ž: %C5%BD
ć: %C4%87
Ć: %C4%86
đ: %C4%91
Đ: %C4%90
ä: %C3%A4
Ä: %C3%84
ő: %C3%B6
Ő: %C3%96
ű: %C3%BC
Ű: %C3%9C
ß: %C3%9F

So in my case instead of Študije I have to use %C5%A0tudije to have Flash spell out the correct word.

Update: Thanks to Jose here's a list of other special characters to use. There are no č, ž, š in that table so it's a nice complement to this post.

http://www.adobe.com/go/tn_14143

Free Tools Galore pt. 8 - More photos for your website

I've already posted about where to get free graphics for your website.

Another place that quickly became one of my favourites is stock.xchng. Liked it from the first moment. I've already registered and posted 2 photos to share with the community (click here to see my profile and photos on sxc).

The site is nice, has a community, some real nice tutorials for working with images and when I posted 2 photos it took some time for them to get published. They have administrators checking the quality of the photos and if the photos are appropriate for publishing.

Here are my 2 photos, only after a day of being published they're already rated and commented:

 

Shorter URL of a document library

I always like to access our company's SharePoint Document Library via URL. And on the way I like to save every keystroke (can't help it - I'm lazy). To have the url of the document library as short as possible, when creating it make the following:

1. Create document library and name it something very short - for example doc


2. When the library is created, under Modify Settings and Columns in that document library click Change general settings and now you can rename your document library to the desired nime, like for example Company's Documents

Yeee. Now you can access your document library couple of clicks faster:

http://yoursharepointurl/doc

Links in a SharePoint document library open in a new window

To make links from SharePoint lists, document libraries, etc. open in new window is usually easy with FrontPage 2003 or SharePoint Designer and inserting a Data View.

But this caused problems. In some cases when you're including xslt data view you can have trouble saving site like template. What worked for me is to put a little script just before the </body> tag, that changed the target window of links inside of document library. The script is based on WSS CSS recognition so you can use it also for other cases.

Below is the code for the script:

<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript"> 
i=0 
while (document.links[i]) //check all document links 
 { 
   if (document.links[i].parentNode.className == "ms-vb2" || document.links[i].parentNode.className == "ms-vb" || document.links[i].parentNode.className == "ms-vb-icon") //if is inside of DL webpart, do it: 
   { 
    document.links[i].target='_blank' 
   } 
   i++ 
 } 
</script>

VistaMan!

Yeeee! Forgot to post. Recently (18.9.) there was an event for Microsoft's partners in Slovenia. At the end I've also had a presentation with 2 of my friends. We've all come to the finals so we've earned the title Vistaman, to prove that we can present the new Office and Vista. Congratulations to Matjaž Šircelj that won the competition and to Simon Jurič for also a very good presentation!

How did I remember that just now? Because our Ministry of internal affairs - the police today kindly reminded me about that date... More specifically when I was driving there ;)

Guess a prize comes with a price ;-)

Want to create hyperlinks manually in SharePoint's rich text field

SharePoint has a nice feature when it comes to edit the multiple lines of text. That is rich text editor. What I'm missing the most in this is the button for creating hyperlinks.

So only if you typed in an URL like www.b4contact.com this was recognized. What if you wanted to create a hyperlink to some cool site like in this example?

Here's a video I've prepared some time ago and dug it out. If you have FrontPage or a friend with FrontPage, you can enable the hyperlink button.

Thanks to Piflar - multimedia e-learning portal (for now only in Slovene - for now!) for enabling me the tools and hosting of my contents.

Logging to SharePoint through Internet and Password problems?

If you're like me using SharePoint over the Internet (for extranet, and other purposes) and if you're opening the same site a lot of times, you might want the computer to remember the username and password for that site. But the computer simply doesn't want to remember the username and password...

Although many do not recommend this, here's the way to do it:

In Internet Explorer under the menu Tools click Internet Options. In the open window now select the Security tab.

Next select Local Intranet and click the Sites button.



In the new window click the Advanced button and in the next window type in the URL of your SharePoint site. If the site is not using SSL (https:) remember to clear the "Require server verification..." checkbox. At the end click the Add button and confirm all the windows with OK or Close.

The next time you'll log on to the SharePoint Site check the box Remember my password and that'll be the last time you'll log in to that site manually on this computer.

!!!Important!!!

If you're accessing sensitive data on SharePoint remember to secure your computer account with a password and protect the unauthorized access to this computer, because anyone can access to this site from this computer now!