SharePoint

Community site template is a new feature in SharePoint 2013. It provides a forum experience in SharePoint. Microsoft also mentions about four types of Communities and membership permissions. Details can be found here . I'm producing the table mentioned in the above link, as this is the topic of today's post. TYPE DESCRIPTION PERMISSION APPROVAL SETTING Private community A community for sensitive information where you want to limit participation to specific users or groups. Grant Member permission only to those individuals or groups who are appropriate. None Closed community Everyone can view the content but only members with approved membership requests can contribute. Grant Visitor permissions to everyone. Require explicit requests to join. Enable access requests Open community with explicit membership Everyone can view the site and receives automatic approval upon joining. Grant Visitor permissions to everyone. Require explicit requests to join. Enable auto approva...

The question often arise on "View Only" permission about using this permission for restricting document download. And also on the difference between "Read" and "View Only" permissions. This post is to explain the difference between the two. Though my screens are taken from SharePoint 2010, it applies for SharePoint 2013 as well. Let us first quickly look at these two permissions as seen in SharePoint: As you can see from the description, users with View Only permission cannot download the documents, and this is applicable for document types with server-side handlers. What it means is, if you have enabled Office web app, Office documents such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are rendered in the browser itself. So, when user clicks on the document, it is rendered within the browser without getting downloaded to client. What it also means is, if the document is of type Text (.txt) or PDF, it is rendered in client (it is actually downloaded to user machine...

Have you ever wondered what is Governance Planning, how to start, what to start etc? Here is one useful information in TechNet which provides information about Governance Planning in SharePoint 2013. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff598584.aspx This basically covers three major areas: IT Governance, Information Management, and Application Management. There are separate section for each area and links to lots of "Planning" articles. Very exhaustive but informative.

The harmon.ie has come up with the Top 25 SharePoint influencers for 2014. This was commissioned through Dana Gartner, Scratch Marketing and Media. All 25 people are in Twitter and so, you know where to tap for knowledge from the influencers. Click here to know more about this.

There will be scenarios where you would want to copy thousands of rows from Excel to existing SharePoint List in a site. There are a couple of ways this can be achieved without writing a code. This post explains both these approaches and also explain on which is the better option for huge number of data. Approach 1: Using DataSheet View (Quick Edit in SP2013) In this approach, you have to switch to Quick Edit view of List. Then, you can copy data from Excel to Quick Edit view (provided the order of columns are same). This approach is most straight-forward and best suited for few hundreds of rows in Excel. If number of rows increase, this approach becomes more time consuming and also sometimes browser becomes non-responsive. Approach 2: Using MS Access In this approach, you will make use of MS Access to copy data from Excel to List. What I have observed is, this approach is pretty fast compared to Quick Edit and MS Access handles thousands of rows. Navigate to List View. Un...

At last, an official statement from Microsoft that it is retiring InfoPath. Check details here: http://blogs.office.com/2014/01/31/update-on-infopath-and-sharepoint-forms/ InfoPath was good for small deployments, but however, when it comes to enterprise deployment, there were challenges and unpredictable behaviors. Hope MS comes up with more stable and reliable tool.

Many a times you will come across a requirement wherein you need to restrict user from entering future or past date in a List or Document Library Date column. Developers are inclined towards writing either event handler or javascript to achieve this. But, hold on! You can achieve this without writing a single line of code. I have a list which stores Employee details like Employee Number, Name and Date of Joining. Here I need to enure that Date of Joining will not accept future date. Navigate to List Settings -> Validation Settings. Here you can enter the formula to restrict future date as shown below. If you change the logical operator, it will restrict past date. Also, you can put message which will be displayed to user. Now, when you try to enter future date and try Save, you will see the validation message. So, next time you have similar requirement, you know where to try first before jumping into coding!