SharePoint Terminology

Lots of people ask me what certain SharePoint terms mean and to help I have decided to write a quick blog of many of them with a brief description of what each term or acronym means. I will try to keep this updated as I remember more, or people ask.

Alerts	To notify users of changes to existing information or new information add an alert to track new matches to search queries, changes to content in an area, or a new site added to the Site Directory
Areas	A means to organize portal for navigational simplification
Audiences	Groups of users, who meet certain criteria, created for targeted distribution of information. Users are said to be a member of an audience if they meet that audience’s membership criteria. The criteria are associated with properties found in the Active Directory.
BDC	Business Data Catalog
Collaboration Content	Collaboration content is content stored in lists like calendars, task lists, and document libraries.
Discussions	SPS supports two types of discussions: discussion boards and Web discussions. Discussion boards are similar to any newsgroup forum. Web discussions, on the other hand, are a new way to comment on documents and share those comments with others. When a new site is created, a discussion board is automatically created.
Document Workspace	SharePoint Services site that contain a document library, tasks, links, and other information. Document workspaces can be created directly in SPS as a new site, or they may be created ad-hoc from within an Office product. End users can collaborate without having SPS open alongside Office.
Libraries	In order to share files, SharePoint makes use of libraries. The three types of libraries available in SharePoint are document libraries, form libraries and picture libraries.
Lists	Along with document libraries, lists form the foundation of content within SPS. A list is a collection of information items displayed in an area or on a site. List types include: Announcements, Links, Contacts, Events, Tasks and Issues.
Meeting Workspace	A specialized SharePoint Services site. Can be created directly in SPS or in Outlook as a part of a meeting request. Should not be confused with Live Meeting, etc.
MOSS	Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
My Site	A single page portal that contains the user’s personal sites, links, etc. My Site consists of both a public and private view. The private view is intended as a personal workplace for the individual end user. The public view, on the other hand, acts like a business card that can be accessed by other portal users. You can see the different views by clicking either Private or Public under the Select View list.
Private Web Part	A Web Part added to a Web Part Page by a user who is working on the page in personal view. Private Web Parts are available only to the user who added or imported the Web Part.
Publishing Pages	Publishing pages are pages under /Pages/ document libraries on each site that include specific content types. Content for these pages are stored in this document library like columns in a list, with each column storing data for a page field.
Shared Web Part	A Web Part added to a Web Part Page by a user who is working on the page in shared view. Shared Web Parts are available to all users of a Web Part Page who have the appropriate permissions.
Server Farm	A central group of network servers maintained by an enterprise. A server farm provides a network with load balancing, scalability, and fault tolerance. In some configurations, multiple servers may appear to users as a single resource. Each SharePoint farm has a single, unique configuration database where information and configuration settings for the farm are registered. Each server in the farm relies on that configuration database to get information about the farm and to provide services in the farm.
Site	A complete Web site stored in a named leaf of the top-level Web site.
Site Collection	A set of Web sites on a Web application that has the same owner and share administration settings. Each site collection contains a top-level Web site and can contain one or more sites (or subsites). There can be multiple site collections on each Web application. A site collection can use only a single content database. Everything is now a site collection: a portal is a site collection where Home is the top-level Web site and the areas are sites (or subsites), a channel hierarchy is a site collection where the root channel is the top-level Web site and sub-channels are sites (or subsites).
Site Groups	Site groups are custom security groups that apply to a specific Web site. Users are assigned to site groups to grant them permissions on a SharePoint site.
Site Templates	Whenever you create a new site, SPS use predefined templates to simplify the creation of the new elements for the site. These templates allow you to create everything from a specialized team site to a blank site you can use to create content from scratch.
SPS	SharePoint Portal Server
SSP	Shared Service Provider
Subsite	A named subdirectory of the top-level Web site that is a complete Web site. Each subsite can have independent administration, authoring, and browsing permissions from the top-level Web sites and other subsites.
Survey	A Web site component that enables users to respond to a set of questions specified by the creator of the survey. Results are tallied in a graphical summary. Surveys provide a way to poll portal users for input on a subject. Surveys support a wide variety of response types from simple Yes/No answers to free-form text.
Top-level Web site	The top, root default site in a site collection. Every site collection has, at its root a top-level Web site. Access to the top-level web site is provided supplying the URL of the site collection (like http://ServerURL or http://ServerURL/sites/SiteCollectionName) without specifying a page name or subsite.
Web Application	A virtual server that resides on an HTTP server but appears to the user as a separate HTTP server. Several Web applications can reside on one computer, each capable of running its own programs and each having individualized access to input and peripheral devices. Each Web application can have its own domain name and IP address.
Web Part	Customizable Web page element that can be added to SharePoint pages
Web Part Zone	A container with a set of properties that can be configured to control the organization and format of Web Parts on a Web Part Page. Web Part zones can also be used to provide protection against changes to Web Parts.
WSS	Windows SharePoint Services

Hope this helps,
Richard Harbridge

Publishing Infrastucture gives Access Denied

This happens more often then I would like, but sometimes you receive an access denied message when trying to turn on the publishing infrastructure feature of SharePoint. This is related to the installation/configuration of the web applications and SharePoint user accounts.

Simple solution? Just use the stsadm command “stsadm -o activatefeature -name PublishingResources -url <YOURURL>” and it will activate the feature for you.

Other solutions could be adding the user account being used in the application pool to the WSS_ADMIN_WPG group on that local machine. This would resolve it and remove the permissions issue.

Anyways just wanted to note this so I wouldn’t forget and maybe it can help someone,
Richard Harbridge

SharePoint Column Field ID’s and Internal Names

This is wonderful! Frode has created a list of the SharePont fields/columns with the title, ID and Internal Name!

For anyone who has ever used XSL with SharePoint or often needs to create CAML queries (by hand) this is an INVALUABLE resource.

http://www.aarebrot.net/site/index.php/sitedefinitions/18-sitedefinitions/20-sharepointcolumnfieldids

If you ever work with the content query web part’s XSL, data form web part XSL, or your own you will use this, not to mention the benefits when building feature XML or content types (as Frode notes).

I hope you are as excited as I am to start using this list,
Richard Harbridge

Edit: Also check out his list of content type IDs

http://www.aarebrot.net/site/index.php/sitedefinitions/18-sitedefinitions/21-frodes-not-so-spectacular-list-of-content-type-ids

Usage/Reporting Trick

Out of the box most people know about the basic usage analysis pages. Where it displays the graphics and the last 30 days. What about the pages that are excluded from these usage statistics? Or even dll references?

Two pages that are often missed or even unknown to SharePoint administrators are the following:

_layouts/usagedetails.aspx
_layouts/usage.aspx

Both show helpful information and can be accessed anywhere in a site collection by just adding the _layouts/ line to the URL.

Hope this helps,
Richard Harbridge

Microsoft Enterprise Library

The Microsoft Enterprise Library has been around for some time and can save you a lot of time and effort when it comes to caching, logging, exception handling, policy injection and much more.

I highly recommend taking a look at this if you are a developer and working in the SharePoint world: http://www.codeplex.com/entlib

Think about using it to enhance your existing libraries and development resources. I know it’s saved me time in the past.

Keep up the good coding,
Richard Harbridge

Faceted Search

Now I don’t normally evangelize things, unless they are free, awesome, and unless I have used them.

Of course one of the most important aspects of SharePoint is it’s search capability. With any information system the larger the information base becomes the more and more search becomes the most fundamental way in which people retrieve information. We know that information will continue to grow (it never ever ever shrinks) so we can also conclude that free tools and components that sit on top of SharePoint search and provide even more useful abilities/improvements are pretty wonderful.

Faceted Search for SharePoint: http://www.codeplex.com/FacetedSearch

This is not a new codeplex solution, but I have used it before and it really does provide a fair number of powerful enhancements over SharePoint’s search and felt I should recommend something I use often, so here you go. Go get it, try it out, it’s free and can’t hurt.

Note: I am advising you to play and test with this on a DEVELOPMENT environment not on your production server.

Hope you enjoy it as much as I do,
Richard Harbridge

User Friendly Selection of Lists and Webs

Anytime you do any custom development work with SharePoint or have a scenario where you must have a user select a site or list you want it to be as easy and painless on the user as possible. Whether it’s a Site Picker, List Picker, or combination of the two you need there is a component in SharePoint that can help a great deal.

The component I am talking about is SharePoint’s TreePickerDialog. The tree picker dialog is the control that SharePoint uses to show site management options and allows users to select sites and lists and is contained in a js file of the same name.

An example of this dialog is shown below:

SharePoint uses this dialog in the Content Query web part to help you select a site or subsite, or a specific list. So if you are creating any of your own controls or modifications where you must have the user select a site or list, make sure you replicate the work already done by SharePoint and help keep the user look and feel consistent.

Now instead of me explaining how to use it I will point you towards two great posts done sometime time ago by Darren and Chistopher which explains two different scenarios (with code) on how to implement the TreePickerDialog to help improve user experience.

Darren’s SharePoint picker Toolpart post:
http://darrenjohnstone.net/2008/01/23/sharepoint-picker-toolpart/

Christopher’s Adding a SharePoint Site Picker to a _layouts page: http://chrissyblanco.blogspot.com/2008/07/adding-sharepoint-site-picker-to_03.html

Hope this helps save someone time and effort,
Richard Harbridge

How to Customize and Remove Buttons from the HTML Editor

In my last post I talked about creating styles that would be available in the HTML editor to help keep the brand and styles of your site’s content consistent and how important this was to a public facing website.

You can take that even further by customizing the HTML editor so less options are available to contributing members who are creating the content for your published pages.

This is also fairly straight forward and of course as always I will point you to an Microsoft article that explains it all in further detail: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms561507.aspx

With very little effort you can implement a public facing website with control on what your users can create and really help push them towards creating material that matches the look and feel of your website. These tricks can really help limit the extra questions, training and corrections you have to perform as a website administrator for staff who just love those hot pink fonts.

SharePoint HTML Editor Styles

Ever wanted to change the styles that exist in the HTML or content editor of SharePoint? It’s easy to do and you can probably find lots of references to how this can be done on the web, but just in case here is a link to the wonderful Microsoft Help and How to Article that describes the process: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointdesigner/HA101741401033.aspx

Using this method you can create any number of your own styles. This is especially useful when you want to help your users stick to your company colors or for their rich html content to fit with the overall brand of your website.

Hope this helps someone,
Richard Harbridge

The Power of PlaceHolders

Everyone knows about the wonders of masterpages and stylesheets but one of the simpler and more prominent components used in SharePoint that is forgotten about is the ASP placeholder controls that power what gets displayed in certain pages, and in certain areas of the page.

As always I am a huge fan of SharePoint designer so I am going to talk about this from the SharePoint Designer perspective (however you can do the same work in Visual Studio or the editor of your choice).

First of all you can edit any of the existing SharePoint placeholders on any page in a number of different ways. The SharePoint Designer supported ways are listed here: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointdesigner/HA101651201033.aspx

What this means is that it is very easy to customize the individual display of various page elements without having to create new master pages, or large style sheets. This is especially helpful when you have only a few pages that have minor differences. Rather than creating an entirely new masterpage because the structure is different you can just adjust the structure of an individual section of that master page.

Now add the fact that you can create your own placeholders very easily and it basically means you can create one master page that can be dynamic in the sense that it changes based on the page layouts and page content, since the page layouts and page content can describe the value of the placeholder controls.

Example:
Add the following to any of your master pages.
<asp:ContentPlaceHolder ID=“MyVeryOwnPlaceHolder” runat=”server”>
</asp:ContentPlaceHolder>

Now add the following to any page layout or directly to the page using SharePoint designer (and the methods described in that linked article)
<asp:Content ContentPlaceholderID=”MyVeryOwnPlaceHolder” runat=”server”>
This is <h1>my</h1> very own <b>placeholder control!<b>
</asp:Content>

Save and load up your page and you should see the html you put into that place holder appear ONLY in the page where you have the asp:Content overriding the placeholders default content.

You can put anything you want into a placeholder. Maybe a complex control with javascript, a simple message to users, or anything else that makes sense to you. The power of the PlaceHolder is in your hands now. Use it well.

Hope you liked the tip,
Richard Harbridge