Creating A-Z Expanding/Collapsing Lists

So as most people know I am a big fan of the posts regularly placed in the SharePoint End User (GetThePoint) blog and Mark Gillis did an excellent post on Friday I just want to reference here: http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/blogs/GetThePoint/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=170

The important thing here is that it clearly explains how to use groups to create effective, and powerful views which using calculated columns let you create various kinds of list views. The one I personally like (which illustrates the point well) is the A-Z list of names with a simple calculated column. Effective, efficient, and easy to understand.

Hope Mark’s post helps you think of creative ways to use SharePoint views in your everyday work,
Richard Harbridge

Using SharePoint Request Access Fully

The other day I was surprised by the way an individual was managing their SharePoint solution when it came to user requests for more permissions, additional permissions, or enhanced permissions.

This individual was taking all requests manually and often the users requesting wouldn’t know where they needed the access. The individual would communicate for several minutes of correspondence until it was clear where the individual was working and needed more access in. I pointed out the “Request Access” link in the user’s welcome drop down and how it could help save lots of time since it lets him know automatically what site the user was in when requesting access. (Extremely important considering how many site collections he had, all managed by different users.)

I have decided to write a quick user help guide for this now in the hopes that it saves someone else time in the future, and to point out that anyone defining their governance and how permission requests are handled should base it around the built in functionality of SharePoint as this will save many man hours of communication that can be handled and facilitated by the system. Keep in mind that business requirements like approval from managers should still be considered, and that this recommendation is simply to use the automation of SharePoint and it’s features to help facilitate that.

For the End User:
When you are viewing any site in SharePoint you always have the option to request the site administrator for higher permission levels (especially helpful if you don’t know who the administrator for that site is). You can do this by following these steps:

1. Click on the “Welcome <<Your Name>>” drop down on the top right of the page.
2. Select request access.
   
3. Fill out the details of your request and click Send Request.
   

At this point the site administrator will be sent an email request from you and will act upon it appropriately (I hope :P).

By Default when a user goes to a site that they do not have permissions to see they will see an automatic request access page similar to the one shown above. Here is a screen shot of the page which you can see has a Request Access link that goes to a request access page.

For the SharePoint Administrator:
The site administrator can be changed and checked by going to any sites’ permissions page. This page will only display the following option if it is set to not inherit permissions from the site above, otherwise it uses the site above’s access request email.

Keep in mind that these sort of SharePoint features are designed to save you time and that if properly trained on them your users can do more and more self management decreasing the load on your SharePoint administrators.

Hope this helps,
Richard Harbridge