Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Power User Cookbook: Over 70 advanced recipes for expert End Users to unlock and apply the value of SharePoint

This recipe works for:

You require either the Design or the Full Control permission level to create a new SharePoint list.

The choice of lists that you have available is determined by the SharePoint version you have. SharePoint 2010 Standard and Enterprise editions add more lists to those already available in SharePoint 2010 Foundation.

SharePoint stores information in lists, in fact almost everything in SharePoint is stored in lists. Document libraries (for storing documents), media libraries (for audio and video files), and form libraries (for storing InfoPath forms) are all just special types of lists. Lists are a fundamental building block in SharePoint.

This recipe shows you how to create a list. You need to tell SharePoint the template (meaning the type of list) that you want to create and provide some basic properties (such as the name of the list). SharePoint will then do the rest, adding the columns, views, and configuring the list as required.

Once your list has been created, you can start adding data or customize it further. There are many options and variations for doing this, which are covered in later recipes throughout this book.

There are many different list templates available. Each template provides different columns, views, and other functionality designed to support its particular function. I have listed some of the common ones in the next section.

SharePoint Foundation provides a core set of list templates, and the Standard and Enterprise versions of SharePoint add a whole lot more. The choice of lists that you will be able to create depends on which site you are in and which features have been activated. However, some of the more commonly encountered lists are as follows:

You can use this recipe to experiment with the different types of lists that you can create and get to know their functionality.

This recipe works for:

You require either the Design or Full Control permission level to create a site column.

SharePoint lists are made up of different columns. These columns can be defined locally (on each list as they are needed) or as site columns, which can be shared by lists throughout the site collection.

If you think that you will need a column more than once, then you should once consider creating it as a site column rather than just adding it to your list directly.

Site columns are particularly useful for columns that contain lookup data or a set of choices (for example, your company's departments or its locations). Using site columns helps you get more consistency in the information that you store within SharePoint.

Site columns are a necessary first step to creating content types, as described in the next recipe.

This recipe works for:

You require either the Design or Full Control permission level to create a content type.

You will need one or more site columns to add to your content type as you create it. If you need instructions on how to create a site column, then please refer to Creating a site column recipe.

SharePoint lists and libraries have a fairly major shortcoming: every item must have the same columns applied. Imagine a real-world scenario, such as the account department of your organization. They might want to store many different types of documents, such as invoices, purchase orders, bills received, credit notes, and so on. The different documents need different columns (or metadata) associated with them. For an invoice, customer amount and due date might be important. A purchase order might record a purchase order number, supplier name, expected delivery date, and payment terms. How can we store all these different types of documents in the same document library? Content types are the answer.

Content types allow us to define the document template and metadata columns for a particular type of document. In our accounts department scenario, we would create a content type for "invoice" and another content type (with different columns and template) for "purchase order". Once we have created the content types, we could add them to our accounts department document library. Now rather than creating a new document, SharePoint will provide us with the ability to create a new invoice or new purchase order in the library. The recipe Using content types to store different types of documents in the same document library in Chapter 4 describes how to do this.

Content types are built up in a hierarchy. The content types you create must extend either a built-in type (such as document) or a custom type that you have previously created.

Content types can be defined centrally and shared throughout all the SharePoint sites within the organization. They can have "business rules" information management policies and workflows attached. Wherever the content type is used, a consistent template, metadata, and rules can be applied.

Content types can be used to bring order to the "information chaos" that most organizations experience. Defining and sharing content types for real-world business objects is the key to unlocking all the power of SharePoint. Use them!

This recipe works for:

My Sites must be configured and active in the SharePoint installation. You can run this recipe from any SharePoint 2010 site that you have access to.

Your My Site is a special SharePoint site designed especially for you. It is the site where you can store private documents, videos, and other SharePoint content, or where you add content that you want to share with others. You can use your My Site to access and update your User Profile (information about yourself), track your colleagues, reference the information that you have tagged on other SharePoint sites, and so on. Think of your My Site as your LinkedIn or Facebook site in the enterprise. Your My Site is the hub of your interaction with the many SharePoint 2010 sites that you will eventually be granted access to. It is also the site where you are likely to have the highest permission levels, so it makes it a great place to try out the other recipes presented in this book.

If you know the URL where the My Sites have been created in your SharePoint installation, then you can access your My Site directly without needing to first visit another SharePoint site. The address might be something similar to http://my.sp2010cookbook/default.aspx. Access your My Site using this recipe and then have a look at the address displayed in your web browser to see what format has been used in your system.

This recipe works for:

My Sites must be configured and active in your SharePoint installation.

SharePoint 2010 stores information about users in their user profiles. It uses this information in news feeds, people searches, and audiences (to target information to particular groups of SharePoint users).

Your user profile is shown in your My Site. This is the place where you can view your profile as others would see it and make changes to the values stored in your user profile properties.

Depending on how your administrator has configured SharePoint, you won't be able to change all the properties that you see. Some information will be read only and may show information that has been imported from other external systems, such as your organization's Active Directory (where organizations commonly store user information). The properties you can see and change will have been preconfigured by your administrator and you may have different properties depending on your role in the organization (SharePoint allows administrators to create different "types" of profiles).

One of the first things that you should do after you have created your My Site is to complete your user profile. This will allow co-workers to locate your skills, connect to you, and start to call on your (I have no doubt undervalued) experience. As soon as your profile is complete, you will start showing up in SharePoint's people search.

Who knows, you may get invited to work on the exciting new "Project X" or requested to meet a client or attend a conference in some beautiful exotic location. Keep your profile up-to-date if you want to maximize your opportunities.

This recipe requires your My Site. The recipe works for:

My Site must be configured and active in the SharePoint installation.

SharePoint 2010 allows you to track your team members, colleagues, and subject matter experts through your My Site. When you add a colleague, you can add them to different groups such as My Team. Adding colleagues to your team will allow them to access more information from your user profile.

Once you have added a colleague, SharePoint will automatically keep you up-to-date with their activity. This includes the changes that they make to their user profiles, the content that they author, the pages that they tag, and their status message updates. All this information will be displayed on your My Newsfeed page when you again access your My Site. SharePoint will also send you e-mails to tell you about important changes and will even suggest colleagues to you based on its analysis of the colleagues you already have, and the people that they have added to their networks.

By tracking colleagues in this way, SharePoint helps you build up strong and effective networks within your organization. You can then leverage these networks to get your work done more effectively.

This recipe requires your My Site. The recipe works for:

My Site must be configured and active in the SharePoint installation.

SharePoint 2010 automatically keeps track of the all the sites that you have been explicitly added to as a member (such as the sites that you can contribute to) and gives you a link to them on your membership tab in your My Site. You can use your My Site as your personal navigation hub. From any SharePoint sites, jump into your My Site, check your memberships, and jump back out to where you want to go. You need never be lost in SharePoint again!

Importantly, the memberships tab doesn't show the sites that you only have a read-only access to. If you want to save links to these sites, then tag them as described in the Tagging a SharePoint page so I can find it again later recipe. Confusingly, it also doesn't show the sites that you have or the ones which you have full control of. To see those sites, add yourself to the member group of the site.

SharePoint recalculates your memberships using a background timer job, so expect a delay between being added to the site and it showing up in your memberships tab.

This recipe works for:

It requires you to be logged in and have read access but no other privileges are necessary.

You will need a My Site to be able to review and make use of the tags that you have created.

SharePoint 2010 allows you to apply keyword tags to the information that you find. Once you tag an item, you will be able to find it gain from your My Site (just click on the tag).

Good tags to use might be the name of a project (for example, "Project X"), a department, or a technical term. By allowing users to tag content, the information in SharePoint is progressively classified and refined.

As you tag, SharePoint learns. It adds the tags you create into its own keyword set. As you type a tag, SharePoint will suggest tags based on the ones it already knows about. In this way SharePoint helps to build up a consistent tagging system through the enterprise.

The data tagged in SharePoint represents a powerful information set. SharePoint makes use of this everywhere, but particularly in its search results. When you search for "Project X", the pages that were tagged should appear higher than those that were not. Tags are like signposts, pointing users to relevant information. Tags can be used to refine your searches, getting you to the information that you really need with just a few clicks.

So tags don't just help you find information again, they help your colleagues find it too. So go on—get tagging!

If you want to quickly tag pages that you approve of, SharePoint gives you a pre-created tag—"I Like It". Simply click on the I Like It icon on the top right side of the page and you are done.

This recipe works for:

It requires you to be logged in and have read access but no other privileges are necessary.

Tags help you find pages again or classify the information that they contain. Notes are public comments that you leave on the pages for others to see. Use notes to add to the content, to correct any obvious mistakes, or explain information that is unclear. Don't use notes for observations such as "the author of this page is obviously a blithering idiot" unless you are confident that you can defend your viewpoint to the Managing Director without getting fired.

This recipe works for:

It requires you to be logged in and have read access but no other privileges are necessary.

To create an alert, your SharePoint administrator will need to have configured your SharePoint server to send e-mail (or SMS messages). The Alert Me icon will not be displayed if the e-mail function is not enabled.

Think of SharePoint as a machine. There are lots of processes continually running in SharePoint that are just waiting to do useful work for you. One of these processes is SharePoint's alert system. It can send you e-mails when something changes in a SharePoint site. All you need to do is tell it what you want to know and how often you want to be told. The SharePoint alert system will do the rest.

You can register for alerts on all sorts of different SharePoint objects, such as sites, pages, documents libraries, shared calendars, blogs, and documents. Just select the object you are interested in and check the ribbon. If you see the Alert Me icon, then you will be able to set an alert. Alerts can be sent instantly or rolled up into daily or weekly summaries of changes. You can even opt to receive your alerts as an SMS too, assuming that your SharePoint administrators have configured this service.

Users new to SharePoint often go "wow!" when they discover alerts. Pretty soon they are setting up alerts anywhere and everywhere. Then the e-mails start coming from SharePoint. On a busy SharePoint site, perhaps, tens or hundreds of alert e-mails are received every day. What started out as a good idea soon turns into information overload.

Think hard before setting up alerts. Only add them where you really need to know if something changes. Use the daily or weekly rollups where you can.

This recipe works for:

It requires you to be logged in and have read access but no other privileges are necessary.

If you want to manage your alerts, then you will need to have created at least one alert before going through this recipe. The recipe Adding an alert to a SharePoint page shows you how.

SharePoint offers you tremendous flexibility to create alerts and to specify why and how often you receive them. It provides built-in functionality to allow you to manage those alerts, create new alerts, and adjust or remove existing alerts for a single administration page. You can use this page to adjust your alerts, ensuring that you don't get overwhelmed by SharePoint alert e-mails.

This recipe works for:

You will need a SharePoint site that you want to check your permissions on. This recipe uses a Team Site for illustration.

You do not require any particular permission level to use this recipe. However, the outcome of this recipe is directly determined by the permission levels that you have been granted.

Everything that you can or can't do in SharePoint is determined by the permissions that you have been granted. SharePoint doesn't tell you the permissions that you have, it only stops you doing or seeing the things that require permissions that you do not have. SharePoint employs a "security trimmed user interface". This means that SharePoint doesn't let you see or do the things you don't have permissions for. It only shows you the content, menus, and commands that you are allowed to access.

Unfortunately, as a user, there is no built-in way to determine your permission levels. This recipe uses a systematic approach to work out the permission levels by testing for the functionality that is granted at each level. If we find the functionality we expect, then we can infer that you have been granted that permission level. As permission levels build up in a hierarchy, we start from the lowest level (that is, no access) and work upwards until we find all the permissions levels that apply to you.

Individual SharePoint permissions are collected together into permission levels. A SharePoint Team Site creates six permission levels by default: Limited Access, View Only, Read, Contribute, Design, and Full Control. You may have been allocated one or more permission levels in the site. The total permissions you have are the sum of all the permissions from the permission levels that you have been allocated.

The limited a ccess permission does not give any direct access to the site. It is designed to be combined with the fine-grained permissions to give access to just particular items within a site (for example, it is possible that you would have access to just a single document library in a site but nothing else). You will not normally encounter this except in highly customized sites.

If you can see the Team Site in your browser, then you have at least View Only or Read permissions level. For all practical purposes, these permissions levels are identical so we do not try to differentiate them any further in this recipe.

If you have the ability to change things in the Team Site (for example, edit pages or upload documents) then you have been granted at least the Contribute permission level, that is, you have the ability to contribute things to the site.

If you have access to the advanced commands located on the Site Actions menu, then you have been granted Design or Full Control permission level in the site. You will probably encounter the Full Control permission level in Team Sites that you are responsible for administering or within your My Site. Full Control means that you can access all the power of SharePoint within the bounds of the current collection of sites that you are working in. You will have the ability to create new sites, add users, set permission levels, and do all sorts of wonderful stuff. However, with power comes responsibility—there is also the potential to mess things up when you have full control! Don't worry, there are plenty of recipes in this book that will help you and make sure that doesn't happen.

This recipe works for:

You will need the URL of the SharePoint site you want to check your permissions on.

You will need the Full Control permission level to run this recipe. Normally, this will mean that you are a member of the site owner's group.

As a user, everything that you can or can't to in SharePoint is determined by the permissions that you have been granted. Individual SharePoint permissions are collected together into permission levels. SharePoint 2010 provides built-in functionality that gives site owners the ability to check the permission of any user in a site.

In SharePoint, security permissions are normally inherited with pages, lists, document libraries, and the items that they contain all inheriting their security permissions from the site which contains them. However, it is possible to break this inheritance and apply unique permissions to any of these items.

Where custom permissions have been applied, SharePoint 2010 provides the same Check Permissions functionality for each object. Just look for the Check Permissions icon on the ribbon for the list, document library, or page that you want to check the permissions for.

This recipe works for:

You require either the Design or Full Control permission level to edit the permission settings of the list.

Lists inherit their security settings from their parent site (which may in turn inherit its settings from its parent right up to the top of the site collection). The following diagram represents the inheritance hierarchy:

The first step of assigning custom permissions to a list is to break this inheritance. When you break inheritance on the list, the security permission it starts with are the permissions it was inheriting—you actually need to remove these permissions manually after breaking inheritance if you don't want them!

Once you have broken inheritance, you are free to add and remove permissions as you wish.

Use this functionality sparingly. It's generally considered bad practice to use custom SharePoint permissions extensively in your SharePoint sites, as this soon becomes very difficult to manage and control. It is all too easy to make a mistake and to give somebody access to information that they shouldn't see.