SharePoint Config

The Managed Metadata functionality provided by SharePoint 2010 allows you to centrally manage metadata and keywords. In a previous post I covered how to provision a SharePoint 2010 managed metadata field and add this to a content type and a list definition. In this post I will cover how to add these types of fields to a publishing page layout so that content authors can add metadata and keywords to webpages they create using these layouts.

If there are a large number of content pages this type of tagging can help users find information as these columns can be used… Continue reading Adding Managed Metadata Fields to SharePoint Publishing Pages »

The first part of this two part series discussed some of the problems with provisioning SharePoint 2010 managed metadata fields. This post will cover a robust method of deploying SharePoint 2010 managed metadata columns in a way that avoids common errors and enables the columns to automatically show up in the search refinement panel.

To recap on the previous post we are aiming to avoid the following problems when creating SharePoint 2010 taxonomy fields through features:

1. If you create a list definition that uses this site column you get the error: Failed to get value of the “{0}” column from the “Managed Metadata” field type control. See details in log. Exception message: Invalid field name. {00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000}.
2. The managed metadata column does not appear in

The official SharePoint site contains a comparison of the features in each SharePoint 2010 edition but does not include specific details on what web parts are available for each SKU/license type. This is useful to know when choosing between Foundation vs Standard vs Enterprise, as this additional functionality may be a good reason to upgrade (or turn on these features for specific users). It is also useful to know these as a developer or solution architect so you don’t custom develop something that has already been built and tested by Microsoft – something that I often see happen.

SharePoint licensing is a complex subject. As well as there being multiple product configuration options, license prices often depend on a number of factors such as the type of organisation, the relationship with Microsoft and/or licensing retailer etc. It is useful, however, to have a rough indication of how much a product will cost when planning a project. For example if you are interested in giving all internal users access to FAST search you are looking at roughly twice the licensing costs of an installation using the standard features.

This post describes how to use the ContentTypeBinding element to avoid an error that can occur creating publishing pages. Continue reading Error creating SharePoint publishing pages »

The guys at WSSSearch.com have got a cool little collection of tagging web parts that allow you to create tag clouds for lists in your site. The basic idea is that you add a tag column to your list, then use the tag cloud web part to display a cloud containing using the tags entered against all the list items. Continue reading Tag Cloud Web Part for SharePoint »

There are several steps involved in creating a custom list definition in SharePoint 2007. These are: reate custom site columns (Optional), create custom content types (Optional), create custom list definition. Continue reading Creating a Custom SharePoint 2007 List Definition »