SharePoint Config

SharePoint allows you to publish SharePoint links so that they appear in Office ‘Save As’ dialog boxes. This is useful if you want to encourage users to save Word, Excel and other Office documents directly into SharePoint rather than the file system as this dialog is shown the first time you save a new file. It allows you to create targeted shortcuts so relevant document libraries and sites are easily accessible when saving Office documents.

In SharePoint 2010 these published links are managed under the user profile service application in a page called ‘Published links to Office client applications’.

There are a couple of issues with major versioning in SharePoint 2010 that prevent users saving files into document libraries. Things like this can be very frustrating for a client so it is worth being aware of these when designing SharePoint solutions in the hopes they are avoided. The issues are:

• Saving files from Office 2007 fails when a document library has major versioning enabled and contains a required field
• Copying files using Windows Explorer fails when a document library contains a required field and column default value settings for this field

I believe these are bugs with the product and both have been raised with Microsoft support so hopefully they are fixed in future updates. In the meantime this articles covers the details and some possible workarounds in case you run into the same issues.

Default Column Values

SharePoint 2010 has some great document management enhancements. One of these is the ability to set location based metadata defaults. This allows you to specify default metadata for documents based on the document library or folder they are uploaded to (i.e. a document could be automatically tagged with Subject=Legal when uploaded to one folder or Subject=Finance if uploaded to another). This is especially useful in situations where users are bulk adding documents that need to have the same metadata applied.

The Problem

I was showing a developer this feature recently when I noticed that on one particular library the column default settings were not applied. The settings were available and I could set the properties correctly using the default column values page but when we tried… Continue reading SharePoint 2010 column default values missing »