Category Archives: SharePoint - Page 3

SharePoint Evolution Conference London

The next three days, I’m attending the SharePoint Evolution Conference in London. After a very unpleasant check in at the Eurostar terminal in Brussels, I managed to get to the conference center safely. Some speakers and probably also some attendees did not make it here due to the volcano eruption in Iceland.

I’m looking forward to the various Information Worker sessions.

SharePoint Log Reader

Tired of using Notepad to plough through your logs?

Tom just released a new version of his SharePoint Log Reader on Codeplex.

This nice utility allows you to browse through the SharePoint ULS log files in a more convenient way. Some of the features:

  • load multiple log files
  • advanced filtering
  • copy error message to clipboard
  • support for correlation ID (SharePoint 2010)

Have a look at this short demo movie.

Windows 7, Explorer view, and opening files from SharePoint with Office applications

I have been using Windows 7 for quite some time now, and one thing that has been bothering me is the performance (euh, lack of performance) when using the Open with Windows Explorer option in SharePoint. Opening it, using it is sooooo slow.

But recently, I read this post of Amanda Perran. The lack of performance seems to be related to a setting in Internet Explorer: under Tools, Internet Options, Connections, LAN Settings, you need to uncheck Automatically detect settings. This magically increases the speed of your Explorer View, but what is even better: drastically decreases the load time of Office documents when opening them from SharePoint.

So this is something every user should know. Spread the word!

SharePoint in Plain English

The people from CommonCraft have created a new video about SharePoint. If you want to learn what it is and what it can do for you in 3 minutes, this is the way to go:

SharePoint Instant List Filter

instantlistfilterI had a great time in my last SharePoint Power User training, and as always, I learned a lot from the questions raised during the course. What do you think about this one: is there a quick and easy way to filter a long SharePoint list, without using Search, without using the column headings or the datasheet view?

I bumped into this nice extension on Codeplex: the SharePoint InstantListFilter. It adds lookup columns at the top of every document library and list, and you can use them to filter the list by typing in them; the results are shown immediately on the screen (jquery).

My development skills are non existing, so I can not evaluate the solution technically, but it is really a lifesaving functionality when you are browsing through long SharePoint lists (especially when there is no metadata or views defined).

Of course, there are some limitations:

  • it only filters in the displayed results
  • it is a feature activated on site level

If you want to see it in action, have a look at the demo.