SharePoint Unicorn Blog

Holy Crap! How long has it been since I posted anything here? Looks like a few months.Sorry about that. I happened to get kind of busy with a new and interesting project that consumed a lot of my time, and I didn't have anything useful I could share. Well good news, I DO have something to share. Broadcast Calendars. In the world of TV, Radio, & Advertising, they decided that the calendar we all use was not good enough.So they had to make their own calendar for the planning and purchase of programs (new & syndication) and advertising. Lets go over a how the rules of the calendar work. Every week in the broadcast calendar starts on a Monday and ends on a Sunday Every month has either four or five such weeks. Broadcast calendar months thus have either 28 or 35 days. The first week of every broadcast month always contains the Gregorian calendar first of the month. So thinking about this from an algorithm stand point, lets discuss how we can work with it. We only r...

I hate spring. Head congestion and constant running nose. So I'll be the first to admit, I am NOT at my prime today.  But with a few cups of coffee and heavy metal later, I can start getting some work done. I wanted to test my custom site in our test environment where we are rebuilding a new design/look & feel. So I to do this, I wanted to export my site as a template solution...but It is in a publishing site. No fear, this is actually pretty easy, but not super obvious. Boot up SharePoint Designer, and navigate to the site you want to export.       Find “SaveSiteAsTemplateEnabled” in Site Options (see below).    Click the Modify button and change this setting to “true” then a pply the Setting once done. Next, navigate to this URL (change appropriately for your site)  http://YourWebApp/YourSubSite/_layouts/15/savetmpl.aspx  This gets around the fact that the option for saving a sub site doesn't exist in site settings fo...

Maybe this is a promise of posts to come in the future, but if there is anything I have learned to both respect and fear. It is JSlink. It is both a source of my frustration, and awe in just how powerful a tool it is in our tool kits. We can render and alter just about anything...in the web part itself, all in a single *.js file. I'd love to discuss more, and really dig deeper into the complexity and power of this, but for the moment, I'm going to put this smaller solution here. Based on the excellent blog post  jslink-with-paging-for-rendering-list-views/  by Cas van Iersel. I was able to implement the same functionality, but with a slight twist. After looking over his template, it was well...awesome, but in a totally different format and style. I'll discuss more about this project later, as it is a unique one. I have restyled and reshaped the out of the box discussion lists, to take advantage of their functionality, but adding my own fields and stymieing. However,...

In an interesting case of "Working as intended" I had a user send us an interesting problem. As they had things configured, they had it set to send them an alert whenever things were being updated in their library. The users in question would leave open documents being stored in the SP library for extended periods of time. Word, then in its eternal helpfulness would then do incremental saves. Each Save, then would create the notice that changes would be made, but often at odd hours (user left word open overnight...etc) So, the resolution to this was to set it to a daily summary, as apposed to immediate notifications. Kinda funny right?

DISCLAIMER: Blog posts that start with the "You can do this" are intended as end user level instructions. For though of us that are more IT minded, you may disregard this as a simple set of instructions. Remember, we all started somewhere. Reading blogs was that starting point for most of us.. I had a user request come in a few weeks back, about wanting to know how they can sync their calendar in outlook to a SharePoint Calendar, so I decided to take a few screen shots so I can walk anyone through this simple process. First, lets navigate to the SharePoint Calendar you wish to synchronize, Next click the calendar tab on the ribbon.. Now look for the button that says Connect to Outlook. There will be a few pop up dialogs that appear. Click allow. Congratulations you now have a new calendar to manage from outlook!

Ok, this is a strange story, but bare with me. A few years ago, I was working for a IT consulting firm. I was speaking with a client one afternoon, and frankly, that's what she called me. "The person we are looking for, that magical....SharePoint Unicorn." I didn't dare stop a woman giving me a proper complement, so stifling laughter and her stifling tears (or at least, that's what it sounded like at the time). The name stuck to some extent. That being said, on that team, we had an iOS troll, a SharePoint Hobo, a 'tried and true' road warrior, and...a SharePoint Unicorn. As a someone with a life long passion for cartoons & animation... There are worse things I have been called. Eh. Why not. I guess I am a unicorn.