Export to Spreadsheet error

Have you ever seen the error "Cannot get the list schema column property from the Sharepoint List" when you try to export the list to a spreadsheet? Here are the possible resolutions-

One, Upgrade to office 2007. Office 2007 has a closer integration with MOSS 2007 and this error is fixed.

Two, remove the date fields from your list. The schema property that is having conflicts are the date fields. Once you remove them, you will be able to export the spreadsheet.

Three, use the option edit in datasheet to see the data in datasheet view. Then copy and paste the entire data in a new excel workbook.

And yes, if you intend to use this worksheet offline and for reporting, then it will be wise to unlink the list from the Data > List menu.

Order of [Me] and [Today] in filters

We had a strange problem today. A task list view had a filter with due date < [Today] and Assigned to = [Me]. Now when I go to set up an alert for this as shown below, which results in an error. The error is - Exception occurred. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80020009 (DISP_E_EXCEPTION)) It seemed a pretty strange behavior. I played around a bit and figured out that if you switch the order of the conditions for [Me] and [Today], it will no longer throw the error. Very quirky!

Search results are blank

The search works perfect in the farm. But one user reported that they need a "better" search functionality than what is provided. I didnt think of it much earlier, but then I came to know that there is no search happening at all on the site. Well.. interesting.

I went and saw all the settings in the central admin, crawl settings, rules to make sure that the site is included to crawl. Site level settings also indicated that the site is visible to the crawler. But then I noticed the aspx page settings right below it. I changed it to always crawl, ran an incremental crawl and voila!

Sharepoint by default will not crawl content on aspx pages, if the permissions are broken down to granular level. This is to provide security to the content. So, if you need to enable search for such content, select this setting and it will crawl happily everafter!

Add to my Links issue

An interesting issue came up some days back. Whenever we would try to add any list or doc lib to my links webpart on my site using the Add to my links function, it redirects to a page which populates the wrong list/doc lib URL in the textbox which is uneditable. The link that so gets created is wrong and is invalid. To give an idea, we have multiple webapplications as xyz, xyz-div1, xyz-div2........ Now whenever I try to add a list of xyz-div2 to my links using "Add to my Links" it stripped off the -div2 from the url. The url seemed something like - http://xyz/sites/team1/xyz/lists/emp/allitems.aspx instead of http://xyz-div2/sites/team1/xyz/lists/emp/allitems.aspx

On closer analysis of the url box of the internet explorer I found out that there is an intermediate portal api which sharepoint before going to the next page. When I googled that api with that particular command parameter I got a hit to msdn here http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms868609.aspx

I then took a look at the portal connection of the site collection and there it was. As part of the site provisioning process in the organization, a site is always connected to a portal site as http://xyz to act as a common home for all employees. We will see how we work this out so that add to my links work, but at least its good to know why it was happening.

Enabling wildcard search in MOSS 2007

MOSS 2007 for some peculiar reason does not support wild card search. There are some solutions out there are which might be of use and I will try to list them here -

1. Using specific metadata - While this may not suit your purpose, but you can search for somebody's firstname by, Firstname:Rob, this will give you all the people whose names are Rob, Robe, Robbie Robbin etc. (You get the idea) Similarly you can search for lastname too. Please note that if you try searching for Robbie using FirstName:bbie, you will NOT get the result.
2. Customizing the search result web part - Mario Hadiwinata lists down a method of doing it. I have not tried it myself, but it looks pretty sleek. [Edit - this works for sps 2003 only and not for MOSS. Thanks sdec for pointing that out]
3. Using a CEWP webpart - Ramon Scott lists down the code to use it on your homepage. This creates a new webpart with two text boxes, where you can do a wildcard search on people by lastname or firstname.
4. Use Ontolica Wildcard Search - This is a free download provided by Ontolica here.

Other than these, there must be various solutions out there, but on the similar lines.

MOSS 2007 User Administration

Well, This was worth writing about. Having worked on 2003 before, the user administration for MOSS 2007 seems confusing to me. I spent the last 60 minutes trying to figure out, how can I see a group's permission and how to edit that. And also I remembered that I can see detailed permission list for a particular permission from 2003(For eg. Full Control). And found that out too. Not at all intuitive.

First of all in MOSS 2007, all users are added at Site Collection level and then reused for all the other sites. So Do not try to find out how to do all this at a subsite level. A good place to begin is http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointserver/HA101172091033.aspx

Now - To view what permissions a group has and how to edit those permissions.
1. Browse to your Site Collection
2. Click on Site Settings > People and Groups
3. Click on Groups on the Left side navigation.
4. Click on the Edit icon that appears between the group name and description.

You will now see the permissions as well as you can edit them here.

Second - You want to see a detailed permission map as well as maybe create a custom permission
1. Browse to your Site Collection
2. Click on Site Settings > People and Groups
3. Click on Site Permissions in the left side navigation.
4. Click on Settings>Permission Levels

From here you can see the existing site permission details as well as create a new site permission level.