In order to turn off or disable the "My Site" or "My Links" functionality you need to be a SharePoint Administrator. Then follow the steps below.

• Go to the Central Administration Web Page
• Click on the link for Shared Services Administration
  • If you have more than one Shared Service Provider (SSP), select the one that is running the "My Sites" functionality
  • Under "User Profiles and My Sites", click "Personalization Services Permissions"
• Select the group you want to limit the functionality.  More than likely you will just have "NTAuthority\Authenticated Users"
• Click Modify Permissions of Selected Users
• In the next screen, you will see a list of checkboxes
  • To disable "My Sites" uncheck "Create Personal Site"
  • To disable "My Links" uncheck "Use Personal Features"
• Select the checkbox that is appropriate for you

Ever had to merge SharePoint lists? Typically you can open them in Excel, copy & paste from one sheet to another and bob’s your uncle. Unfortunately this doesn’t work in all cases, especially when attachments are involved or the data uses lookup columns.

I’ve been playing about with MS Access 2007. It has a handy feature in that you can open SharePoint lists directly, as shown below:

You can then get to do pretty cool things with the list as it’s pretty much a DB table within access, albeit still linked to SharePoint.

It’s simply a case of using the ‘External Data | SharePoint List’ option to open the lists you need merged and copying/pasting from one table to another. There’s a couple of caveats here to be careful of though, namely:

• Your content types have to match across lists, otherwise it doesn’t work. You’ll have to switch into the query designer and map the columns manually.
• Beware of lookup columns. They’ll cause a ‘data integrity error’ if your data doesn’t match correctly. What I tend to do is paste a row in at a time and manually select the lookup value from the relevant column. This seems to sort it.

The plus side of using MS Access is that you can build up queries and reports from your SharePoint list data. Pretty powerful and not often mentioned!

Anyone that’s worked with SharePoint 2007 knows it’s a pain to make accessible. SharePoint spits things out as tables and the Site Actions menu is grim to behold in HTML. The guys working on the NSPCC NSU site used the ARF toolkit to replace the standard SharePoint 2007 controls with ARF controls that basically pull the info from SharePoint, render it as XML and apply an XSL to this. The result is the NSU Safeguarding Unit site that’s fully accessible. (Cue Ciaran or Nicky for a full blog post! =) )

Andrew McConnell has recently blogged about SharePoint 2010’s rendering; namely that it’s WCAG2.0 AA compliant ootb and it even converts existing sites! His post is definitely worth a read and can be found here:

http://www.andrewconnell.com/blog/archive/2009/11/04/sharepoint-2010-changes-to-rendering.aspx

I wonder how accessible the admin interface is though? I’ve seen a few requests for accessible admin interfaces and I have a feeling it’ll be the next big thing.

I installed and configured SharePoint 2007 on a farm but ran into a problem accessing the site from the web front end servers.

When trying to navigate to the site, SharePoint would prompt for user credentials, no matter who you were logged on as and then return a 401 error.

Spence Harbar has a really good article explaining this issue which is caused by a security feature installed in Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2003 (SP1). http://www.harbar.net/archive/2009/07/02/disableloopbackcheck-amp-sharepoint-what-every-admin-and-developer-should-know.aspx

He points to Microsoft’s KB article 896861, http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/896861

which details two workarounds to resolve this issue.

I recently had to export a site and import it to a different server.  Everything worked well using the stsadm export/import command.  EXCEPT when I tested adding a new content type in a Document Library, the document opened in Word 2007, but I got an error saying the Document Panel will not load and I was not able to add in any metadata for this document.

It turns out that I have two lookup columns on the site which contain metadata for a content type and to resolve this problem, I had to delete and recreate these columns, then add them back into the content type.

Luckily I had set these columns up in a parent content type and was able to push down these changes to the other content types inheriting from this parent.

Here’s an interesting post (http://www.bluedoglimited.com/SharePointThoughts/ViewPost.aspx?ID=305) from Maurice Prather on SharePoint 2010 Web parts.

It seems that now your web part will be stored against the page if check in/checkout is activated against the page library in a WCM site.

Sounds useful as in previous cases if you exported your site the web part settings were lost. Now hopefully your web part settings will stay with the page during export or the web part itself will reappear in a previous page version if inadvertently deleted from the current page version.

The one thing I’m curious to see is if the page differences / web part differences are visible to the user from the SharePoint UI, rather than having to revert to a version and manually check for differences Could be a useful WinDiff add on for SharePoint.