SharePoint Learning Portal

Properly training your users is the greatest challenge for a SharePoint community.
There are many classes and books and blogs available, but most of the users will be put off by the complexity of most of these resources. Microsoft has a great option, the Microsoft SharePoint Learning Kit, for training available as a individual download, or available as a SharePoint Portal solution complete with Training Site Template if you wish to integrate it into your Portal.

Basically this product contains documentation, interactive lessons and video instruction available on demand when the user chooses.

If you do not have a training budget (and these days who does?) this is a great product to help make the Administrators job easier.

The links for the two downloads are here:
Stand Alone individual download.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=7bb3a2a3-6a9f-49f4-84e8-ff3fb71046df&displaylang=en

Portal download.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=673DC932-626A-4E59-9DCA-16D685600A51&displaylang=en

The stand alone is very simple and straightforward, while the Portal is a bit more unwieldy as it is a Solution that needs to be added to your farm and configured.
I will post my experience on setting that up shortly, it was successful, but a bit of a time consuming process.

Public Facing SharePoint sites

Many times people will ask about public facing sites that use SharePoint, specific to their industry. Every time I get this question, my go to answer is check out wssdemo.com by Ian Morrish. I have a link to it off to the left in my links list, but I wanted to give it some more attention since it has provided me with endless opprtuinities to advocate SharePoint for internet sites.
Here is the direct link below, definitely check it out, Ian has put together a great listing of sites broken down by business category.

http://www.wssdemo.com/Pages/websites.aspx

Creating a Site Specific Search Scope

I recently was asked to help with creating a site specific search scope, and realizing I had never written down the steps, decided to put it up here on my blog for reference.

Within Central Administration, go to the SSP Administration page and select "Search Settings". From within the Search Settings page click on the View Scopes link under the Scopes heading and select the "New Scope" button. Name the scope what you wish (I use the site name), and click OK. Once the scope is populated in the Scope listing you will need to add a rule in order to get it to work. Click the "Add Rule" link and enter in the requested information as so:

Scope Rule Type: Web Address

Web Address: Folder-Enter in URL to the site, omitting a specific page such as Default.aspx

Behavior: Require


Save the scope, then make sure the scope updates.

Now from the top level site page, go to actions > site settings > search scopes > and add the new search scope to the display group.
Now it will appear in the search drop down.

Simple enough.

Missing Icons in Document Libraries

Another day another perplexing SharePoint issue.
After performing a content DB move for a client, there were intermittent reports of a blank icon next to them, no matter what the type of file. (Excel, PDF, Word, etc).
I would investigate, perform an iis reset and voila they'd be back, however the next day, gone.
After digging around a bit I found this post on Eggheadcafe:
http://www.eggheadcafe.com/software/aspnet/30882542/document-library-can-not.aspx

After looking into this further, sure enough the DOCICON.XML file, located at Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\TEMPLATE\XML, did not have the proper rights for authenticated users - actually no rights at all. So I added the proper file rights in and icons came back and stayed back.
NOTE- During my research, I also came across a posting that suggested it was a port renaming issue, but did not find anything further on how to solve.

Cannot activate Office SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure in Site Settings

I recently came across an issue with activating the Office SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure through the Site Settings of a clients site.
When I clicked "Activate" it returned an access denied error, even with the Farm account. After trying a few things I tried the old STSADM standby and sure enough there is an "Activate Feature" command.
The syntax looks like this:
stsadm.exe -o activatefeature -name PublishingResources -url http://sitename

This should activate the feature, you may have to go back into the Site Settings and activate but this did the trick in our case.