My front page of my new portal won’t come up. I deleted the site collection and tried to recreate it, here’s what I got (see image). That sucks!!!

OK, so everyone knows by now but everyone else is still blogging about it so here goes: SharePoint Team released SharePoint Administration Tool Kit. Yay!

This is just a repost of this blog (link) about custom workflow activities that I found really useful.

Here are just some of the things that are accomplished with this:

During my work in Afghanistan for CSTC-A, one of my biggest selling points to them for upgrading to MOSS 2007 was workflows. I really wish there were more workflows packaged but we ended up having to spend a lot of time creating them from scratch. It was time consuming because we were still dealing with post-upgrade things like training for end users. This CodePlex project is really a great tool that every SharePoint Architect/Engineer should keep handy.

One of my colleagues (and friends – hi Brett!) reminded me of something that I think isn’t written about too much. Its one of those things that everyone knows is needed but there’s a lack of information, samples and best practices – a void thats yet unfilled.

He emailed me asking my opinion on the size of SharePoint Site Collections in MOSS. I echoed the sentiments of Bill Baer who’s blog I read a lot. In summary, 15GB is a good limit. Personally, I know the user base that Brett was talking about and 15GB is actually too much. Yes, we did move completely away from traditional file servers but at the same time, SharePoint is not a storage dump. The information should be kept relevant, updated and unneeded documents trashed or archived some other way for historical tracking.

But the bigger question is how to define policies such as these and how to enforce them. Its really a non-SharePoint business decision. Many organizations have an “Acceptable Use Policy” that governs the use and abuse of their systems in general. I think with any Content Management System there needs to be specific policies. These policies would cover file size limits, type of documents stored and other technical limitations. It should also cover non-technical policies such as a blogging policy, classification of documents, use of MySites, etc.

I was researching this recently and could not find any such template, I guess I’ll need to make my own. Usually organizations do have these policies, but they’re unwritten, unclear and scattered everywhere. When it comes time to enforce, its hard to be objective without a comprehensive written policy.

Finally, I think such a policy would reinforce the business’ IT growth plan. It allows you to say, “Despite these limits we’ve imposed we’ll soon need new hardware.”

I got an email from one of my friends who was telling me about some limitation in SharePoint, specifically with surveys. He ended up creating a InfoPath form but it didn’t seem to be the best way.
The problem was that he needed some questions to be answered but some of the questions needed to solicit more information. For example: “Do you have any pets?” (Yes/No) and a follow up “If yes, please select the type of pet from this drop down.”

The InfoPath form did get him his information but there’s a better way. This can be solved using SharePoint’s built-in survey. I would guess this would be an option while creating the survey questions but its not. First, create the survey with all the questions. To create branching, you go to the Site Settings and select Survey Settings and click on the question you want to branch.

You’ll see the “Branching Logic” heading there, simply select which question each response will branch to.

I also found a non-traditional use for this. Some of the survey I’ve created were lengthy and all the questions would appear on a single page. I used Branching Logic to break up the pages, it works well.