December 2004 - Posts
A while ago I was looking in Sharepoint to find the option where to view the usage details of a portal area. In a WSS site it can be found under Site Settings/Site administration/View Site Usage data. I'm fairly sure now that it is not available through the admin pages of a Sharepoint Portal.
However, if you remove the last part of the url of a portal site and replace it with _layouts/1033/usagedetails.aspx you will find the statistics. (ie for www.myportal.com/default.aspx you can view the statistics at www.myportal.com/_layouts/1033/usagedetails.aspx ). Please note that 1033 may vary depending on the language version of your sharepoint installation.
This not only works for statistics, but for every admin page of a wss site. This is actually obvious if you realize that Sharepoint Portal Server is built on top off WSS.
To keep up with all the end of year top lists of things, I thought to share the things I dislike the most about SharePoint.
Bear in mind though that I do like SharePoint a lot, so I will probably also be posting a list of things I like most as well in the near future. Remember this is my personal list, so if you've got solutions to my issues or if've you're more annoyed about other things in sps please let me know.
- Visibility of options you can't use. A lot of users I know complain about the fact that they can often go very far in the Sharepoint system only to be dissapointed when they find out they haven't got enough permissions. According to Microsoft, this is by design.
- Very loosely coupled listings. In Sharepoint you can have listings that refer to a for instance. Moving, renaming or deleting the document result in a broken link.
- Customizing the look and feel of Sharepoint can be a pain in the ...If you go beyond the stylesheet changes (and there are a lot of styles!) you find yourself struggling with CAML, javascript and Frontpage (for crying out loud!). Not an easy job in my opinion. And if you want to make a general change to already existing pages and sites you can also run into problems.
- Unclear navigation. This is another thing I see users struggling with, The quick menu navigation is context sensitive so it changes depending on where you are. It also gives you no option to go directly to a node that is on the same branch (what is the word I'm looking for here?) This is very confusing for a lot of users. And it is not easily customizable either.
- A lot of the cool stuff requires Office 2003. The use of office 2003 gives users far greater experience then say office XP. However, this is not enough to convince clients to upgrade to Office 2003, so I find myself explaining a lot of times that a certain option is only available in Office 2003 (again the option is often visible in the portal regardsless of the ce version a client has, see issue 1)
- The page viewer webpart doesn't work well in folder view page viewer webpart allows you to show a file, folder or another webpage in a webpart window on the portal page. However, it has no option to set the deafult view when in folder view mode. So my users have to change the view from pictograms to details each time they visit the page (the pictogram view shows only part if the file names are long).
- Setting up Sharepoint as an extranet in a hosted environment. About half a year ago we started deploying some sites at a hosting party. The environment is quite complex with load balancers, proxies, apache webservers, firewalls etc. We are still not a stage where we feel we can comfortably use Sharepoint in this environment.
- Choosing new document from the document library toolbar. There is no option here to specify the type of file you wish to create.
- Lack of wizards. ln several places in Sharepoint the user has to provide details which he should have copied to the clipboard first (ie a url to a picture). it would have been much better to be able to browse for this information.
- Settings on doc library can not be set at subfolder level. Because of this users are forced to put related documents in separate libraries if they want to have different access levels.
I feel I have just started and have many more such as missing workflow, limited document management and more. I hope some of the issues mentioned here help you in your projects. Some of these issues I feel are also changes to create some custom solutions (anybody interested?).
My current client has decided to convert their component framework from VB.NET to C#. The main reason being that they want to have other parties to build upon their framework and most of the parties they work with code in C#.
Now I don't want to start a new session again about what language is better, cause I haven't made up my mind yet. What I do know however that event though we use a converter tool, I still spend practically all day today getting the damn thing to compile.
According to the converter tool it was able to convert 97.5%. But I must have gone through hundreds of task list entries today. What I do like about C# already is that is shows how much VB does behind the scenes. I suddenly noticed unused variables, unreachable code, variables that were never assigned and more.
And for some reason we are not allowed to use the Microsoft.VisualBasic dll any more, which resulted in rewriting a lot of collections, trims, rights, redim statement etc.
So that's one down, 25 to follow woohoo.