SharePoint Zen

New: UploadZen is now HTML5-based

ROXORITY — Sun, 12 May 2013 04:04:05 +0000

Until yesterday, UploadZen's Web Uploader (and File Upload Web Part for SharePoint) required either the Flash or the Silverlight browser plugins at the client side to support selection of multiple files for document uploads.

No longer!

In all modern browsers (except, at the time of this writing, Internet Explorer) this SharePoint Solution Package now utilizes HTML5 features for selecting multiple files if the browser supports them...

Using Filter Web Parts to search a SharePoint List / Library View's entire directory hierarchy (incl. sub-folders)

ROXORITY — Fri, 10 May 2013 05:40:30 +0000

So, this is a fairly common use-case and requirement that FilterZen easily delivers a workable solution for. (I think we have this topic covered in a forum thread or two, but a quick "authorative" blog post on this can't hurt.)

Here's your situation:

you have a SharePoint List View (or Library View) with folders shown. Easy, simple, your users know how to work with that.
you have it connected to a Filter Web Part so that users can easily "search" locally within that List View, without needing SharePoint's Search UI.
your users appreciate the display of folders, but also would like to be able to "search in all folders" when they begin specifying filter criteria.

By default, this won't happen... here's how to make it happen.

How to recover "missing" SharePoint ribbon/tool-bar action commands

ROXORITY — Tue, 07 May 2013 17:35:06 +0000

All three products, ExportZen, PrintZen and UploadZen integrate themselves into your SharePoint Lists and Libraries by means of custom tool-bar items (SharePoint pre-2010) and/or Ribbon actions (SharePoint 2010 and newer). After a fresh from-scratch installation, they will automatically provide a readily usable default Action in normal out-of-box List/Library View pages, but sometimes as time proceeds and customizations are performed "all over the place", all of a sudden "our ribbon/toolbar action is no longer showing up!"

Here are "three easy steps" to investigate such an incident.

Rare errors #1: "Root element is missing"

ROXORITY — Mon, 06 May 2013 06:24:22 +0000

Our license files are sent out as XML text files. Under very rare circumstances, you may get the following error message when attempting to apply your license file: System.Xml.XmlException: Root element is missing. Here's how to work around this uncommon issue.

FilterZen how-tos: live-filter as-you-type; embed filters under Column headers

ROXORITY — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 07:04:59 +0000

The newest FilterZen build now lets you easily implement two convenient and popular use-cases for SharePoint List Filtering:

"Live" List filtering as-you-type
Embed filtering controls directly underneath your List View's Column headers

Using User Profile Property Values for List Filtering in SharePoint

ROXORITY — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 15:41:41 +0000

Every other month or so, we receive an enquiry like the following:

Is it possible to filter (using FilterZen) a standard Document Library by a specific user profile field such as Department, where Department is also a field in the List / Library? I cannot see a way of doing it like the out-of-the-box Current User Filter Web Part.

Can do! With a few tweaks...

Manual installation / deployment of our SharePoint WSP Solution Packages

ROXORITY — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 19:16:45 +0000

All our Web Parts and SharePoint solutions come with a deploy.exe Windows-based installation+deployment wizard to achieve streamlined installation and deployment. This wizard works smoothly and pleasantly for 99% of users.

Except when it doesn't. With a growing user base, a tiny minority of edge-case users or misconfigurations that prevent the wizard from completing are to be expected, and this article applies only to them.

SharePoint "Unknown Error": How to Show All the Details

ROXORITY — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 09:40:51 +0000

If you encounter an Unknown Error or "An unexpected error has occurred." in your SharePoint that you suspect to be caused by roxority software (this has become exceptionally rare fortunately as our software has grown ever more stable over the last few years), then we need you to turn on Detailed Error Messages in your SharePoint environment. This is easy to do and absolutely non-dangerous. Here's how...

PeopleZen Data Field Templates: one new feature, many new possibilities

ROXORITY — Sun, 20 Feb 2011 09:53:10 +0000

Lately we received a number of feature requests that could all be addressed by a single feature we've been meaning to add for quite some time, so we finally implemented it for the 1.9 release of PeopleZen: Customizable Data Field Templates.

Simply put, this gives you an easy tool that lets you fully redefine how PeopleZen displays or transforms certain user information, which is typically returned in rather raw form by your Data Source and may not be ready for human consumption as is.

SharePoint 2010 List View AJAX Options and Filter Web Parts

ROXORITY — Sat, 25 Dec 2010 17:51:10 +0000

A FilterZen user reported the following issue:

I have tried to set up the Filter Web Part with an Issue List on SharePoint Server 2010 and everything seemed to work flawlessly except the List 'unfilters' every time it is auto-refreshed.

I have tried putting the filters in a Web Part on the List and applying it to a List in a Web Part where AJAX Options Asyncronous Refresh is enabled with the same result: the List unfilters every time it is auto-refreshed.

The strange thing is that it seems to work OK when AJAX Options Manual Refresh is applied to a List in a webpart?!

Sync User Profiles' Picture URL with Active Directory images (thumbnailPhoto / jpegPhoto)

ROXORITY — Sat, 09 Oct 2010 20:47:40 +0000

As you know, the SharePoint 2010 User Profile synchronization features sync up all your people data as stored in Active Directory (or other LDAP service) — except your profile pictures, if your AD uses the jpegPhoto or thumbnailPhoto properties for those.

The main reason for this is quite simply that the PictureURL property is a URL field (storing only the HTTP address pointing to a picture file), whereas AD stores the entire image itself as a "binary large object" (blob). So any synchronization will involve downloading the pictures stored in AD, putting them somewhere HTTP-accessible, and then setting the PictureURL user profile property to the address of this copied image file.

We wanted a sync-all, batch solution — you launch it and it just runs — so we wrote a free tool to help you with this, greatly assisted (thanks again, Robert! :) by a User Profiles Web Part user who had a vested interest in such a tool.

We packaged this up with PeopleZen but you won't even need a license to keep using this free sync tool indefinitely. If you need the source code for more sophisticated customizations, simply contact us and we'll send it to you.

Print-Friendly SharePoint Calendar / List Views & User Profiles Web Parts

ROXORITY — Sat, 25 Sep 2010 16:33:39 +0000

We recently launched PrintZen, which lets you offer printer-friendly Views of SharePoint List, Calendar and other Web Parts. This article shows you how to integrate PrintZen with PeopleZen to offer print views for your User Profile Web Parts. Once you have both solution packages installed in your SharePoint environment — it's really easy.

Augment Search Result Pages with Filtered Document Library / List Views

ROXORITY — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 01:35:00 +0000

While SharePoint's Search features present a great deal of configurability and customizability, it sometimes cannot be tweaked enough to support every need. We received the following request:

We have a WSS 3.0 store of documents that we would like to share. They are stored as list items and there are a number of different columns which help describe the documents. Some are quite straightforward, such as document name, document description, division and subdivision within the organisation that created the document. The one that is causing problems is a column called keywords. It takes its values from another list (sample values might be: climate change, air quality, litter prevention, noise pollution control). Since a document might be relevant to a number of areas, multiple keywords can be selected. I found that once multiple selections were allowed, a search scope allowing the user to narrow their search by keyword just wouldn't work. I would like to allow a user to narrow their search by organisational division, which I have done, and I'd like to be able to give them good functionality to filter the results that are returned. The filtering wouldn't just be limited to the keywords; it would also allow users to filter by date and author.

Lost Web Part Connections on SharePoint 2010 List View Pages (Windows 7)

ROXORITY — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 00:53:34 +0000

This is just a short notice on what has to be one of the most curious little bugs we have come across in SharePoint 2010 (installed under Windows 7) so far...

Ad-hoc View Customization in the User Profiles Web Part

ROXORITY — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 07:00:48 +0000

Just a quick note that PeopleZen, the SharePoint User Profiles Web Part now supports new ad-hoc view customization features.