While visiting with one of my customers this week I was asked for a tutorial on creating a date range filter for a Data View web part using SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint Designer 2010.  I decided the easiest way to demonstrate this task was to create a short web cast video.   Check out the video below:

A few days ago one of my customer’s reached out to me with a rather perplexing issue.  They have a custom list in SharePoint 2010 with a multiline textbox configured to append changes to existing text.  Whenever a user of the site tried to create or edit an entry in this list they would receive an access denied error. 

Since the user has access to other lists and content in the site it left me with a few possible options:

1. The list has unique permissions which is causing the access denied error.
2. A workflow task associated with the list is requiring a higher level of permission.
3. An event handler associated with the list is requiring a higher level of permission.

The customer responded that none of the above possibilities were true.  The permissions were being inherited, no workflows were associated, and they were not using event handlers.

I was still very confident that this was a simple permissions issue somewhere.  To enable the append changes to existing text option on an textbox you must first enable versioning on the list.   Is it possible that the default permission levels in the site collection were changed, or maybe they are using their own custom permission level?   A quick email and I receive my response.   Yes!   They had created a custom permission level and removed the view versions ability.   Once they added that ability back into their custom permission level the users were able to add and edit items in the list. 

There is an article available on TechNet that can be valuable when dealing with issues related to permission levels. The article lists out all of the default permission levels and their settings.  A quick review of this document can assist an administrator in determining if a site collection owner has made modifications to the out of the box permission levels.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc288074(v=office.14).aspx

One of the first questions IT organizations usually say after installing SharePoint is “now what?”.  The organization understands the business value of SharePoint and are excited to use it.  The problem is that they do not know where to begin with building out sites for their users.

To help kick start that process Microsoft has created a complete portfolio of free SharePoint templates that can be used with SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint Online.  This portfolio includes 30 templates covering all sorts of topics including project tracking, operations, management and finance, information management, human resource management, and healthcare.

To view or download these templates, hop on over to the Microsoft in Government web site.

While building out a SharePoint demo farm with SQL 2012 I ran into the following error when trying to view a PowerPivot spreadsheet:

Unable to refresh data for a data connection in the workbook

After a lot of digging around I realized that it was a pretty simple issue.  My farm includes a web front end (WFE), an applications server, and the SQL 2012 database server.  One step in configuring PowerPivot on the application server is to ensure that both version 4 and 5 of the MSOLAP provider is installed.  The one piece of information that isn’t mentioned is that you need to also install the MSOLAP providers on the web front ends if they also have Excel Services enabled.  Once the MSOLAP providers were installed on the WFE the error went away and the workbook functioned as expected.

Check out this TechNet article for information on installing the Analysis Services OLE DB Provider (MSOLAP) on SharePoint.

Like most administrative offices in most county governments throughout the United States, the Juvenile Justice agencies in San Diego County all run on paper—a million pieces of paper, all of which have to be created, copied, distributed, filed, and retrieved by hand. To help their employees work more efficiently and effectively, these agencies are replacing that paper with a digital library and workflow management solution based on Microsoft technologies. The result: attorneys glean better insights from their cases while spending less time reviewing them. Within the District Attorney’s Office, greater flexibility to assign cases boosts attorney productivity by 14 percent. Support staff productivity is up 50 percent. And the tangible return on investment, across the Juvenile Justice agencies, is expected to be more than 100 percent.

Read more about how San Diego County built their solution on SharePoint 2010.