3

I have worked with Sharepoint 2007, and as a developer, it was a nightmare. I left my internship after 1 month because of this technology.

I thought that all developers would think similarly to me, but this question has taught me differently. It seems possible for a developer to say "I love Sharepoint". Perhaps they've fallen into madness.

I'm not asking for information about Sharepoint which could easily be found in books, but instead I want to know what war stories or personal anecdotes do you have about Sharepoint 2007 development?

Perhaps format your responses this way:

Problem : Problem to solve which "should" be easy to do but isn't.

Solution : Solution or nasty tricks to know to resolve the problem.

Community
  • 1
  • 1
Nicolas Dorier
  • 7,383
  • 11
  • 58
  • 71
  • Which version of Sharepoint are you referring to - things got a lot better between 2003 and 2007 (though there is certainly still room for improvement!) – Richard Ev May 08 '09 at 09:10
  • 1
    I've worked with sharepoint 2007, I can't imagine how things could be worse. – Nicolas Dorier May 08 '09 at 09:15
  • Ho, someone voted to close, is this a duplicate question ? – Nicolas Dorier May 08 '09 at 09:18
  • The technology itself is good, but in a lot of cases it gets configured and managed by people who don't really know what they are doing - fine for a prototype, but then the whole company wants access to it... That said, there are a lot of areas where little tricks are helpful - SharePoint is a very flexible platform, so this is way too broad a topic to work in this format. – Tom Clarkson May 08 '09 at 09:47
  • This is similar (but not the same as) http://stackoverflow.com/questions/525968/regarding-moss-or-wss-3-0-what-parts-of-the-api-might-have-been-implemented-bett – Alex Angas May 08 '09 at 11:46

5 Answers5

4

Problem: "Join" data from multiple lists (especially with diferent fields) Solution: Lookup fields might help in few cases, but most of the time you have to join the list items programatically.

Sergiu
  • 129
  • 2
  • Yes I've hit this, and damn it sucks. Especially scaling the solution and having to implement your own caching. – Alex Angas May 08 '09 at 11:47
  • Depends on the lists, but the DataView Web Part joins and merges lists quite well... – Andy Burns May 08 '09 at 14:08
  • The DataView is composing the result of one or several lists into a big XML in memory. It's not a scalable solution anyway. – Sergiu May 11 '09 at 17:17
4

Here are a few basic but frustrating ones:

Problem: You can’t use the title of a wiki page as a lookup on another list.

Solution: Create a text field on the list which you manually complete with the same information and use that as the lookup.

Problem: Users with Office 2003 can’t edit a PDF document directly on the SharePoint site (not a misprint; Office 2007 is required to edit PDF documents on SharePoint).

Solution: Download the file, edit it locally then upload it over the original one.

Problem: It’s not possible to see the amount of data used by a site collection unless a quota has been applied.

Solution: Apply a quota template, even it’s just a very large one.

More than happy to be proven wrong on any of these!

Troy Hunt
  • 20,345
  • 13
  • 96
  • 151
2

It would probably take a couple encyclopedia sized books to answer this question. Here are just a couple off the top of my head.

Workflow:

Problem: After creating a workflow using SharePoint Designer, you want to copy or move the workflow to a different list.

Solution: Copy and paste the workflow's XML configuration files. Then find and replace all of the old list's GUIDs with the new list's GUIDs.

Searching with Enterprise Search SQL (ESSQL)

Problem: You can only query a field up to 64 characters.

Solution: Use CAML and query for items directly.

Kit Menke
  • 7,046
  • 1
  • 32
  • 54
1

Problem: You want to base a content type on another content type.

Solution: Specify an ID which is 200 hex characters long.

erikkallen
  • 33,800
  • 13
  • 85
  • 120
0

Problem: Edits to summary link list are lost between saving and publishing page.

Solution: Add dubplicate webpart and apply changes, delete original after publishing.

Problem: Users want to define unique permissions for lists, pages, etc but will also give each other full control

Solution Take away the permission and create a workflow to request a break of inheritance that runs as user with full control

The list will go on and on.. Check out my questions if you feel knowledgable about sharepoint..

Also I can be considered one to love sharepoint, but purely the concept. It seems that a "soft" implementation of such a large application was desitined for trouble.

RyanS
  • 3,964
  • 3
  • 23
  • 37