¨What doesn’t come out of the box?¨

The length of the answer depends on the circumstances but, when talking about optional extras, it seems that plenty of people don’t know about Codeplex. Codeplex is Microsoft’s Open Source Projects hosting site, where solutions are posted that typically provide enhancements to products at no extra cost. And SharePoint has a few friends there.

Go check out Codeplex and do a search on SharePoint if you are curious about the types of extras available. Here are 5 for starters:

Projects listed on CodePlex but not yet released include: Community Kit (for building community-driven portals) and Accessibility Kit (web site templates that follow W3C Web Content Accessibilty Guidelines 1.0).

Filed under: SharePoint: Add-ons

Technorati tags: SharePoint 2007; MOSS 2007

I’ve never been hit by a runtime error before. At least, not one that couldn’t be persuaded to go away with the all the usual tricks (‘refresh’ ‘iisreset’ ‘reboot’…) This time, the error was persistent, meaning I had to actually find out what was going wrong. A few server configuration issues cropped up (this is a hosted server and the Windows installation was completed by someone else). But 3 SharePoint installations later and I still had a runtime error. Time to find out specifically what the problem was.

Interestingly, a search on the web showed that more than a few people get stuck on the first hurdle – decyphering the initial message. If you look at the image above, you’ll notice it doesn’t actually tell you anything about the error. It just tells you to amend your web.config file so that the error message can be displayed.

To do that, you need to locate the correct web.config file. SharePoint is installed within web applications. Each web application is identified by a port number. The default is port 80. When you type in http://servername you are usually accessing the server through port 80. Any other port will be need to be shown as a colon, e.g. http://servername:11111 is accessing the server through port 11111 (ports can also be assigned to names, but this is not a lecture on ports or web apps).

To locate the correct web.config file, navigate to the Inetpub directory on the file system. Go to wwwroot – wss – VirtualDirectories. Beneath VirtualDirectories, there is one folder per port number. And within each of those folders is the web.config file for the corresponding web application. The image below shows the web.config file selected for port 80. The other two ports listed are for the SharePoint Shared Services Provider and Central Administration

Right-click on web.config and select Edit (or choose to Open With: Notepad). You need to locate the system.web section. It’s usually located just under half-way down the file. There you will find the customErrors tag. You need to change its mode to either “RemoteOnly” to view on the local server or “Off” to view across the network. In the example below, the web.config has been modified to view error messages on the local server.

Save the web.config. Now try to access SharePoint again. In my case, the following error message appeared.

A bit more delving and it appears the hosting provider (this is a hosted SharePoint server) has configured overrides at a higher level than the web application to prevent changes to security settings. SharePoint needs to amend those security settings in order to work = stalemate. I’m now in discussions with the hosting provider to see if we can get SharePoint running or not…

Technorati tags: SharePoint; MOSS 2007

The RSS feed will be displayed in the browser, like the screenshot below:

The RSS feed is not designed to be read direct inside the browser like this. Instead, you should add the RSS Viewer web part (it is one of the default web parts available ‘out of the box’ with SharePoint) to a page and then modify the web part to include the URL to the RSS feed. The easiest way to do this is to copy the URL from the browser window (you can see it in the screenshot above) and then paste it into the URL box for the web part (as shown in the screenshot below):

In this example, the RSS Viewer web part has been configured with the RSS feed for the Calendar list within the team site. As soon as somebody creates or updates an entry in the calendar, the RSS Viewer web part will be updated and display the title of the new entry.

RSS feed is a geeky phrase for what is simply a news feed. If you want to keep track of what’s going on in a given list or library, then subscribing to a news feed means you will automatically receive the updates when they are published, rather than having to go and keep checking on the list to see if there are any changes. (I always rename the RSS Viewer web part with a friendlier update – in this example, I would use ‘Calendar updates’) You can see the RSS Viewer on display in the screenshot below. A list item – Management meeting – has been expanded to show more details:

If you are having problems with getting the RSS Viewer web part to display on your page, specifically you are receiving the message ‘The RSS webpart does not support authenticated feeds’, you need to change your authentication provider settings from NTLM to Kerberos. To do this, go to SharePoint Central Administration and click on the Application Management tab. Within the list of options, click on Authentication Providers. Click on Default (should be the only one listed if you are an ‘out of the box’ set-up). Under IIS Authentication Settings, the checkbox for Integrated Windows authentication should be selected. Change the radio button selection from NTLM to Negotiate (Kerberos). Click Save. If you go and refresh the page containing the RSS Viewer web part, the feed should now be displayed, i.e. it worked on my machine If it doesn’t work, chances are you need to change the account being used for your application pool settings.

RSS feeds share similarities with another SharePoint feature – Aerts. For an explanation of the similarities and differences, please check out a previous blog post: SharePoint and RSS versus Alerts

Technorati tags: SharePoint, SharePoint 2007, MOSS 2007