I was asked by a customer how to change the title description for a SharePoint page (in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007). Not the title and description that appears within the page, but the title that appears at the top of the browser. See picture below:

The title that you see within the page (in this example it is ‘Collaboration Portal’) is the title for the site. To change this, you need to configure the site settings. Click on the Site Actions button and select Site Settings Modify All Settings. Within the Site Settings page, under the ‘Look and Feel’ column, select ‘Title, Description and Icon’ and you can change the site settings. See picture below:

The title you see at the top of the browser (in this example, it is ‘Home’ – default setting) is the title for the page. To change this, you need to configure the page settings. Click on the Site Actions button and select Edit Page. With the page in Edit mode, click on Page in the Page Editing Toolbar and choose Page Settings. See picture below:

When you have finished making your changes, click the ‘Publish’ button in the Page Editing Toolbar. You should now see the new page title at the top of the browser. See picture below: (I have changed ‘Home’ to ‘SharePoint 2007′)

p.s. if you are not sure what the Page Editing Toolbar looks like, see picture below: If it is not showing after you have clicked Site Actions Edit Page, click on Site Actions again and select’Display Editing Toolbar’.

Final note: This method works for changing the title for individual pages. If you want to have a standard page title for the entire site (e.g. the name of your intranet appears at the top of the browser on all pages), you either have to change each and every page within the site collection or modify the templates.

Technorati tags: SharePoint 2007; MOSS 2007

A quick post on how to modify the appearance of the QuickLaunch bar in SharePoint (WSS v3, SharePoint Server 2007)

One of the most common questions I am asked when demonstrating SharePoint to customers is how to modify the Quick Launch navigation bar. In particular, people want to remove the ‘View All Site Content’ option to prevent users from seeing the underlying site structure. See screenshot below:

If you wanted to remove ‘View All Site Content’ from all sites and pages, you would need to modify the underlying templates being used to build the navigation. But if you just want to remove the option from a single site or page, there is a quick and easy method using SharePoint Designer 2007.

1. Within the SharePoint site, click on the Site Actions button in the top-right corner of the page (see screenshot above).
2. Under Galleries, click on Master Pages (Master Pages are page templates that contain elements common to the site)
3. In the Master Pages Gallery, hover over the default.master page and click the arrow to display its Edit menu (see screenshot below)
4. Select Edit in Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer (SharePoint Dersigner will open with the default.master page displayed)
5. Click on the ‘View All Site Content’ placeholder. In the Tag Properties, under group Behaviour, select the ‘Visible’ property and change it from True to False (see screenshot below)
6. Click ‘Save’ to save the default.master page template.
7. Refresh the site in your browser and the Quick Launch navigation bar should no longer show the option to ‘View All Site Content’ (see screenshot below)

Naturally, if you are working with live deployments of SharePoint, make sure you test any changes and are happy with the results before applying them to the production environment.

[Update: 28 August 2007] Please check the Comments section for a simple alternative method that does not require SharePoint Designer (i.e. just Notepad will do). Many thanks to Ulrich for sharing.

Technorati tags: SharePoint, SharePoint 2007, MOSS 2007