One of the most common Actions used in SharePoint Designer custom workflows is “Send an Email.” This Action allows you to specify recipients, subject lines, and the email body with combinations of text and dynamic content.

The email design dialog box in SharePoint Designer (SPD) 2010 is a great improvement over the one in SPD 2007. Among other things, the text in the email body can now be formatted with font choices. Hyperlinks are easier to construct, and building dynamic subject lines that combine text and data is easier as well.

One desired feature that seems to have been left out, however, is the ability to send a blind carbon copy (BCC) to a recipient. There seems to be no BCC option in the email creation dialog box. If you have that need and didn’t know better, you might add a second Send an Email action to send a separate notification to that recipient. Luckily, there IS an easier way – it’s just not obvious.
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A problem was recently posted on one of our SharePoint Solutions Help Community Forums. The situation was that an individual wanted to “roll up” multiple discussion boards from multiple sub-sites; essentially pulling the content from different discussion board lists.

One solution is to upgrade to SharePoint 2013 and take advantage of all the new social features such as Communities. Another option is to buy a third-party web part such as this one. Neither of these may be possible in your organization.

In this post, I will present a solution that involves modifying the styles available for presentation within the Content Query Web Part.

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The ostensible purpose of the Calendar Overlay feature in SharePoint 2010 is to aggregate multiple calendars into one master, or roll-up calendar. The appointments in each calendar can display in an assigned color, allowing for a quick visual impression of which appointments belong on which sub-calendar.

In my previous blog post, I described how the SharePoint 2010 Calendar Overlay feature could be used to color-code individual appointments in a single calendar. The trick is to create views of types of appointments (based on perhaps a custom metadata column you might add to the Calendar). The Calendar Overlay can then be used to assign a color to each view. Then, each appointment in that view will have the assigned color.

This post shows another feature of Calendar Overlay: Showing items that are not on a calendar. In our example, the IT department has the default Team Site Calendar that they use for general items. In addition, they would like to include on this calendar the anticipated end date for their major projects, and the review date for the various contracts they have with vendors. This information is already captured in a Project List and a Contracts and Agreements Library. Both the Library and the List have a column for a date. Using these I can (a) create a view for each one that is a calendar, then (b) use Calendar Overlay to roll those dates up into a master Team calendar.

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One of the most common requests I received as a SharePoint administrator was to color-code Events. Users are accustomed to assigning colors to appointments in Outlook and other calendaring applications, so it’s natural to want that type visual organization in SharePoint as well. Unfortunately, in SharePoint 2007 and earlier, there was no built-in solution. It was such a common need that many administrators, developers, and power-users devised solutions using various types of code. These required the know-how to develop (or the know-how to research and try to adapt to your situation), and most end-users would not be comfortable with trying such a solution.

The good news is that SharePoint 2010 includes functionality that can be leveraged to achieve this effect, with no code needed. It may not be a completely obvious solution when working with a single Calendar, though. The secret lies in the use of the Calendar Overlay.

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The Content Query Web Part is a very handy tool in SharePoint Standard and SharePoint Enterprise. The web part has a number of uses. For one, it can allow you to create an aggregated list based on multiple lists or libraries, either from within a single site or from across a site collection, as we show in our course Introduction to SharePoint Server 2010. For another, it can also be used to display items from a single list or library on a different site within a site collection. For example, you might have a master Contact list on the top-level site in a site collection, but need to display a filtered version of that list on a sub site through the Content Query Web Part.

You can add the Content Query Web Part (often called CQWP for short) to a SharePoint page by going into Edit mode (Site Actions > Edit Page), then click the Insert tab and choose Web Part. Click the Content Rollup folder and select Content Query Web Part.

This blog post isn’t intended as a description of how to use the CQWP, but to point out a SharePoint site collection administration detail that sometimes causes a problem. That problem is that frequently a user will go to insert the CQWP and find that it’s missing. They are sure they are in the Standard or Enterprise edition of SharePoint (as opposed to Foundation), but the web part simply isn’t there. Why? And how do you make it available?
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In our Introduction to SharePoint Foundation / Server 2010 course, we briefly mention that SharePoint limits the total URL length of any location in a site: Depending on some variables, it can be up to 256 to 260 characters. (See http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff919564.aspx for a technical explanation.) In addition, you’ll run across a 255-character limit for URLs in lots of other places. For example, if you want to paste a link into an email, your email program may not accept URLs longer than 255 characters. In some SharePoint sites it can be surprisingly easy to hit that character limit. Some of the things that can eat up URL space are:

• Long names for lists or libraries
• Use of folders and subfolders
• Long names for documents or list items
• Multiple levels of subsites

In this post I’ll discuss how to help keep that length under control by smart management of lists and libraries.

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In the module on Meeting Workspaces in our Introduction to SharePoint 2010 – Using SharePoint Foundation 2010 class, we teach students that there are three ways to create a new Meeting Workspace:

• From any site, just like you would create any other site (Site Actions > New Site or View All Site Content > Create).
• From any Event on a SharePoint Calendar (check the box beside “Use a Meeting Workspace to organize attendees, agendas, documents, minutes, and other details for this event.”)
• From any Appointment or Meeting in Outlook (click on the “Meeting Workspace” button in the ribbon while editing or creating the Appointment or Meeting).

When I show students the Meeting Workspace button in Outlook, some students have seen it and some have never seen it. In Outlook 2007, the button was on the Meeting ribbon by default in the Attendees section, as you can see in this screenshot.

Unfortunately, for some unknown reason, the Outlook team decided to remove the Meeting Workspace button as a default in Outlook 2010.

However, it’s easy to add it if you want it. J Here are the steps:

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Hi, and welcome to my first blog post for SharePoint Solutions. I’m looking forward to meeting more of our students and clients in the coming weeks, but I thought I’d jump in and introduce myself through the blog. Today I want to talk about a basic topic that is nonetheless a little puzzling at first glance – the difference between the Blank Site template and the Team Site template in SharePoint 2010.

You might be saying to yourself, “Well, that’s obvious; the Blank Site is empty, while the Team Site has some features already built out of the box.” That’s true, but the difference goes a little deeper; it can be a significant factor in which template you choose when creating a site collection or subsite.

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Two years ago I wrote a blog post about How to Create a Detailed Custom Task Notification with a SharePoint Designer Workflow. That blog post provided step-by-step instructions and screenshots for doing this in SharePoint 2007. I received a lot of questions asking for more information explaining the steps. Back in December I finally decided to record a video of showing how to do this same thing in SharePoint 2010. However, I got tied up with other work and just now realized that I had never posted that video here on the blog. Oh well, better late than never, I guess.

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Wow! I never expected to write so many posts about Column Validation. Yet, here I am with the 5th post in what has become a series about Column Validation. Just to recap, here are the links to my previous posts on Column Validation:

•  How to Validate a Due Date in a SharePoint 2010 List
•  How to Validate Strict Text Formats in SharePoint 2010
•  How to Validate an Email Address Using Column Validation in SharePoint 2010
• How to Use ‘OR’ Type Options in SharePoint 2010 Column Validation

Also, if you would like to learn more about these techniques, with live demonstration and discussion, I’ll be speaking on Column Validation at July. 2012 meeting of the Federal SharePoint User’s Group (FEDSPUG) in Washington, DC. Come on out, I would love to meet you!

The Problem

A reader asked, “I have form that does not require the ‘phone’ to be filled in. However I want to validate the entry if/when it is filled in. Is there a way to add string at end of the phone validation formula to accept a ‘null’ value to avoid validation error?” Yes, this is possible, and in this post I’ll show you how to do it.

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