Wednesday 21 February 2007

SharePoint 2007: Issues / problems found (and ideally their solutions)

This post will contain problems I have found during the implementation of SharePoint, and hopefully eventually, a solution / workaround.
  1. Permissions - Creating a hybird between unique and inherited permissions.
Let's say you have a parent site which has a Site Owners group. You want that members of the group Site Owners to have full rights to all child sites. So what you do is create a child site, which inherits permissions from the parent site. Now to assign unique permissions you edit the permissions, such that all the permissions are copied from the parent to the child and the child thus gets its unique permissions. Delete all groups (except Parent Site Owners) and create the groups necessary for the child site (Owners / Members / Visitors). Thus we have unique permissions for the child site, however Parent Site owners are still site owners within the child site.

The problems arises if you have removed ALL parent groups from the child site. Once you have created your child groups (Members / Owners / Visitors), you cannot add a parent group to the child groups because you get the error: "SharePoint Groups cannot contain other SharePoint Groups. Remove the SharePoint Group from the Users box and try again."

You you can solve this issue, re-doing all your permission settings and use the suggested solution above, however the ideal situation (at least in my head) is that you would be able to add the Parent Site Owners group into the Child Site Owners group.

Edit: You can add the Site Group of the parent directly. In People and Groups for the Child Site click New > Add Users > Search for Parent Group (e.g. Parent Site Owners), and once you have found the group select Give users permissions directly (Full Control).
  1. Document Library Management of Content Types and Column Ordering

From some testing I have performed, it seems that once you have enabled Management of Content Types (Advanced Settings) in a Document Library, you can no longer set the column ordering in settings of the document library. Once you disable management of content types (Advanced Settings), colum ordering re-appears. I am assuming that this is a bug.

To get around this issue, disable management of content types, and then re-enable it after you've set the column ordering. Your previous content types are retained.

Edit: This is not a bug! Its a feature :) You can actually set the column ordering for each content type. To set the ordering for each content type, you need to click on the content type and click on the Column Order link!

List Settings with Content Type Management disabled. You can see the Column Ordering.



Column Ordering is gone, once Management of Content Types is enabled.

And re-appears as Column Order in the settings of each individual content type ;)