Name your Managed Paths wisely

When designing your SharePoint architecture you should consider the names of the Managed Paths. SharePoint cannot create a library or list that has the same name as one of the Managed Paths. This means that if you have 'Projects' as a Managed Path, users cannot create a library or list called 'Projects'. If someone tries that the following error occurs:

[Name] cannot be used as a site name. Site names cannot contain certain reserved words and cannot begin with an underscore. Please enter a different name

An error like in the screenshot below appears. It doesn't matter whether you use an explicit inclusion or a wildcard inclusion

My advise is to name your Managed Paths shortly, like: 'proj' instead of 'projects', 'loc' instead of 'locations', 'arch' instead of 'archive' etc... You get the idea ;)

Send an Alert based on a SharePoint View

SharePoint can send email notifications to users when content in their SharePoint library changes. In SharePoint terms these email notifications are called ‘Alerts’. Using the ‘Alert me’ button any user can sign up for the email notifications. What most users don’t know is that you can also set an alert based on a SharePoint view, so you will not get updates of documents that you are not interested in. To achieve this someone with sufficient permissions should take a few steps.

In order to create an alert based on a view you need to create a view with a filter.

Step 1 - Create a view with a filter

Step 2 - Create an alert

You can now receive alerts based on the SharePoint view!

SharePoint 2013 eDiscovery

Today I investigated the eDiscovery functionality in SharePoint 2013. With eDiscovery users are able to gather information from different sources like mailboxes and SharePoint sites and access that information from their own eDiscovery site, which will be called a 'Case'. In the real world the eDiscovery functonality can be used by lawyers or litigators. They are able to quickly discover information about a particular client or project. With eDiscovery in SharePoint 2013 they are also able to freeze the information that has been 'discovered'. They can do this with the In-Place Hold feature. When these holds are placed on documents SharePoint actually freezes the documents. Modifications to these documents will be preserved by SharePoint.

Increase thumbnail size in SharePoint 2010 Picture Libraries

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This week I created a huge image library for a customer in the fashion industry. One of the functional requirements was to quickly check and locate images. The end users are used to the Extra large icons view in Windows Explorer. A SharePoint picture library, by default, shows much smaller icons when navigating through the library. I found out how to change the default thumbnail size for a SharePoint picture library.

The default thumbnail size in a SharePoint picture library is 160px (width). For a better user experience you can increase the thumbnail size, let's say to 240px width. To do this follow the steps below.

1. Go to the FEATURES folder, and then to PictureLibrary --> PicLib

On the SharePoint WFE, go to \Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\FEATURES\PictureLibrary\PicLib.

2. Open the schema file

3. Set the ThumbnailSize to 240. (it’s in one of the first lines).

4. Reset IIS


The new thumbnail size will now be applied to every new picture library!