What to do When User Profiles Don't Have Email Addresses

Today, at a customer site, I addressed a problem that annoyed users more than usual. It seems that they can't sign up for alerts or assign each other tasks, and they get an error screen that offers to fix the problem, but leads to a dead end. I evaluated it, and created this write-up:Among the many pieces of information collected and presented by SharePoint, some of this information comes directly out of Active Directory. AD was always intended to be a directory first, a central repository for information about users, phone numbers, email, etc. I’ve seen phone systems that tap directly into AD, for example. But most places I’ve been, AD is simply...

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So you want to be a farmer

My two largest customers suddenly both decided they wanted to stop playing around with a test MOSS server, and put SharePoint into production. So all week I've been building and configuring small SharePoint farms. I ran into a real headache today, which I'll discuss below.First, here are the two deployments:SharePoint Farm with No Load Balancing:This solution means you have a single web front-end server, but multiple servers in the farm, mostly for...

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Convert template title to internal name

My subsite creation webpart lets the user choose from a list of allowable site templates. Of course, SPSiteCollections.Add() wants the internal template name, like "STS#0" for a team site template, and blog only knows what for a custom site template. My users don't like this much; they want to see "Kewl new subsite template" in the dropdown selection, so he agrees. So here's how you convert the template title to the internal name:// We want to create the site using a pre-defined site template.// People refer to site templates by using the public template name,// but SharePoint refers to them by using the internal template name.// Find the internal...

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How to change the SharePoint logo on every page

Our new SharePoint 2007 site is up and running. Over 1,000 pages, each with our customized logo in the upper left hand corner. Uh-oh, it worked fine on the test server, but not on the production server. That's because every page was created from some nifty template which points to the test server to look for the logo, and the test server is no longer available. Not only does it look bad, but for reasons known only to the various SharePoint gods, you can't switch a document library to Explorer View until SharePoint has finally decided that the logo can't be found. This takes about 20 seconds. The natives were restless, and the high chieftan announced...

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