For the official event site with Session, Speaker and Sponsor information – go HERE.

For the Registration site – go HERE. 

• We’ve got some great returning speakers and some exciting new presenters
• We’ve got 8 concurrent sessions planned, including a 101 (Intro to SharePoint) track, Development, IT Pro/Admin, Information Worker track and a Hands-on Lab. 
• Good food, great networking, T-shirts, bags and other fun swag and give-aways

We’ve got 600 tickets open for the event. At a minimum we’re hoping for more than the 500 (sold out) registrations we had at the last event. I’m hoping we sell out again.

Sign up, tell your friends and co-workers and start figuring out your schedule for the day!

(yea yea, I’m slow.  But hey, I’ve been busy…)

A big Thank You goes out to Microsoft and the SharePoint community for another year being recognized as a Microsoft SharePoint MVP.  I am honored and humbled to be recognize in such a rich community filled with great speakers, authors, forum participants, consultants, vendors, users, and customers.

I don’t want to say that the honor is bitter-sweet, but while I am very excited, it does make one stop and think about all the people that make up our community: both those that are recognized and those that should be.  The SharePoint community wouldn’t be what it is without everyone that participates and contributes on a regular basis. It’s risky to name a few because there are so many, but a few I want to mention are:  Raymond Mitchell (@iwkid), Sarah Haase (@sarahhaase) and Mark Rackley (@mrackley). 

So, what do we have to look forward to this year?

• Lots of ongoing user groups, both locally and online
• Our local group is the Minnesota SharePoint User Group (MNSPUG)
• More SharePoint Saturday and mini-conference events
• We are planning 2 this year in Minnesota (Twin Cities) starting with the first on April 14th. Last fall we had over 400 people in attendance!
• SharePoint Conference 2012 !!
• Likely with the first tidbits about vNext!
• Lots of other conferences and summits
• More SharePoint books on all kinds of topics
• We’ve got one coming in March… another post coming on that

Another fun year ahead in the SharePoint world – I hope to visit with lots of you throughout the year.  Now, keep an eye on the SharePoint Saturday Twin Cities site.  Registration will be opening soon!

There is a few dollars per user per month difference, but the key difference is that Plan E users need to purchase an annual subscription while the Plan B (Small Business) users can do a monthly subscription.  Pretty cool. 

• Plan E will pay $12/user/month – annual subscription
• Plan P will pay $15/user/month – monthly subscription

These services also enable access to the Office Web Apps as well, so they can access the web versions of the applications without needing to load the client app, or if they are on another machine view and edit documents without the client apps at all. 

For more information, check out this page:
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/buy-office-professional-plus.aspx#fbid=qv4rqlTfnei

More good news for small business owners if you ask me. 

The two items I was most excited about during the keynote were:

1. There will be a SharePoint Conference 2012. 
   This one will likely coincide with content about SharePoint vNext.  Odds are good that we’ll be going back to the 2009 type of content that is more features, features, features about the new platform. 
   Set your calendar: November 12-15, 2012 in Las Vegas, NV
2. BDC is coming to Office 365 and SharePoint Online – soon. 
   By soon they mean by the end of the year.  Those of us that have Office 365 accounts have already been notified that there will be system updates happening between Oct 20th and the end of November. 
   This is one of the really exciting things about Office 365, that we can (hopefully) expect more frequent updates to features…
   Now we need to see what the details of this are and how we can extend our SharePoint Online capabilities. 

So, a lot to look forward to. 

If you’re interested in following more SharePoint people on Twitter, Raymond put together a list of all SPC11 speakers, their web sites and Twitter handles if they were available.  

If I can find the time, I’ll do some follow-up on the three sessions I enjoyed:

• SPC289  Visio Services – Creating No-code Visio Services Dashboards using Office 365 by Christopher Hopkins and Krishna Mamidipaka
• SPC290 The City of SharePoint: What SharePoint Planners Can Learn From City Planning by Craig Roth (Gartner)
• SPC393 Step-by-Step: Building Search-Driven Applications that Matter by Scot Hillier

We’ve got 25 speakers giving 27 sessions in 7 tracks through out the day.  This includes two new tracks that we’re excited about.  We have a SharePoint 101 track featuring several national speakers as well as a Hands-on Lab track being managed by Mindsharp.  Be sure to come and visit all of the sponsors that make the event possible. 

I’ll be kicking off the SharePoint 101 track with a “What is this thing called ‘SharePoint’” session that’s been described as a SharePoint session you could send your mom to.     (and one attendee did)

Check out the schedule and tell us which track you’re likely to attend most of the day. 

Also, check out GuideBook as an app for your iPhone or Android device or m.guidebookapp.com on other devices as we’ll soon have our event information available there as a tool to use during the event. 

Register Now!

Hopefully they’ll get information about the new location, parking, etc. on the MNSPUG site soon. 

SharePoint Saturday Columbus (OH) was held a few weeks back on August 20th.  The organizers did a wonderful job organizing the event and pulling everything together at a nice venue and pulled together about  130 or so attendees. 

I presented my Lists: Used, Abused and Underappreciated session in the first time slot of the day, had decent attendance (25 or so) and fantastic participation throughout the session.

If you weren’t able to stick around until the last timeslot of the day, Jennifer Mason did a session on simple dashboards which was an excellent follow-up to the content introduced in my session.  Check her slides out – HERE.  

My apologies for the delay in getting the slides out there – I had a slight detour on my way home and was off the grid for 5 days or so – only now getting back up to speed.  My slides can be found on SlideShare – HERE. 

Please let me know if you have any questions!

Beware of using the ‘Share Site’ or ‘Share this site’ links in Office 365 – SharePoint Online without knowing exactly what it is doing: you are potentially granting users access to more content than you intend to. 

The longer explanation:

In my opinion, security is one of the most confusing things in SharePoint for users to manage.  This is both because the flexibility of its design leads to a confusing implementation and because most users aren’t properly trained on how SharePoint security works (yes, this should be handled through a governance policy). 

Because of this, a number of issues usually arise: users don’t have enough access or users have too much access.  Just this weekend I was chatting with someone that uses SharePoint in their organization and she described a conversation with their SharePoint contact who was giving her access to a site – or so she thought.  Typical, irritating to users and something that needs to be handled better in order to successfully accomplish user adoption.  

The flip side of that problem is giving users too much access – more access than you are intending them to have.  Sometimes this isn’t that big of a deal, but many times it can be a serious issue with competing clients seeing each other’s content, etc. There are many examples of how this could turn out badly.    

Well, in SharePoint Online, as part of Office 365, Microsoft has added a nice and easy way to grant users access to SharePoint by way of the ‘Share this site’ link.   Unfortunately, while this is a very easy way to grant users access, it will in many cases grant too much access unintentionally – not because it doesn’t work properly, but because it isn’t doing what most users will expect it to do.

First, a quick primer on SharePoint security:

• SharePoint has a number of containers and entities, all of which can have security attached to them:  Site collections, sub sites, lists or libraries, folders (I’m not touching this topic in this article) and items.   
• Security can be assigned directly to these containers and items by adding a user and defining the permissions they have.  Users can also be granted access through an Active Directory security group or a SharePoint security group. 
• By default, security in SharePoint is inherited.  When you have security on a site collection and create a sub site, you can tell SharePoint to have the sub site inherit the permissions of the parent site collection.  People and groups will have the same permissions to view, add and update on the sub site content as they did on the site collection. 

There are lots of details to work through if you want to dig in, but those are the basics.  Now to the specific problem scenario. 

I have a SharePoint Online site collection and I want to create an area where I can collaborate with people outside my organization on a project.  To me, this translates into a sub site (or even better a site collection if possible) because I can isolate security at a whole site level, I can have a landing page for users, I can add additional lists later without having to change security, etc. So, I create my sub site. 

By default, my site has a document library which is all I really need for starters.  Now, I want to grant my external users access to the site – here comes the potential issue.  SharePoint Online has the ‘Share this site’ link right on the default page.  You can get to the same functionality by going through the Site Actions menu and selecting ‘Share Site’.  Both are shown below.

Either of these links will open up the following form:

Herein lies the potential for a security issue.  Now, the form does some nice things.  It allows you to add users to groups and then send them an email that will alert the user to the fact that they now have access and provides them a link to the site, list, etc. that you’ve just given them access to.  Where this form causes issues is by only allowing you to add them to the pre-existing ‘Visitors’ or ‘Members’ SharePoint security groups.  By adding users to the ‘Visitors’ or ‘Members’ groups, you are very likely granting them access to more than just the sub site. 

The Members and Visitors groups are default groups added to most SharePoint sites and many site administrators allow the groups to be inherited in sub sites and lists as they are created.  Members are generally able to read most everything and contribute to most lists and content.  Visitors can read, but not contribute.  If I were to add my external users that I want to collaborate with on one specific sub site to either of these groups, they’d have access to much of the rest of my site as well unless I had specifically gone and locked down my other content by breaking inheritance and/or removing the Member and Visitor groups from my other sites and content – which most administrators or users do not do. 

Suggested Approach:

The suggested approach to granting users access to only the sub site (or list) is to do it directly/explicitly rather than using the shortcut.

• On the sub site, select Site Actions –> Site Settings

  

• Select Site permissions

  

• In the ribbon, select ‘Stop Inheriting Permissions’

  

• Now, there are plenty of variations here, but we’re going to add a new group.  Even if I’m only adding a single person right now, it’s better to have a group in place in case you want to add others later with the same permissions.  The group will be visible throughout the site collection (trivia, but might actually be relevant if you have groups for partners, clients, etc. in the same site collection).  So select Create Group from the ribbon.

  

• For simplicity’s sake in this example, give the group a name and select the permission level you’d like for the group.  I’m using ‘Contribute’.  Click Create.
• From the Permissions page (where you land after creating or adding a group), click the name of your group.
• You are listed as a member by default, but now you can also add other users who will all take on the permissions of the group.  More importantly, they will only have permissions in the sub site, rather than in other areas of your site collection that you might not want them to have access to.  Click New –> Add Users

  

SharePoint security and permissions have many options.  Be aware of what you are doing when adding users, groups and managing their permissions in order to maintain the security you need and want. 

Playing with the Windows Phone (pre-Mango) tonight and was hoping to be able to display a SharePoint calendar in my phone’s calendar view.  You’d think if anyone could do it, it should be the MS device but no go. 

Here’s the official post/statement:  http://community.office365.com/en-us/w/sharepoint/527.aspx

Ok.  It’s lame, but Mango isn’t that far out, so we’ll just wait and see. 

To be fair, I haven’t found a way to get this to work on the iPhone/iPad either, though there are a number of 3rd party apps available to assist with access to SharePoint sites.  On the iPad, the screen is big enough to actually navigate to the calendar site itself, which is better than nothing, but I still would like the one-stop-shop available with Outlook. 

Bamboo got close at one point – it looks like a product called MashPoint actually allowed some functionality for ‘real’ SharePoint servers for 2007, but nothing is available for 2010 or the Office 365 solution (sandbox solution).    

If Mango can pull this off – major points to them.  It still won’t solve the problem of my wife wanting to access our family SharePoint calendar on O365 though… Her employer doesn’t allow browser access to O365 – #FAIL. 

The list is a custom list with a number of fields added – nothing fancy (yet). 

I open up SharePoint Designer from the list ribbon and select New form, enter a name and hit OK, only to receive the following error:

“Could not save the list changes to the server.”  This translates into “something happened and we don’t have any more details for you.  Virtually useless. 

There are a lot of posts and forum entries out there for this, many of which were resolved with things like cleaning out the recycle bin.  Not so in my case. 

Just for kicks, I wanted to see if the problem was on my end.  I opened up an Office 365 site I had easy access to and repeated the same process of opening a list, then jumping into SPD from there to add a new form and it worked flawlessly.  So, pointers back to something on the server-side. 

Back to the server.  Next, I tried editing the existing forms.  Normally I like to leave the existing stuff alone, but I was early enough in the process where it wouldn’t make a big difference for me to delete everything and start over if I messed anything up.  Anyhoo – I got another error message:

And clicked “Details”, which gave me the following:

“soap:ServerServer was unable to process request. —> Value does not fall within the expected range.”

This error was more helpful and turned up some better information.  I found the following forum post related to the latest error:
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/sharepoint2010customization/thread/aa093ec9-e491-4fdf-b233-a1ba3eba0f75

The URL for my web application was listed as:  “http://servername/”

The URL that I have been using to access the environment looks more like “http://servername.domain.company.com”.  Per the suggestion in the forum post, I added an alternate access mapping of the long name for an intranet zone, refreshed my browser, opened the list in SPD and was able to create a new form. 

Hopefully this post will help someone with the same issue find the resolution more quickly…