Assigning permissions the right way in SharePoint 2010

This week I'm attending a course on SharePoint administration and today we talked about permissions. I was very surprised when trainer did not mention the method I've been using for a while to "force" power users to assign permissions the right way. When I mentioned to him that I have a method he told me that in 13 years working with SharePoint this is the first time he heard about this method so I thought maybe I should blog about it and maybe other people will find it useful.

When assigning permissions in SharePoint arguably best way to doit is via SharePoint groups. The problem arises when you have to delegate the permission so "power" users (not administrators) start managing permissions and start dishing out explicit permissions and do a mix and match on site, library, folder and item level.

My method is really simple:

• You create all SharePoint groups you need in specific site
• You then set the person to manage permission as SharePoint group owner. This gives that user permission to add/remove users from that group and therefore assigning permissions in their site.
• If more than person is managing permissions, create a SharePoint group and add all "power" users to this group, let's call Access Administrators. 
• You can then set SharePoint group Access Administrators to be owner of SharePoint group they use for giving other users to their site
• Note you might need to give or publish a direct link to SharePoint users as typically power users will not have access to Site Action therefore will not be able to navigate to Security Settings to open groups they own. 

Example

Site: Finance

SharePoint Groups: 

Finance Access Administrators (FAA), owner SharePoint Administrator, Contribute 

Finance Visitors, owner FAA, Read

Finance Members, owner FAA, Contribute 

Office SharePoint Server Search crashing

I've had Office SharePoint Server Search service crash several times in the past couple of years. Normal service restart made it hang and crash completely. Service status got stuck in Stopping and there was no way to restart it.
.

A quick server reboot would bring things back to normal but apparently there is a quicker way to solve this problem:

You can kill the service using this command:

taskkill /F /IM mssearch.exe /T

 or you can open the task manager in the MOSS box and end 'mssearch.exe' process.

After you kill the service using any of the two methods above, make sure you start the service and in few minutes MOSS search will be fully functional.

Create a custom New Item form for SharePoint Custom Lists

You do not have to use the built in New Item form that you get when you want to add new item to a SharePoint list. You can create a specially formatted form for instance with fields grouped and various layouts. To achieve this you need to have SharePoint designer installed (free from Microsoft) and the how from below.

I had to do this four times now in the past couple of years or so and every time need to remind my self the steps. So here it is:

1. Create your custom list with all the columns you need.
2. Using SharePoint Designer open the site containing the custom list you want to create a new "New Item" form.
3. Browse to the custom list web part under Lists folder.

Enable anonymous access in SharePoint 2007

Done this about 10 months ago for another site and today gut stuck a bit wondering where is it so here it goes - a note!

Under central Administration go to Application Management and find the link to Application Providers under Application Security section.
Make sure you have the right Web Application selected at the top right dropdown list and click on the zone, tick Anonymous Access and save it.

Final part is to go to the site you want to enable anonymous access and open Modify All Site Settings. In there under Users and Permissions go to Advanced Permissions where under Settings you need to open Anonymous Access and set it up as required.

SharePoint 2007 error message

I got bombarded with emails and my phone started buzzing this morning with users complaining they can’t update docs on the intranet or upload new ones. Everyone was getting a very simple and “informative” message:
Error
Unable to complete this operation. Please contact your administrator.
It turned out to be the SQL (2005) Server was out of disk space (bloody log files!). Anyway, fixed easily by freeing some disk space but was really surprised by guys in Microsoft. How hard can it be to display a message “disk full” or similar?

Browser compatible InfoPath form linked to a web service

I had to create an InfoPath form to submit data to a SQL 2005 database and was surprised you can't submit to SQL directly if you run the form from the web browser. Instead you need to write a web service which will link InfoPath form and SQL database.

So I write a simple webservice and create the InfoPath form which I link to this service. Run the form from InfoPath to test it; submit data successfully and checked on the database that the web service done its bit. Published the form to MOSS 2007 so everything done... Not!

I had to:

• In the form options
  - under Compatibility tick "design a form template that can be opened in a browser or InfoPath and enter URL of the MOSS with InfoPath Form Services;
  - under Browser Choose to show toolbars and Submit command;
• In Tools / Data Connection convert the data connection and store it on the same MOSS (link type Relative to site collection);
• In Tools / Submit Options tick "Allow users to submit this form" and set it to send form data to a web service;
• Publish form to the SharePoint server.
• In the SharePoint library on the lib settings go to Advanced Settings and make sure that under Browser-enabled Documents that browser-enabled docs are displayed as a web page.

Now it's done. I think... It works anyway...

Can't submit data direct to SQL Server using browser-compatible InfoPath form

Apparently you need to write a web service that will accept the data on the SQL Server's behalf. Not happy!

SharePoint Portal Server 2007 lost the global navigation bar

I thought I might have to do a restore due to a corrupt database when the global navigation bar disappeared from all sites.

In the end the problem was fixed in no time at all after restarting WWW Publishing Service which incidentally was the first service I decided to restart.