Prevent !New tag from Appearing

Both Windows SharePoint Services and SharePoint Portal Server 2003 come bundled with a multitude of features. Many of these features need a bit of tweaking to get them to work in a particular situation. One of such features is the appearance of the “!New” tag.

The “!New” tag appears in all SharePoint lists. This tag gets appended to every new list item.



This feature really becomes a nuisance if, for example, you were importing a number of documents from a file share to a SharePoint document library. In this case, all documents will now be appended with a “!New” tag. Even though these documents are newly imported in the document library, their origination dates will show them to be generated a lot earlier than that. This could become very confusing to the end users.

Fortunately, there is a way to eliminate the appearance of the “!New” tag by simply changing the number of days the “!New” icon will appear beside a list item to Zero. The stsadm.exe utility is used to accomplish this task.

Navigate to stsadm’s location:
cd /d %program files%\common files\microsoft shared\web server extensions\60\bin

The “setproperty” command will be used to accomplish our task as follows:
stsadm.exe –o setproperty –pn days-to-show-new-icon –pv [number of days] –url [Virtual server address]

For example, use the following syntax to prevent the new tag from appearing:
stsadm.exe –o setproperty –pn days-to-show-new-icon –pv 0 –url http://<server name>

SharePoint integration with SAP

A while back, I was looking into the SAP’s Portal offering and trying to understand how it differs from SharePoint.  In my investigation, I found the following to be the best practice:

• SAP R/3 Power users can use SAP GUI, or SAP Enterprise Portal, to interact with SAP apps


• Casual SAP users should use SharePoint to consume relevant SAP info


• Example:


• Using a web part to display a user's personnel information from SAP in a web part


• View open purchase orders in a web part

 

• Single Sign-On would be the solution to interface SharePoint with SAP apps


• User signs on to their windows account, which is tied to their SAP account credentials, and gets instant access to all SAP apps


• Personalized access to views of the user's own data

SPS Areas vs. WSS Sites

The following question comes up a lot in my interaction with our training participants:  What are some of the advantages of using a WSS site vs. a sub-site on the Portal?

Here are my thoughts on it:
All if not most collaboration functionality of WSS is available in the Portal (since WSS is the root product of the Portal).

However, few things should be considered when deciding whether to use Areas or Sites for your collaboration:

1. It is recommended to use only One Portal per company.  If a company needs their disparate locations to be able to collaborate on sites locally, it would be to their advantage to generate new sites locally (using WSS)


2. All WSS sites from many geographical locations could be aggregated under one Portal umbrella


3. WSS Sites can be used to create permanent as well as ad-hoc sites.  While Areas in SPS can be "orphaned" if their parent areas are deleted.  Thus, the organization of these “containers of data” would be better served using WSS sites instead of Areas

I’ll be back with more random thoughts soon.

It Finally Begins...

By seeing the number of Blog posts out there, I might be the last person on Earth to finally start blogging. Well... I guess now is better than never.

The main focus of this Blog will be SharePoint and any related technologies. Since I'm currently a SharePoint trainer, I come across all kinds of SharePoint related scenarios/questions/suggestions/complaints and so on... I'll use this blog to purge my head of these thoughts so I can sleep better at night.