Category Archives: SharePoint 2010

I really like the SharePoint 2010 Approval workflow, as it provides a lot of functionality for not very much work. The out-of-the-box one is a bit limited, but it works if you take it for what it is. The version you can use in SharePoint Designer is nicer as it gives you a lot more flexibility in what you do and don’t do based on what happens.

One of my workflows is used for approving standard IT procedures, and today I got a question from the site owner. Someone was trying to approve a task that they received in Outlook, but they got the following error:

That’s not terribly descriptive, and at first glance I didn’t have a clue as to what was different for this person since everyone else seemed to be working fine.

At least for this instance, the problem was caused by the person only being in a permission group that granted them Read access to the site. They could get the task and call it up, but the approval or rejection would fail with the above error message.

Fix… just put them in one of the permission groups that had at least Contribute level access.

Bottom line… this is FAR more difficult than it needs to be… 😦

The straightforward (and intuitive) way to do it would be to create a new page and add a Page Viewer web part:

Next, go out to one of your document libraries, open up the PowerPoint file in browser mode, and get the URL:

That gives you a URL that looks somewhat like the following: http://domain.com/sites/DuffTeamSite/_layouts/PowerPoint.aspx?PowerPointView=ReadingView&PresentationId=%2Fsites%2FDuffTeamSite%2FShared%20Documents%2FEthicsCOISharePointaloozaBranson2014%2Epptx&source=http%3A%2F%2Fdomain%2Ecom%2Fsites%2FDuffTeamSite%2FShared%2520Documents%2FForms%2FAllItems%2Easpx

No problem, right? Actually, major problem, as it gives you the following error:

What you have to do instead is search the page source code to find the iframe tag. It’s within there that you’ll find the actual code you’re looking for:

In this case, the iframe code for my PowerPoint file is:

PowerPointFrame.aspx?PowerPointView=ReadingView&d=F4d0845e366cf4196adc344c19238f728md26da0e52012465c8dbe3c9d5cafe974m07df9f35b715495798c790767e0515a8m&source=http%3A%2F%2Fdomain%2Ecom%2Fsites%2FDuffTeamSite%2FShared%2520Documents%2FForms%2FAllItems%2Easpx” width=”100%” height=”100%” style=”position: absolute; top: 0px; left: 0px; right: 0px; bottom: 0px;” frameborder=”0″>

From that, you have to take a snippet of that code above (in bold green) and add the bold purple code below to get the following for your page URL:

/sites/duffteamsite/_layouts/PowerPointFrame.aspx?PowerPointView=ReadingView&d=F4d0845e366cf4196adc344c19238f728md26da0e52012465c8dbe3c9d5cafe974m07df9f35b715495798c790767e0515a8m&source=http%3A%2F%2Fdomain%2Ecom%2Fsites%2FDuffTeamSite%2FShared%2520Documents%2FForms%2FAllItems%2Easpx

Once you have that completed, you can use that URL as the address for your web page to show (in this case, your slides):

To get it to be a bit more visible, adjust the height and width parameters of the web part:

This is how I have to set up PowerPoint page viewer web parts in SharePoint 2010. I certainly hope it gets more intuitive in upcoming versions.

Much like I suggested in my Empty Date Field post, I’ve found myself starting to add EmptyName as a column to some of my lists that require comparisons (usually during workflows) to blank values. I just find it easier to know I’m going to match up exactly to what a blank people picker field will look like.

Just create a column in the list, name it something like EmptyName, and leave the default value as blank. Then use that field as the comparison value to any of your other names that you’d like to check against.

This is sort of a “why would you do that?” thing, but it’s saved me a lot of time when it comes to SharePoint Designer workflows.

I’ve always had problems trying to compare a variable in the workflow against a blank date, because every date variable wants you to populate it with the current date or some other set date. Furthermore, there’s no “Is Empty” as a comparison option.

I know you can compare the string to some magical date of 1/1/0001, but I’m always afraid I’m going to make a typo or that default date is going to change some time in the future. Instead, I prefer to let SharePoint do the work for me.

I create a list column with the name of EmptyDate and I don’t give it a default value. Therefore, when it comes time to compare dates, I already have a blank date field in the list that I can use for the comparison. Since I normally customize my list forms using InfoPath, I just choose not to put that field on the form.

I don’t have to remember any magical dates, nor do I have to worry about anyone coming behind me and messing up that value by adding leading zeros or something. It just works. 🙂

I had a strange occurrence in one of my SharePoint workflows that took me far longer to resolve than it should have… pesky typos!

I had a SharePoint Designer 2010 workflow that would send out emails based on various settings on a list item. The emails were sent to people in a SharePoint permissions group, so it was easy to add/remove people who needed to get the information. I’ve done that in many workflows, and it works perfectly…

… until it doesn’t.

In this case, I had a series of permission groups that started with NMPT in the name. When the emails went out, the creator of the item would get a copy, but the To address was coming out as “NMTPRestOfGroupName@domain.invalid”. I tried looking up @domain.invalid online, but I could find nothing that came close to my situation.

Maybe your eyes are better than mine or your mind is sharper, but it took me a while to figure out that NMPT is not the same as NMTP. Basically, I had incorrectly typed in all the group names in the workflow, and SharePoint was trying to send to a mailbox with that incorrect name, but it didn’t know what domain to send it to.

Once I fixed the names in the workflow to start with NMTP instead of NMPT, everything worked like a charm. 🙂

I put this out here so that the next time someone searches for @domain.invalid in the context of a SharePoint workflow, they’ll have something that may work to resolve their issue.

I’m always surprised when someone asks me what should be an easy question, and the answer turns out to be something completely different than you expect…

The most recent example of that was yesterday when someone asked me if we could change the Survey Response view to add a couple of columns. No problem, right? I’ve changed views thousands of times, right?

Here’s your normal view of survey responses:

Alas… As you can see, there’s no option to create new views or modify the current view:

But wait! To get around that, put the page into edit mode, and then click Edit Web Part for the List View Web Part:

The Web Part gives you the option to Edit The Current View from there:

Now it looks like editing any other view:

And when I’m done, I now have the Project Name and Project Contact columns as part of my Response view:

I hope that helps you next time you get a request to edit a survey response view, and all of a sudden things don’t look normal and simple. 🙂