Easiest way to find SharePoint Site Collection ID

I found a couple articles/tips explaining you different ways to find out the site collection ID on your SharePoint farm.

Retrieving the Site Collection ID from SharePoint (WSS 3) Chris

A Very Fast Method to Get the Site Collection’s Web Structure

In my opinion the easiest way to find the site collection ID is through the Central Admin site. Follow the instructions below to get the site collection id.

You can find the Site Collection ID by opening the Central Administration, then opening the Application Management, and

then clicking Site Collection Administrators in the SharePoint Site Management section.

There you choose the administrators for your site collection.

The Site Collection ID shows up in the URL of the site collection selected. If you can’t find the ID change the web application and try again.

Tell me if this is the easiest way!

Identity and Access Strategies for SharePoint

Microsoft is publishing series of articles on the Identity and Access Strategies for SharePoint.  Watch this space for new updates as the new articles are published on this topic. These articles are must read, if you are dealing with different membership providers.

Articles

Identity and Access Strategies for SharePoint Products and Technologies, Part 1: Membership and Provider Architecture

Explore the membership and role provider architecture and how it operates in SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0.

Identity and Access Strategies for SharePoint Products and Technologies, Part 2: Membership and Role Provider Assignment

Explore how to configure the LDAP Providers in SharePoint Server 2007, how to automate provider assignment and provider registration, and how to configure Web Single Sign-On with Active Directory Federation Services.

Code Sample:

Sample: Identity and Access Strategies for SharePoint Server 2007

Learn how Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and SharePoint Server 2007 use membership and role providers, and how to automatically configure providers into SharePoint Server so it can manage the configuration settings.

Thanks for shedding light on this!

TIP: Hide Site Actions Menu using SharePoint Designer.

Use the SharePoint:SPSecurityTrimmedControl WebControl to wrap the Site Actions menu in your master page.  The control allows you to hide the contents if the currently logged user doesn’t have the required permissions.

SharePoint 2007 Browser Support – A refresher

With the release of SharePoint SP2 this week. There is much talk about the SharePoint 2007 browser support. So I like to refresh on what browsers SharePoint support and the level of support.

Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides rendering support for browsers that are commonly used. The support is distributed across two levels.

Level 1 Web Browsers:

1. IE 6
2. IE 7
3. IE 8 (SP2)

Levle 2 Web Browsers: 

1. Firefox 1.5 
2. Firefox 2.0 /3.0 (SP2)
3. Mozilla 1.7
4. Netscape 8.1
5. Unix/Linus with Firefox 1.5 or Netscape 7.2
6. Mac OS-X with Firefox 1.5 or Safari 2.0/3.0 

What is Level 1 and 2?

Good you asked!

Level 1 Web browsers take advantage of advanced features provided by ActiveX controls and provide the most complete user experience. Level 1 browsers offer full functionality on all SharePoint sites, including the Central Administration Web site.

 Level 2 Web browsers provide basic functionality, so that users can both read and write in SharePoint sites and perform site administration. However, because ActiveX controls are not supported level 2 browsers and due to the functionality differences within different browsers, a different user experience might be provided and there could be some variances from the user experience from the level 1 browsers.

Complete SharePoint Security Guidance

Came across this great resource little late! The timing is not bad at all because I am about to do a review of SharePoint Security of an existing SharePoint based Intranet portal for a non-profit organisation. It is not a fun ride reviewing security guidelines.

I recommend this ebook ‘SharePoint Security Guide‘ for anyone involved in putting together a great SharePoint Solution. Folks this is a good weekend reading!

Download SharePoint Security Guide @ http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=94375

SharePoint ‘How we did it’ articles

One of the best forms oflearning something is through experience. When you don’t have all the time and oppurtunity to experience everything, you can still learn heaps of stuff from others experiences. To learn from others experiences, ‘How we did it’ articles on the SharePoint Team Blog and other blogs are very nice media. I take this oppurtunity to present all the ‘How we did it’ here in this post. Please note that this post will be updated as and when I find a new article.

Article	Snippet
How We Did It – Nintex Reporting	Nintex Reporting is all about content/collaboration analytics reports for anyone who owns/manages any SharePoint assets.  It’s reporting about SharePoint farms, not reporting for SharePoint farms.
How We Did It: blueKiwi SharePoint Connector and OfficeAssistant	The blueWiki SharePoint Connector allows SharePoint customers to integrate blueKiwi’s complementary, highly specialised social software suite into their existing SharePoint environment, surfacing valuable social metrics, such as the most active discussions across the whole organisation, within a SharePoint portal.
SharePoint Connector for Confluence – How We Did It	Have you ever needed to integrate an external system with SharePoint, showing content from each system within the other? What if you needed to integrate search between SharePoint and the external system? How do you keep the user experience seamless if the systems use different authentication mechanisms? Have you wondered if this can be done if the external system is written in Java?
How We Did It: Podcasting Kit for SharePoint	The PKS is an accelerator for social media, using podcasting and social networks to deliver the next-generation knowledge management solution. Built on top of Office SharePoint Server 2007 and using Silverlight 2, the PKS delivers an integrated experience with a wide variety of podcast-capable devices including computers, iPod mobile digital devices, Zune digital media players, and Windows Mobile-based phones.
How We Did It: Connectbeam Spotlight Connect for SharePoint	This blog entry describes how Spotlight Connect for SharePoint enhances SharePoint’s Enterprise Search and My Site capabilities by augmenting these native SharePoint features with enterprise social content from Connectbeam. This results in SharePoint users having a greater reach of “social discovery.”
How we did it: Mission critical HawaiianAir.com website powered by MOSS 2007	About a year ago, when Hawaiian Airlines planned to redesign the look and feel of their website, http://www.HawaiianAir.com, they wanted a solution that would improve the authoring and management of the website’s content. After an evaluation, they decided to take advantage of MOSS 2007’s Web Content Management (WCM) features even though the product was still in beta.
How we did it: PFGC.com — design, development, and go live in 10 weeks!	The design of the website was accomplished by first understanding and defining the audience personas and then using that information to guide the information architecture and graphical design of the site.
How We Did It – Automating Service Requests using InfoPath Forms Services	The application addresses the need for enterprises to have a no-code way to quickly turn around service request based SharePoint sites
How We Did It: Christian Children’s Fund extranet powered by SharePoint	The purpose of this project was to develop and implement a new CCF extranet, known as “The Hub”, that would be used by all CCF employees worldwide as the single source for information, content and document storage, as well as a means for collaboration internally and externally.
Tomoye Ecco and SharePoint Integration – How We Did It and What We Will Do Next	In order to publish content from SharePoint into Ecco, we created an application page that is accessed from a custom menu action on SharePoint list items. The application page and custom action are deployed using a SharePoint solution (.WSP) file and then activated as a Feature.
Microsoft Academy Mobile – MOSS 2007 Powered, Community Driven Videocast/Podcast Service for the Enterprise – How We Did It	Academy Mobile was built entirely on SharePoint Server 2007. The videocasts and podcasts are stored in a customized document library that has been tested to scale upwards of 10,000 podcasts.
MOSS Has Got Game – Glu Mobile’s Website (www.glu.com) – How We Did It – Part 1 of 3   http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2007/06/27/moss-has-got-game-glu-mobile-s-website-www-glu-com-how-we-did-it-part-2-of-3.aspx   MOSS Has Got Game – Glu Mobile’s Website (www.glu.com) – How We Did It – Part 3 of 3	Our design philosophy from the start was to integrate the best of ASP.NET 2.0 and MOSS 2007 to implement a highly functional, manageable, and scalable site within a short amount of time.
MOSS 2007 supports Live Earth – Conservation International’s Public Web Sites – How We Did It (Part 1 of 2)   MOSS 2007 supports Live Earth – Conservation International’s Public Web Sites – How We Did It (Part 2 of 2)	The main aim of the project was to migrate and consolidate all existing web site content, which was in multiple languages and dispersed across several different web domain names, to a common SharePoint server farm. The initial driving force behind the project’s inception was the Live Earth concert series on July 7, 2007
How We Did It: Australia National Native Title Tribunal website – advanced web content management	The Tribunal website needed to provide access to government records related to the native title process. The records have complex content types with thousands of pages based on each, and many pages also link to other images and documents that would be available to download. MOSS 2007, with its flexible support for content types and advanced web content management functionality, was a very suitable candidate for a tough job like this.
How We Did It – Allowing Connections to Multiple SSRS Servers with Report Viewer and Explorer Web Parts	The core requirements of the solution were to enable SSRS web parts in SharePoint Server 2007 to point to multiple SSRS environments, a capability available in SSRS web parts for SharePoint 2003, with parameterization capability with the filter framework in SharePoint Server 2007. In essence, combine the best qualities of SSRS web parts from 2003 with 2007, as well ensuring usability was easy for end-users with minimal or no training required.

SharePoint Cascaded Lookup Field

SharePoint Cascaded Lookup column is one of the most asked for column type which is not available in SharePoint Out of Box. Every second client I work for says for this. SharePointBoost has come up with this and is selling it for very minimal charge. For large clients I work for this is peanuts!

In their words,

“SharePoint Cascaded Lookup introduces Filter Column and Parent Column to filter field values to narrow the range of choices. As a result, users can lookup field values more quickly and accurately. Filter Column is in the same list with the looked-up column. If users set a column as Filter column for the looked-up column, when edit/create an item, the choice of the cascaded lookup column will be filtered according to the value of the Filter Column. Parent Column, which is also used to filter looked-up values, is in the same list with the Cascaded Lookup column. When users set a column as Parent Column of a cascaded lookup column, in the edit/new form of an item, the choices of Cascaded lookup column in dropdown list will be different according to the value of Parent Column” 

It is now available for 30 days free trial, and users can download it from SharePointBoost web site:
http://sharepointboost.com/cascaded-lookupdownload.html

While you are at it, don’t forget to check out their other products @ http://sharepointboost.com/products.html . I like the idea of building something which is not available out of the box and sell it for less then a price of single consultant day.

Disclaimer: I don’t work for SharePointBoost and hence cannot support any of the products. I am just like anyother SharePoint consultant who happen to stumble upon this amazing product line.

Good work SharePointBoost