Currently in M365 Lists, you can only do a partial word search using a wildcard. This also applies to SharePoint searches, but does not apply to most other M365 programs. I contacted Microsoft because, in earlier versions, it was a setting to enable or disable needing the wildcard. Microsoft says it cannot be done - need to use wildcard. I do know that when you start typing in the Search, it will bring up all records with whatever you type directly under the Search. If you pick one, it brings you up to another screen - again users not used to and not feasible. If you enter on the Search with a partial word, it brings up a blank list.
Issue - this is for a phone database that over 1500 people use. Current database does not require wildcard. So you can type kal and get all names starting with kal. To try to tell 1500 people how to do it (include wildcard), is just not feasible. I have asked Microsoft if we could add a field to top of list that we could code to search (without wildcard). Have not heard back yet, but it seems like it is first level support that is answering any support questions I have even when I ask to give it to someone higher up.
So, does anyone know how you can do a partial word search in Lists without the wildcard - either by changing the config of Search or creating a new field that will allow users to search? Welcome to all ideas. Thanks!
I'm using a standard link list web part. What I want to achieve is before my users click on the link a pop-up javascript warning box will display, stating that they are leaving the domain. In regular anchor tag I would preceed the URL with javascript:ShowWarning('http://www.youtube.com');.
I've search the AllLinks table in the database but did not find the links was looking for.
Where or how are these stored?
Thanks,
Risho
Firstly, editing the SharePoint database directly is a really bad idea. You shouldn't do it unless you really, really know what you are doing, and even then you will probably break the system.
Secondly, any change made in the data will be what shows up in the editor, and I don't think the editor supports links that don't start with "http://".
A better approach is to use jquery to add the popup behaviour to the links when the page is loaded.
My Google analytics shows the second most used keyword to access my site is the url of the site. This doesn't particularly surprise me, but I wondered if any of you have tried educating your users out of this (i.e. detecting search term from referrer and showing a popin encouraging them to create bookmarks etc.) or is it just a waste of effort or likely to annoy.
UPDATE
I was watching someone the other day and discovered one possible reason why people do this. If you try clicking in the address bar and click twice instead of once, then type your url, you get a big mess. Far easier to type into the nice empty google search box (which is also selected by default). So basically you have the choice between:
Type > Enter > Click
or
BadClick > Type > Enter > "Bugger!" > Click > Type > Enter
Similarly, Microsoft noted long ago that many people just type search queries into the address bar. If there are essentially between two and four unlabeled text boxes on a browser window (address bar, search box, maybe Google start page, toolbars, etc.) don't expect the user to find the right one when they should.
As long as they end up where they wanted to they couldn't care less.
Google Chrome did the right thing imho by merging at least the search and the address bar again.
for most people, google is the internet.
Focus your efforts somewhere else, like providing good contents. It does not matter how they get there.
Good luck :) Most of internet users may even not realize if the address bar gets removed from their browser. Typing a URL is far too technical.
I'm not sure anything can be done. Users are known to be extremely stubborn in their habits.
One my fellow googles for the login page of his online-banking system, being too lazy to type it in or bookmark it. That scares me a lot. It only takes for someone to manipulate search results even for a day or so to hijack the credentials.
I suggest you ignore the matter. With luck, if they google enough for your site, then google will start to show the name of your site in suggestions as your type which is rather nice.
I've tried to encourage the use of a browser at work to access the data I put on the company intranet. It's proving difficult — they would much rather open My Computer and drill down through many levels of folders, while muttering 'Where was that file? What was it called again?'
I prefer the idea of web pages on an intranet site, with images, hyperlinks, etc, but I have to be careful not to use the term 'browser' since people don't really know what it means. For example, I demonstrated the site to one colleague by telling her to start 'Internet Explorer', then I typed the URL, rather than explain it to her. When the web page opened, she said 'Oh wow, what program is this?'
I've gone to some trouble to use 'friendly URLs' — no complex query strings, but it was probably a waste of time. I'm sure no-one types them in and uses bookmarks/favorites instead.
If the address bar disappeared, it wouldn't be missed by the majority of Internet users, and there's a Google/Yahoo/whatever search tool in the corner of each page.
A friend of mine wants to have an application where people can upload documents in Word (or text) format, and then allow people to make edits to those documents within a browser.
Is there any mechanism that would support adding text "bubbles" for adding comments? Either floating, or off to the side.
Being able to save back to Word format is a must too. Or at least, some format supported by Word, that would still be editable. Saving it as an image is not acceptable.
I was thinking about opening the Word Document in an FCK Editor window, but FCK only seems to have "normal" inline text editing capabilities (although it is great).
Is this feasible?
Yes it is feasible. Google has done that (and it does have comments). So has Adobe. I'm sure there is more.
Xopus provides a programmable platform that allows you to define editable XML within a WYSIWYG environment. You could use it to define what you want to edit (XML), against which rules you want to edit it (an XSD) and how you want it to look while you edit it (XSL). Then you tie that all together with the Javascript API.
In other words, you could pretty easily define a document that contains multiple paragraphs with optional comments and then have them displayed as bubbles exactly the way you want them; when saved, a script on the server could be executed that converts the XML to a Word document.
Take a look at the demos.
If they are Word 2007 documents, you can use Silverlight. Here's an example application that uses Silverlight to open a Word 2007 document and display it in the browser.
Since StackOverflow is a programmer site, I'll assume you're a programmer. You can use Silverlight to add the bubbles and annotations to a Word 2007 document, but you'll need to know VB.NET or C#.
Take a look at docx2web.appspot.com which is (currently) a very bare bones editor with the distinguishing feature that the browser is directly manipulating (more or less) the "flat OPC" version of the docx.
This means that there is no lossy conversion on either the way in or the way out. So for example, when you save after editing, anything which was in the original docx is round tripped back to Word.
As far as support for older .doc is concerned, POI can be used to convert them to .docx (although your mileage may vary).
Why are you trying to compete with google docs?
I know that TinyMCE provides some rich controls for in browser editing. Last time i looked at it, it had 100% of the stuff i would normally use in word, and then some. On the other hand, i probably has 1% of the features that MS word provides. It would be VERY difficult to implement it all.
As far as saving to MS word compatible format. i am sure its possible. it would probably be easier to save to a non-doc format.
As far as popups etc, those can be easy built using jquery UI or any other javascript framework.
Bottom line: yes, its possible, but why?!
It is possible. For example eyeOS has a text processing application able to open and process Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org text documents.
Ok, I've seen a few posts that mention a few other posts about not using SP wikis because they suck.
Since we are looking at doing our wiki in SP, I need to know why we shouldn't do it for a group of 6 automation-developers to document the steps in various automated processes and the changes that have to be made from time to time.
Here are some caveats I came across that will vanish if you use a wiki other than Sharepoint.
Sharepoint lets you create tons of separate wikis, but I'd recommend having one big wiki for everything. My company made a bunch of little wikis for each project/feature, but only admins can create the individual wikis, so if I want to write about something that isn't doesn't match one of the predefined categories, I have to find a manager to create the wiki first.
Secondly, if you use Sharepoint make sure everyone on your staff only uses IE, since Firefox doesn't support the WYSIWIG editor. This is a good thing for most wikis, but makes collaborating difficult in Sharepoint. Imagine editing auto-generated HTML in a tiny little box all day.
Third, try to write up your project documentation in the wiki and resist the temptation to upload Word docs to the Sharepoint library. No point in writing up all your docs twice and watching things get more and more out of sync.
Finally, image support in Sharepoint wikis is terrible. You have to add a file to a document library somewhere and type in the URL. My images were forever getting deleted because they don't seem to make much sense out of context.
I have a much more positive view of Microsoft's Sharepoint Wiki. In many ways it reminds me of FrontPage 98 -- and that was an unfairly maligned product.
The comment about using a list is misguided. Sharepoint Wikis ARE Sharepoint lists, in which each page is a list item with an HTML attachment.
It's true that you can't link into a page, but if the pages are short I don't see that as a problem. SP Wiki makes it very easy to have short pages.
You can manipulate the Wiki attributes from access 2008 if you wish, and you can add attributes to the wiki list items as desired. For example -- do you want categories? Just add them by editing the list. Want specific views? of list items. Create them too.
There's real genius in the way Microsoft built their Wiki framework atop Sharepoint lists -- which are undeniablly well done.
The TRUE drawback of Sharepoint Wiki was mentioned by famerchris. The approach to image management is surprisingly awful. It's such a serious problem that you should consider other Wikis for this reason alone.
There is a convoluted workaround that I use. It takes advantage of the superb Sharepoint support and image editing integrated with Windows Live Writer.
Create a SP blog that will hold the images that will be referenced in the wiki.
Use Windows Live Writer to post to the wiki-image-blog. Drop your image into WLW, resize it as needed, etc. If you like, use WLW to write your image associated wiki text first draft as well.
After you post to the Wiki, copy and paste image and text into the Wiki editor rich text field.
This takes suprisingly little time, far less than any other option I've read of. I admit, it is convoluted.
Other than the image problems I'm pleased and impressed with the product. If only Microsoft had thought harder about images ... if only ...
The default wiki included with Sharepoint doesn't support common wiki features well at all. There is no way to edit a single section of a page, and no way to link directly to a particular section on another page. The backend is in HTML so you lose the ability to edit in plaintext using simple syntax. The diff feature can't span multiple versions. Poor cross browser support of WYSIWYG editing. No way to auto-insert a table of contents...
There are, however, other wiki add-ins for Sharepoint which I can't categorically dismiss, for instance Confluence makes an add-in for Sharepoint. I haven't evaluated this software myself, and Confluence is somewhat expensive ($1,200 for 25 user license) although if you are already on Sharepoint I sense large corporate coffers :P. There also appear to be some free add-ins like CKS Enhanced Wiki but that appears to have a lot of the same problems mentioned above.
We run into this topic all the time, and the first question I have taken to asking people is "Why do you need a wiki"? Almost always the answers are things "ease of editing", "multiple contributors", and "Word is to heavyweight". Very rarely have we seen anyone ask for what I consider to be uniquely wiki-like features (special "magic" markup, fine grained version history showing changes, etc). Also, they usually want some kind of categorization of things, not just completely free-form pages.
In the SharePoint world these things should scream "list" at you if you've been working with the tool for a while. There is basically no particular reason to use a wiki for these knowledge base-style applications, especially since "ease of editing" usually directly conflicts with the idea of learning a special markup language for most user. Through a couple of rich-text columns in there, and you're all set. If you really don't like the built-in rich-text editor (yes the image uploading process is clunky and it doesn't work in Firefox), have someone in your organization go drop the 8 Benjamins and go get the RadEditor for SharePoint. It should pretty much handle those concerns.
Generally once we've gotten over the "but it needs to be a wiki" dogma, we've had pretty good customer reception to just using lists. In some cases, where a little more of a page templating facility was required we turned to using the WCM features of MOSS, which requires a little more up-front thought about templates, but also has a better out of the box experience for things like content snippets and image handling.
Because the default implementation is not a wiki, it is an HTML editor.
If you've used a wiki before you'll know the difference. Just look at "Your answer" at the bottom of this page to see the difference. You use markup in a wiki, which is relatively easy to read and edit. Formatted HTML completely obscures what is written.
My two cents worth as a wiki content creator and super-user, rather than an administrator or developer:
I am currently editing a document in Sharepoint Wiki as I type this, and it is by far the worst editor I have ever come across. To be precise, I'm using Sharepoint Foundation 2010 (previously known as WSS), editing pages using IE 9.
To sum up the problems I've faced: When creating wiki content you want to concentrate on the content and the wiki engine should be so easy to use as to be almost invisible. With Sharepoint that is not the case. I really struggle with the pseudo-WYSIWYG editor, having to fix frequent formatting problems.
I estimate that I'm about 15% less productive writing wiki content with Sharepoint than I am with ScrewTurn or Wikimedia because I have to deal with the formatting issues. If I spend a day writing wiki pages I would lose about an hour trying to fix formatting issues.
For background: I've created four internal wikis at our company - the first in Wikimedia, the wiki engine behind Wikipedia, the next two in ScrewTurn, and a final one in Sharepoint. In each wiki I've written about 50-100 pages.
In both ScrewTurn and Wikimedia the editor looks fairly primitive - a plain text editor that uses simple wiki mark-up codes for formatting. Each has a row of buttons that can apply mark-up codes for simple things like bold and italic formatting, and to create links, so beginners do not need to learn the mark-up codes by heart. While the editors look plain they turn out to be really simple to use, especially for fixing formatting problems.
Sharepoint Wiki, on the other hand, looks slick but is terrible for editing. Instead of using a plain text editor with wiki mark-up it has a WYSIWYG editor that looks much more sophisticated than other wiki editors. However it has personality, an evil one. It frequently adds blank lines or changes the colour of text. When I select text to format then go to the Markup Styles dropdown to format it, sometimes the act of selecting an item from the dropdown list deselects the selected text so the formatting applies to text at a random location. Inserting text copied from Word sometimes causes the editor to double or triple up on blank lines between paragraphs at other places on the page. There appears to be no easy way of creating a table, apart from writing HTML.
The biggest problem about the editor, however, is that you can't easily see what is going on behind the scenes so it's difficult to fix it. Yes, it's possible to edit the page's HTML but that really defeats the purpose of a wiki.
The overall impression I get as a user, is that this is alpha-level code that has been knocked up by a summer intern. I know Foundation is the free version so perhaps I get what we've paid for but I cannot believe a professional software company put out this product.
For a group of 6 people that will be making "every now and then" edits, the built-in wiki will be fine.
The Sharepoint Wiki is essentially a list of Static HTML Pages, with the only Wiki-feature being [[article]] links. No Templates, No Categories, nothing.
We ended up having a separate MediaWiki and only use the Sharepoint wiki for text-based content that does not need much layout.
Don't forget the Community Kit for Sharepoint - Enhanced Wiki Edition. This adds some features to the out of the box version.
Before the rant, here is my overall experience with SharePoint as a wiki.
It is a poorly implemented feature that failed becouse there was a fundemental lack of investigation into what current wiki environments provide. That is why it failed in it's editor and why it misses on points like: tagging, history comparison, and poorly generated html code.
You need to skip it and get something else that does the job better and link to it from SharePoint.
Having production experience with both products, I'd recommend ScrewTurn over SharePoint.
see edit history for rant
My company rolled out sharepoint recently, and I have to say my user experience was Very Bad. And I'm not just saying I was apprehensive to using it: I went in with an open mind and tried it, and many things just felt like they didn't really work right.
The reasons Luke mentioned more or less cover it.
Why wouldn't you consider using something else like Screwturn Wiki which Jeff donated to a short while ago? I haven't used Screwturn myself, but it is free and open source, and may be a faster lightweight solution for what you need.
We looked at Sharepoint for a department wiki a few months ago. Even though we're primarily an MS shop, we went with DokuWiki. Open-source, so easy to keep up to date, great plugins, and a file-based back end.
I would also temper the ratings of the OOB wiki and its lack of functionality with the technical level of the authors here.
I agree that the SP wiki might qualify in name only - certainly when compared to some more robust offerings - but remember as an admin - your primary success is determined by end user adoption. In short - for every feature that a wiki like Confluence adds, it also adds user education, syntax, etc.
While I would love SP wiki to have more "wiki-like" - there is a certain, undescribable satisfaction you can take when your CIO adds an entry in the company wiki - or you are recognized by a group of administrative assistants who find the new wiki "revolutionary".
In short - the built in functionality may be lacking to the jaded eyes of us tech professionals, but to the technologically naive, its pretty easy to train on, and can expose them to a technology they may have heard of but could never (before this) understand or imagine using.
I've played very briefly with SharePoint Wiki Plus. It's a third-party extension that adds features to the SharePoint Wiki. For serious wiki users then you probably need something more than the SharePoint provided Wiki - either via an extension or a dedicated Wiki product.
Maybe try http://wordtosharepoint.codeplex.com/ for migrating your Word content to SharePoint? It takes care of linking images and most other things.
Screwturn is wicked awesome - and it is C# / .Net.
Sharepoint 2010 is supposed to have better wiki features, and there is always the community kit of sharepoint.
If you are able to leave the Sharepoint Wiki behind - you could always head over to the http://www.wikimatrix.org to find the wiki that works for you.
I fully concur with the above (Keng). Whatever that thing is within SharePoint (currently using 2010), it is NOT a Wiki by a long shot.
I am implementing an automated documenting solution, where I extract config and other info (like perldoc markup) from source code and XML config files. It inserts the info in a set of DokuWIKI pages, complete with formatting markup (including tables). It comes out perfectly formatted and works with a couple of tens of lines of perl, includes internal links to manually edited static doc pages, and support for namespaces so I can have my information logically organised. There is no way I could do that in SharePoint (sigh - company direction)...
The best I can do is try to make DokuWIKI template resemble sort of the SharePoint site (to keep the look and feel similar) and link out of SharePoint. :-(