SharePoint Printing--And SharePoint Fun On the Road

SharePoint 2010 features, of course, the Ribbon and all kinds of snazzy new navigation. This week I was asked to help a client print views from the browser without the surrounding “noise”—removing the title area, Quick Launch, and Ribbon. Pretty darned easy in 2010. I’ll show you how momentarily. 

I’d also like to invite you to “be one of the lucky ones”—come join me at some great upcoming events. First, there’s the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, Canada! I head up north on Saturday to join one of the most exciting IT operations in the world, playing my little role as the Microsoft Technologies Consultant for NBC Olympics during the broadcast of the games.

I’ll be sharing all the SharePoint related (and other fun) news from up there starting next week, so even if you can’t be there in person, you can watch it all on NBC networks and NBCOlympics.com; and you can follow us in this newsletter.

There are also some phenomenal SharePoint events coming up in the first part of 2010...

Be One of the Lucky Ones: Come Join Me

I’ve got three events coming up that I wanted to invite you to. I’ll be speaking at each of these, and each has something really unique to offer:
• SharePoint Pro 2010 Summit, Las Vegas, March 16-19. This is the premier event for SharePoint 2010 this spring! Come celebrate the release of SharePoint with me, other top-notch speakers from outside and inside of Microsoft, and hundreds of high-caliber peers.

We have an agenda packed with great IT Pro, developer, and solutions-focused sessions. There’s no other event that even comes close this spring, and we’ll have lots of time to discuss SharePoint around the fountains at the beautiful Bellagio hotel. O, and I’ll be seeing “O” there again for sure!

• Virtualization Pro 2010 Summit, Las Vegas, March 16-19. Running just nearby at the Bellagio is a phenomenal, one-of-a-kind virtualization event that covers all of the virtualization options from all of the major players in virtualization. Sure, you can go to one vendor’s virtualization event, but here you can learn about all of them, and see rare head-to-head comparisons.

Also filled with great speakers from the vendors themselves and from independent consultants, this is a must see event for anyone working with server, desktop, or application virtualization! We’re even talking SharePoint virtualization there!

• The Experts Conference (TEC 2010), Los Angeles, April 25-28. I’m so excited to be part of this top-notch event, covering SharePoint, Directory Services & Identity, and Exchange, making it a great event for those of you who wear many hats, and need to be experts at all of these technologies.

The SharePoint content at this event covers both 2010 and current versions. So whatever the mix of responsibilities you have at your job, there’s a great event coming up for you!

Also, both of the Summit events offer discounts totaling $300 through January 29th, so sign up today!

Better Printing with SharePoint 2010

This week I was tasked with improving printing for users of SharePoint 2010.

When they print a single item (in the dispform.aspx page) or print a view (viewname.aspx), the title, ribbon, and quick launch navigation are printed, which create unnecessary “noise” and, in the case of dispform.aspx, strangely cause the printout to shrink, making the resulting printed document very small and tough to read.

We were able to tackle this requirement in just a few minutes, thanks to SharePoint Designer 2010. Here’s how you do it:

1. Open your site in SPD. Create a CSS with the style definitions to disable printing of certain parts of the document

2. Click the File tab.

3. Click Add Item.

4. Click More Pages.

5. Click CSS.

6. Click Create.

7. Type a name for the CSS, e.g. MyStyles, then click OK.

8. Paste the following code:

@media print \{ #s4-titlerow, #s4-statusbarcontainer,   #s4-topheader2 \{ display:none; visibility: hidden; \}   #s4-leftpanel \{ display:none; visibility: hidden; \}   #MSO_ContentTable \{ margin: 0 0 0 0 \} \} 

9. Save your changes. Link the CSS to your master page.

10. Click the Master Pages link under Site Objects in the left navigation.

11. Right-click v4.master and choose Edit File in Advanced Mode. If you’re using a Publishing site definition, use a browser to go to the Site Settings and determine which Master Page is the default.

12. Click the Style tab of the Ribbon.

13. Click the Attach Style Sheet button in the middle of the Ribbon.

14. Click Browse and browse to your CSS, which will be in the Site Pages library.

15. Click Open.

16. Click OK.

17. Save your changes. You will be informed that the page will be customized, and will no longer adhere to the site definition. Click through the warning. Voila! 

Important Security Warning for Users of Internet Explorer

As you have no doubt heard, Google and others (including Adobe, Juniper Networks, Rackspace, Yahoo! and Symantec) were attacked recently by malicious code exploiting a flaw in IE6. According to CNET and other news outlets, it appears that the code likely targeted Google employees and others who had access to internal resources and were using IE6.

There is now publicly available exploit code for IE6, and while Microsoft is no doubt working feverishly to fix the problem, no patch is yet ready. It is crucial to remind your users about the dangers of clicking any link to an unknown source. It is also crucial that your enterprise work through governance processes so that eight-year old (IE6) and three-year old (IE7) browsers are updated regularly. You ask your users to change their passwords every few months, your technology should be equally secure.

While no enterprise is completely secure, when weaknesses exist in both the human or technology resources, risk is at its greatest. This threat is very real. I’ve seen it in play in my client base already, and other enterprises are making the news. Get your users to IE8, which is, in my opinion, at least today, the sweet spot in the security-productivity-manageability triad. And send a special “poke” to them, today, about secure computing.