Setting Permissions on individual pages/sites in Tulip/SharePoint 2010

Well I'm going to attempt to spice up this very very boring subject by adding lots of pictures of cats taken from icanhascheesburger...

well I did warn you!

So lets say you've split your students up into groups and have set up a number of sub sites/libraries for these students to use as their own. However what you don't want to happen is for other groups to view/edit/copy these groups works! Luckily the big M has our back on this one... no not Mc Donalds... Microsoft Dummy!

Getting to the Permissions for your Page

1) So go to the site or page your wanting to have unique permissions, and from the Ribbon Menu™ select "Page".
2) From the resulting contextual menu select "Page Permissions" roughly just below where you clicked "Page".

Your then get greeted with a really scary looking page... but don't worry here's a picture of a cat to make it look nicer!

Altering a groups Permissions

Ok I think I'll quit with the cat pictures now they're getting in the way! Anyway so back to this task the default setup for your SharePoint pages is that they'll inherit permissions directly from their parent. Which is quite self explanatory you change the main site's permissions it'll change the sub site's permissions. We want this to stop since we don't want to make it unique! So:

3) Click on the "Stop Inheriting Permissions" icon:

 You'll get a warning saying bla bla bla click OK! Unless you genuinely accidentally clicked on the "stop inheriting permissions" button in which case why are you reading this tutorial... however if your just experimenting don't worry as you can re inherit permissions back again if you change your mind!

From here you can alter the different groups permissions, for this example if you wanted to edit the students group you tick the box next to students and in doing so will enable the "Edit User Permissions" icon in the "Ribbon Menu" click this icon and it'll bring up a menu you might recognise from SharePoint 2007:

I won't go into explaining all these different tick box's as they're quite self explanatory, you need to have at least one ticked so alter these to your hearts content... Once happy click "OK" and your done.

Removing a group from your Site/Page
If your not wanting your group to have any permissions on your site you can't just un-tick these items you have to actually remove the group from your site. So to do this go back to the "Permissions Tool" page by cancelling this pop up or repeating this tutorial up till step 2.

When your at the list of groups/users tick the little box next to the group your aiming to remove and click on the "Remove User Permissions" icon which'll be enabled, ok the warning and your done.

Adding changing an individuals permissions for your site
However if your wanting to enable individual students/staff to alter a document/page/library we need to go back to the "Permissions Tools" page (the page we got to from step 2 up above). When here click the "Grant Permissions" icon.

When you click this a pop up window will appear which might look a bit scary to start with but is actually quite simple. The top box is where you add the different staff/student names. If you know their full name as listed on the system type it in here separated by a semi colon ooor even easier search for their names using the address book as shown in my 5 steps to glory image:

If your unable to view that image it goes like this:

1. Click the address book icon
2. Type name into the search bar
3. Click on the right name
4. Click add
5. Click ok

Once you've clicked ok you'll go back to the original pop up menu but you should notice the "User/Groups" box has been filled out with the users names... much like in an email address...

We then need to change the permissions for the added staff/students for this example I'm wanting the to be able to edit the page, so I'm going to select "Full Control" I'm sure Contribute would be suffice but seeing as its just for one page I'm happy for students to have more permissions as the aim is to get them involved with this technology not constrain them! By default an email will be sent out to the people listed you can unstick the box to stop this from happening if so desired.... which is particularly helpful if your doing a covert operation! Once happy click OK!

And there we have it you've made your sites page custom... your sites' been pimped you just need Xzibit to give you a pinch.... pimp my ride... ok forget it... more pictures of cats! 

Errm that's all hope this has been of some use!

Explorer View in SharePoint 2010?

One of the nice things about SharePoint is its ability to integrate nicely with all things Microsoft, in the older version of SharePoint one of the more prominent features of this was "Browse in Explorer", this would open your site in an Explorer window within Windows much like you do when Browsing your 'My Documents' on your local machine etc. So as you can imagine was a really easy method of creating backups and or copying files back and forth.

However the new version of SharePoint 2010 (updated Tulip) doesn't have this feature as prominent which is both a good and bad thing, bad because if your used to creating backups via this means then at first glance it seems to not be there. But good in the aspect that Microsoft are aiming their system at all users not just Microsoft Windows users, so all you Linux and that other fruit based operating system users can get a piece of the SharePoint love!

So How do I get to View my files in Explore View?
Simple! I'm going to make the assumption your using a Windows Based computer and are using Internet Explorer, if not then please do as this wont work otherwise. Go to the document library your wanting to view (for this example I'm using my SharePoint based E-Portfolio system for Midwifery Students):

You should see the magical ribbon listed along the top... you know the standard ribbon which Microsoft seem to think everyone's familiar with and love... obviously I'm very familiar with it and indeed do love it... in all  fairness at least they've chosen an idea and gone with it.... much like this. Ok in this ribbon you should see "Library Tools" Select sub heading "Library" (as marked in the above image).

This will change the ribbon to the following image from it about in the middle of the page you shoudl see "Current View:" with a drop down menu underneath. From the drop down menu select "Explorer View".

You'll have to wait for a bit as it does its thing, I'd imagine there's a fair amount of authentication involved in this task hence the delay anyway as if by magic your documents will view in Explorer View:

I've not tested this at home yet (as my home laptop is run by fruit) but it works on my works computer which is running Windows 7 and is on the Uni network so it might not work if your on XP or Vista (please let me know if it does).

SharePoint 2010 - Alert ME!

So you've followed my advice and set up a Splendid (and functional) Wiki for your students to collaborate and produce some magnificent pieces of work on. However.... you can't really be arsed to check the said Wiki every day to for updates! Not when there are far more interesting things to do with your life such as checking Facebook, checking Emails, checking Twitter, checking your phone for texts, checking Failblog oooor actually doing other work!

Well luckily the clever chaps at Microsoft (you might of heard of them) thought of this whilst they created SharePoint, a nifty little tool called "Alert Me". This tool can send you live updates about your super special/cool wiki's as they happen or send you daily/weekly summaries.

This tools not narrowed down for just wiki's it can be used on all pages located on Tulip/Sharepoint so Blogs, Forums document library or a site as a whole.... I might set this up for all my Tulip sites (all 712 of them) just to receive loads of emails to make me feel popular (don't worry I'm not that vain I've got a mirror for reassurance).

Errr Steve enough mumbling how do I turn on this Magical tool?
Well navigate to the page you wish to be alerted about. And bring up the edit pannel:

From the edit "ribbon" select "page" and then the sub option of "Alert Me":

This'll bring up the following page which if you read what it says is quite self explanatory:

Once your done click "OK" not sure if the "text message (SMS)" system works on our set up so test that but don't rely on it to work! And that's all you need to know watch your inbox flood with emails from Tulip stating how hard your students are working!

Wanna use Twitter in SharePoint 2010... sure thing!

Ok so last week I had a golden email off a member of staff:

"Idea to Share:"
"I was thinking I might share my modules on Twitter this year! What do you think?"

I feel my face resembled something similar to this:

Ok maby not quite as excited as the above cat but it was quite close! Why did this excite me so much? Well it basically means I get to use my favourite technology in the WORLD. XML! If I'm honest I barely use xml however its a technology that I respect and realise the awesome power it can possess if used right, and I hoped I could tap into this by combining Twitter and SharePoint!

So here was my plan by using Twitters "Feed for this Query" feature embed the RSS feed into a Tulip page, so that way both staff and students could post information on the SharePoint page provided they use the set Query, this being the module name. BINGO! I also figured giving a link to the academics Twitter account was a suitable idea as well would be useful...

So here's how I did it:

1. Get the RSS feed from Twitter:
Go to Search.Twitter.com and type in the Query name I also added "include:retweets", quite self explanitory what that does.

Then on the search results page:

Click on the link which says "Feed for this query" and it'll bring of the feed (obviously):

However the feed is in ATOM format, which annoyingly isn't supported on our copy of SharePoint, luckily Twitter allows you to change where it says ATOM to RSS and it magically changes to an RSS format... I almost spat my coffee out when I thought "hmm I wonder if I change the URL it'll make it in RSS format". Once you've changed the URL to RSS then copy the whole address.

2. Add the 'RSSFeedForSharePoint' WebPart to your page:
Go to the SharePoint page you want to display your tweets on and click on the edit icon:

We then want to insert a web part this is under "Edit" and "Insert":

THEEEEN To get to the RSSREADER Web Part select "Miscellaneous" - and "RSSReader Web Part" then click "Add":

3. Bring the RSS feed and the reader together:
In your newly added web part go to the bit where it states "Enter the URL of RSS feed" and paste in your XML feed address which we got from step 1:

You can also edit different things in there like how many tweets to show (Enter number of items to display:) and the different sizes etc. Once your happy click "OK". And your tweets should magically appear:

This is all find and dandy but if someone was to visit your page they wouldn't have a clue what they're looking at so lets give it some context. Click on the "edit" button again. And select the area just above where your RSSReader thingy is and Enter some contextual text:

And your done!

This will obviously work for any RSS feed, most notably if you want to use the RSS feed from an individual account, remember to change the ATOM bit to RSS. However I'd advice against displaying your own account here as you might accidently tweet something distasteful to the Module or Program so it's probably best to use the Search Query method I've shown above.

Hope this has been of some use if any of the images are too small click on them to enlarge and please comment if you have any questions or likewise!