So I've been gone a while

Well,
It's been a while but I'm starting to come back around to updating with some new posts, so here's some of my recent stuff:

1. Our SharePoint setup was such that everything was in a single content database and single site collection. This has proven troublesome, especially in MOSS 2007, so the system admins are going to split some subsites into their own site collections and group them into multiple content dbs. We're hoping to be able to point out where some of our current performance flaws exist in doing this but also to prepare for a migration to SharePoint 2010.

2. Working on the CTT+ certification...fun times there...pro tip: don't have people use funny first names in your video - creates a world of havoc in submission and processing.

3. Created a vehicle registration form for the university to register (2) vehicles in an infopath form, submit each vehicle as a separate form to sharepoint, and then process those via Access on the backend. This is a pretty simple but cool setup and didn't involve any major work EXCEPT: infopath decided, upon one of the publishing processes, to add a 'comment' tag in 3 different places...there wasn't a comment opening tag or any actual comment, just that closing tag. I also got an error for "unexpected CSS formatting" or "potentially unsafe HTML found in your form". To fix the comment issue, you have to do the scaries thing ever: Save your infopath form "as source files" and then open the particular view.xsl in notepad++ and look at the CODE...scary...and then do a simple find for the word 'comment' and see what you find. I just deleted the tags since they weren't connected to anything and that fixed them (you won't see them anywhere in the form, just in the code).

4. Learned a nifty trick on Microsoft's website for determining if someone who is opening an infopath form is opening it in the browser of if it's being opened in InfoPath: use a condition on an opening rule that says "matches the expression": "xdEnvironment:IsBrowser"...this is useful if you want to have certain views used internally for processing but the main page be a browser form for public use.

5. Had an interesting problem sent to me: someone deleted a list in sharepoint and, when it was restored (not from the recycle bin), the list had a new ID number (called a GUID). This messed up several things that were originally connected to this list; however, there was a simple albeit scary solution for it: open up the site in sharepoint designer and just do a simple find-replace for the original list's GUID with the new one...had several thousand fixes - mostly from workflow configuration and workflow history. After I did that, I double-checked the workflows themselves and noticed that you can open these up as xml files and just do a find and replace there too - so i did. Between the two pieces, it fixed all references to the list and all workflows now work just fine.