1. Create a custom content type for your test site. I am going to use “SCTest” top level site (site collection) for the demo. Go to Site Actions => Site Settings and click on “Site Content Types” link under Galleries category.

2. Click “Create” link on the top left corner of Site Content Type Gallery.

3. Create a new site content type as shown below. I have chosen Document content type for simplicity. You can add this content type to “Custom Content Types” by selecting it for Group category but I have created a new group called “Test Group” to add this new content type. Please note that I have named new custom content type as “Project Release Documents”

4. You will see following screen on adding a new custom content type. Click “Add from existing site columns” link under “Columns” category.

5. Add appropriate columns for this new content type. I have chosen few as shown below.

6. This is how a new custom content type looks like after adding few existing site columns.

7. I am creating a new document library for “Test Site Collection” (SCTest) to use this custom content type.

8. As usual, I have used shortest possible name for my document library to keep URL for this document library as short as possible. You can always change the “Name” field later on by going to Title, description and navigation under General Settings of document library settings.

9. Go to Settings => Document Library Settings.

10. This is an additional step. I have modified the document library name from TCTL (to keep URL short) to Test Content Type Library as by going to Title, description and navigation under General Settings

11. Click “Advanced Settings” link under General Settings category.

12. Select “Yes” for “Allow management of content types?” and click “OK”.

13. Select “Add from existing site content types” link under Content Types.

14. Select a new custom content type – “Project Release Documents” which you have created in previous steps as shown below.

15. This is an additional step – I am changing order for content types and making “Project Release Documents” as default content type. Select “Change new button order and default content type” link under Content Types.

16. Change the order and select number “1” for “Project Release Document” content type to make it default content type for this document library.

17. So finally content types and columns for your document library will look something like this. Please adjust your column order by clicking on default view – “All Documents”.

18. Now, something very interesting…how content types work with MS Office 2003. Well, keep reading…

As you can see from the screen capture, “Project Release Documents” is the default content type for your document library. Click New menu and select “Project Release Documents” to add a new document (content) to your document library.

19. You will see following message on your screen, if you have MS Office 2003 installed on your machine. Click “OK”

20. It will allow you to use MS Office 2003 (Word 2003) to create a new document. As you have already noticed MS Office 2003 will not allow you add/edit metadata in Word application itself. Add some text to this document and click “Save” icon.

21. Now, you can add those metadata properties for your document however I have noticed that couple of document properties is still missing…I don’t know why. I need to check it out later but anyways it will allow you to add metadata properties for your document using MS Office 2003 and that is what is more important.

22. To add those missing metadata properties, I am going to right click on document in my document library and select “Edit Properties” link.

23. Adding those missing metadata properties, which I could not see in MS Office 2003 for some reasons.

24. Finally here is the document in document library which was created using custom content type and MS Office 2003.

Now, here is the scenario for those unlucky people who can not work with content types using MS Office 2003.

Note: This site belongs to different SharePoint test environment than the previous one.

1. I have created ProjDocs document library and it has “Test Content Type” as default content type.

2. Attempt to create a new document in ProjDocs document library. Same message will pop up, which is shown is previous screen capture before opening MS Office 2003 (Word 2003) for creating a new document.

3. Unfortunately when you try to save this document, it will give you following error message. When you (keep) clicking on either “Yes” or “No” button, it will finally add this new document to ProjDocs but all metadata properties will be missing and you can not add metadata properties even by editing properties in SharePoint.

4. Document “Test2” was added.

5. Trying to edit metadata properties by right clicking “Test2” document in ProjDocs document library and selecting “Edit Properties” link.

6. Unfortunately it does NOT allow adding those missing metadata properties.

7. Here is the work around. If you want to create a new document, simply upload a new document and it will allow you to add those metadata properties but if you want to edit metadata properties of existing document unfortunately you have to download that document to your local computer first and then upload it back to edit/update its metadata properties. Here is the screen capture for uploading a new document to ProjDocs document library.

8. Enter metadata properties for this document and you are done!

9. Here is how ProjDocs document library looks like after uploading those two documents.

Note: Error: 'length' is null or not an object is environment specific. It happened in our environment after we installed one of the hot fixes (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/935958) for resolving the other issue.

Here is the hot fix for those who are unable to work with content types using MS Office 2003.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;950292

This hot fix also resolves issues to work with multiple content types using MS Office 2003.

Note: I have taken screen captures from two separate SharePoint environments.

Step 1-24 are from the enviornment, that does NOT have http://support.microsoft.com/kb/935958 hot fix applied and we can work with content types using MS Office 2003 without any issues.

Step 1-9 are from the environment, that has http://support.microsoft.com/kb/935958 hot fix applied and for some reasons we are unable to work with content types using MS Office 2003 after applying that hot fix. We have to apply http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;950292 hot fix to resolve errors explained in these steps but we will have MS Office 2007 available very soon so we have NOT applied it yet.

Note: MS Exchange or your mail distribution system (Majordomo in our case) must be configured to route all emails that suffix with @sharepoint.hq.MyDomainName.com to C:\Inetpub\mailroot\Drop folder of SMTP Virtual Server installed on MOSSServer1.

10. Safe E-Mail Servers: Accept mail from all e-mail servers is selected.

That's it, incoming e-mail feature for MOSS 2007 is configured...Congratulations!

Now, Let's talk about testing this feature...(Please keep in mind that we have Unix based Majordomo mail distribution system in our organization) Most of the time it worked fine for receiving e-mails in SharePoint however we stopped receiving e-mails after 2-3 days of testing. We were unable to telnet into server on port 25. SharePoint server(with Virutal SMTP Server installed) was not listening on port 25. We checked “Connection” property under “Access” tab of SMTP Virtual Server properties and noticed that SMTP server is accepting connection only from 196.X.X.123 server however we configured to receive e-mails from any e-mail server. So We removed that IP Address (196.X.X.123) from the “Computers” tab and set connection settings to “All except the list below” by keeping “Computers” tab empty. After this change, we started receiving e-mails in SharePoint as normal but question was how this change was occurred and who made changes to “Connection” settings? and here is the answer :-)

While testing incoming e-mail feature in SharePoint, we set “Accept mails from these safe e-mail servers” with the above IP Address (196.X.X.123) and that changed “Connection” settings of SMTP Virtual Server in IIS. This was the root cause of this issue. So be very careful when you make any configuration changes to your incoming e-mail settings.

As I mentioned before I am pretty excited about announcing this feature in our SharePoint production enviornment however here are the few things what I am concerned about,

How can we manage undelivered emails?

1. What happens to emails, which are sent to wrong email addresses? SharePoint logs refer that as Unknown Alias. How does SMTP server handles it? Is there anyway we(or SharePoint Admin email account) can get notified for undelivered email messages? We tried to set email account in SMTP server properties for Undelivered emails but that didn't help. We would like sender to receive bounce back email when email is sent to wrong email address or at least SharePoint administrator account get notified when email is not delivered to SharePoint.

2. We have Distribution List set for different groups. Let's say for example, dl-spadmins has all email accounts of SharePoint administrators. If we add email address for SharePoint document library in this DL and then send email to dl-spadmins, all members of that DL receive email but SharePoint document library does NOT receive this email. Is there anyway to troubleshoot this issue?

Why we want to add email address for SharePoint document library to Distribution List (DL)? Because we can not find those contacts in SharePoint even though we have configured Directory Management Service for incoming email feature in SharePoint and that is because we have Majordomo mail distribution system instead of MS Exchange (I believe this is the reason, we can not find those contacts in MS Outlook but I am not sure) So if we add contacts for important SharePoint document libraries to DL of relevant department (Site Collection), anybody can send email to DL, which will send email/document to all the members of DL as well as SharePoint document library and nobody needs to remember email address of SharePoint document library. All they need to do is, just send an email to DL and it will reach both the members of DL and SharePoint document library, which these members are going to access later.

When you add email address of email enabled Document Library to Distribution List(DL), permissions for email must be set to "Accept e-mail messages from any sender" in order to receive email in SharePoint and yes, It shows "System Account" for those messages or the documents received in Document Library. This is already been discussed in this Blog and unfortunately we are still struggling for an appropriate solution. If you set "Save all attachments in folders grouped by e-mail sender" , it creates a new folder for each new sender and then add attachments to that folder however it still shows "System Account" under "Modified By" field but at least it gives you an idea (by looking at the folder name) who sent that email/documents to your Document Library.

If you set "Accept e-mail messages based on document library permissions" then the email will not be received in SharePoint.

One more thing...

If you set "Accept e-mail messages based on document library permissions" option for your Document Library and if somebody, who doesn't have permissions on your Document Library sends an email to your Document Library, it never arrives in your Document Library. Also Sender will not receive any bounce back. So Sender assumes that he has successfully sent an email to your Document Library and you never receive it. Now, this issue might be specific to Majordomo(Unix based) email distribution system and may work well with MS Exchange configuration. I have tested this in my Lab with MS Exchange and I believe it sends the bounce back message if you don't have permissions on the Document Library but I am not 100% sure. :-(

Finally here is the matrix for reusing same contact name for same library or different library in SharePoint,



References:
http://www.combined-knowledge.com/Downloads%202007.htm
http://www.toddklindt.com/blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=31

Back in September 2007, we upgraded SharePoint Portal Server 2003(SPS 2003) to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007). For some unknown reasons, after finalizing upgrade to MOSS 2007, We have MOSS 2007 environment depending on configuration database of SPS 2003. We are unable to create a new site collection/site if we detach old SPS 2003 configuration database.

One of the best possible way to fix this issue is to reconfigure existing SharePoint 2007 environment and get rid of both old SPS 2003 configuration database and old MOSS 2007 configuration database, which was created as a part of migration to MOSS 2007. We can also think of creating a new web application (Portal Site) and move content databases from original web application to a new web application however we did not want to take any risk of inviting new issues without thoroughly testing it in our MOSS 2007 stage environment, which is almost identical to our MOSS 2007 production environment. I will talk about these two approaches for fixing old (SPS 2003) configuration database dependency issue some other day but my intension of mentioning this issue is to talk about how to make Office 2003 web parts and components to work if in case you upgrade or reconfigure your MOSS 2007 environment.

As I mentioned before, the best possible way to resolve SPS 2003 configuration database depedency issue in MOSS 2007 is to reconfigure MOSS 2007 and that is what we tried first in our MOSS 2007 stage environment. SharePoint stage environment was upgraded to MOSS 2007 the same way as production environment and stage environment also has SPS 2003 configuration database dependency issue. So we reconfigured SharePoint stage environment successfully (I will talk about it in detail some other day) and we noticed that we were unable to install Office 2003 web parts and components after this. We are still using MS Office 2003 company wide. So the only option, we were left with was to reinstall Office 2003 web parts without installing WSS 2.0/SPS 2003. We tried to install Office 2003 web parts and we received following error:

"You must install Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 before you install Office 2003 Web Parts and Components."

We found following KB Articles, which explain more about this error message and its work around.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929320
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927602
Here is the link for downloading Office 2003 Add-in for MOSS 2007,

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=38be67a5-2056-46a1-84b1-337ffb549c5c&displaylang=en

So if you upgrade SPS 2003 to MOSS 2007 or if you reconfigure existing MOSS 2007 environment and if you want to reinstall Office 2003 web parts (to use it with MS Office 2003, I know nobody would personally prefer it over MS Office 2007 but if your company is still using MS Office 2003 with MOSS 2007), you can download and install Office 2003 Add-in from above link, which will allow you to use Office 2003 web parts in MOSS 2007.

Thanks to Microsoft for releasing this Add-in on time otherwise we would require to start from the scratch, meaning refresh OS on the servers, install SPS 2003 and then upgrade it back to MOSS 2007 just to have Office 2003 web parts working in MOSS 2007.

First of all, let me make this clear that I am not a good SharePoint Developer but I have tried my best to achieve this programmatically.

Few days back, we decided to outsource SharePoint support. The new support professionals will be responsible for troubleshooting basic SharePoint issues and if require, they should be able to provide the end user with the contact information of particular site collection administrator.

Basic SharePoint issues such as - Request for creating a new sub site under particular site collection(Top Level Site or Departmental Site), Unable to access SharePoint, Unable to edit SharePoint contents, Unable to access lists, libraries etc.

We have site collection created for each department and each site collection has one or more site collection administrators, who are responsible for managing the site collection, they belong to. If site collection administrators are unable to address the end user's issue, the request will be forwarded to SharePoint Farm Administrators - I am the part of that team.

Now as we decided to outsource SharePoint support, we had following requirements:

1. Create a new AD account, which will be used by all the support professionals to access any site with "Administrator" privileges in the SharePoint server farm. Lets say this account is "domain\spsupport"
2. If any support professional is unable to resolve the issue and he/she wants to direct end user's request to the site collection administrator, he/she should be able to access any site collection with "Administrator" privileges to provide name and contact information of site collection administrator to the end user. Support professional should use "domain\spsupport" account for this purpose. They can also use this account to find out the content owner information and forward permissions requests/issues to the content owner - e.g. If somebody needs access to a specific document library of a site or when somebody request specific permissions to lists/libraries of a site.
3. Finally make "domain\spsupport" account as site collection administrator for all the site collections in the SharePoint server farm.

We have almost 300 site collections and adding "domain\spsupport" account as site collection administrator to each site collection using Central Administration site or Site Settings does not seem to be an appropriate solution. So I decided to write a simple C# application which will output stsadm commands for adding "domain\spsupport" account as site collection administrator to each site collection in the farm.



Here is the code,

Note:

1. This code assumes that you have all the site collections created under "sites/"
2. This is a console application so you have to use it the way you use stsadm command.
3. This code will output stsadm commands. You may run it as follows to generate batch file for all the stsadm commands,

AddSCAdmin.exe -url http://sharepoint.domain.com -user domain\spsupport > addSCAdmin.bat

4. Finally you can run addSCAdmin.bat file, which will execute all the stsadm commands for adding domain\spsupport account as site collection administrator.

5. addSCAdmin.bat file should look like this,

stsadm -o siteowner -url http://sharepoint.domain.com/sites/SC1 -secondarylogin domain\spsupport
stsadm -o siteowner -url http://sharepoint.domain.com/sites/SC2 -secondarylogin domain\spsupport
stsadm -o siteowner -url http://sharepoint.domain.com/sites/SC3 -secondarylogin domain\spsupport
stsadm -o siteowner -url http://sharepoint.domain.com/sites/ITSiteCollection -secondarylogin domain\spsupport
stsadm -o siteowner -url http://sharepoint.domain.com/sites/MktSC -secondarylogin domain\spsupport
...............................
...................
........


Disclaimer: Please do not use this code unless you have tested it in test environment first. I will not be responsible for the outcome of this code.

using System;
using System.Collections;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;
using Microsoft.SharePoint;
using Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration;
using Microsoft.SharePoint.StsAdmin;

namespace AddSCAdmin
{
    class AddSCAdminClass
    {              
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            AddSCAdminClass sc = new AddSCAdminClass();
            sc.addSiteCollectionAdmin(args);
        }

        private void addSiteCollectionAdmin(string[] args)
        {
            try
            {
                string mode = "";
                string virtualserver = "";
                string user = "";

                // get command line arguments
                if ((args.Length == 0) || (args.Length == 1 && (args[0] == "-?" || args[0] == "-help")))
                {
                    displayOutput("", mode);
                    displayOutput("AddSCAdmin.exe -url VirtualServerURL -user domainuser [-quiet]", mode);
                    displayOutput("", mode);
                    displayOutput("  -url VirtualServerURL: Full URL of virtual server starting with http://", mode);
                    return;
                }

                // loop through command line arguments
                for (int i = 0; i < args.Length; i++)
                {
                    if (args[i] == "-url")
                    {
                        virtualserver = args[i+1];
                        i++;
                        // make sure url parameter starts with http:
                        if (!virtualserver.StartsWith("http:"))
                        {
                            throw new ArgumentOutOfRangeException("url parameter should start with http://");
                        }
                    }
                    else if (args[i] == "-user")
                    {
                        user = args[i + 1];
                        i++;
                    }
                      
                    else if (args[i] == "-quiet")
                    {
                        mode = "quiet";
                        continue;
                    }
                    else
                    {
                        displayOutput(String.Format("Unrecognized switch {0}", args[i]),mode);
                        return;
                    }
                }

                // connect to web application on virtualserver
                SPWebApplication webApp = SPWebApplication.Lookup(new Uri(virtualserver));
                // create site collections object for web application
                SPSiteCollection siteCollections = webApp.Sites;

                string SCUrl = "";
                int SCCount = 0;
                // loop through site collections
                foreach (SPSite siteCollection in siteCollections)
                {
                    //site = new SPSite(siteCollection.Url);
                    SCUrl = siteCollection.Url;
                    if (SCUrl.Contains("sites"))
                    {
                        SCCount++;
                        Console.WriteLine("stsadm -o siteowner -url " + siteCollection.Url +" -secondarylogin "+user);
                    }
                }
                //Console.WriteLine("Total Site Collection: " + SCCount);
            }
            catch (Exception e)
            {
                Console.WriteLine(e.Message);
            }
        }

        private void displayOutput(string text, string mode)
        {
            if (mode != "quiet")
            {
                Console.WriteLine(text);
            }
        }
    }
}


I have created C# project for this solution. Please send me an email if you want the zip file for the whole project.

I hope this will help few people for such specific need.