With SharePoint 2010 Service Pack 1, one of the new features that was introduced was a site and site collection level recycle bin.

Once Service Pack 1 has been installed within your SharePoint environment, deleted sites will appear in the Site Collection Recycle Bin ((Site Settings -> Site Collection Administration -> Recycle Bin) under “Items Deleted From End User Recycle Bin”.

If you have a deleted Site Collection that you need to rescue, you can run a Powershell Command to get your site back.

First you must run the Get-SPDeletedSite command to retrieve information regarding deleted site collections that exist within the farm.

Then once you know the ID of the deleted site collection, you can run the following command.

Restore-SPDeletedSite -Identity ENTER ABOVE VALUE FOR SITEID

And just like that your site collection is restored!

For example, when you attempt to create a new site, you may only see the following as options:

In addition, you may want to create a simple collaboration list such as a contacts list, but when you go to the list creation options, you only see the following:

However have no fears! You can still create items based on the missing templates, you just have to enable the options for these other templates first. So here are the steps you need to follow:

Configuring Which Site Templates Are Available For Use as a Subsite

1. Select Site Settings from the Site Actions menu.
2. From the Look and Feel section of links, select the Site Templates and Page Layouts option.

    

   

    

3. From this location you can either select to all subsites to use any template or you can specifically select your desired templates to allow from this list.

    

So you might be thinking, “Why didn’t they just allow all site templates to be used from the start? It’s so lame that I have to complete this step”.

Well the truth is that this is just a single step in configuring the Publishing Portal (or any site collection) for use and it’s a valid consideration when planning your SharePoint site collections to determine which subsites you are going to allow from specific areas. As an example, in a Projects area, you may only want users to create sites that are based upon the templates you have defined for managing projects. Therefore you would restrict the Projects landing area to only allow those templates as subsites. Similarly if you have a Departmental sites area and you have defined a standard template for Departmental sites, you would apply this setting there so that people couldn’t just choose any site for that area.

Configuring the Publishing Portal to Allow All Common Collaborative List Templates

1. Select Site Settings from the Site Actions menu.
2. From the Site Administration section of links, select the Site Features option.
3. Scroll to the Team Collaboration Lists feature and click Activate.

    

   

Now when you return to the list creation screen, you will see all the common collaborative list types including the missing Contacts list.

Again you may be asking why this wasn’t enabled by default like it was in 2007. Well the truth here again comes down to initially limiting choices to those most commonly required for a specific site type or usage scenario. Because the Publishing Portal is a template designed for usage around a communications type site using the publishing capabilities of SharePoint, collaborative features are not turned on by default. However as you can see, they can be added if required by following the above described steps. That said, I do advise to use careful planning when turning on features to ensure you are activating features in the places where you actually need them. To quote a great mind in the SharePoint world, just because you can doesn’t always mean you should. In a lot of cases, you don’t really need or want to be adding collaborative content to the top level of your communications site collection.

First up, we released our latest book! Beginning SharePoint 2010: Building Business Solutions with SharePoint.  This book was a major effort and consumed the majority of my non-business time related to the world of SharePoint in the past year.  Of course, it was a joint effort between my most awesome co-authors, Shane Perran, Jennifer Mason and Laura Rogers.  So far feedback on this book has been great and I think it is an excellent asset for anyone that is getting started with SharePoint 2010 that is either completely new or has had prior experience with a previous version.

Another reason for the slow down has been a major extension to our little family.  Shane and I now have a daughter, Dylan Perran.  She is an amazing little girl and a total breath of fresh air that was much needed in the past year between professional life and an illness in the household.  She has introduced a whole new role to my life as a mother and its one that I am enjoying tremendously.

So now that things have settled down a bit, I am looking forward to getting back into writing. I am currently on Maternity Leave from work so its nice to spend some time with technology that is more around discovery, research and investigation and less about projects and timelines.

Shane and I are also planning to launch a new site in the near future but we will be cross posting for a while on our existing blogs.

If you have a Content Query Web Part (CQWP) on a page that is pointing to a SharePoint Library (Asset, Picture, or Document), you may discover that an anonymous user will receive an exception error similar to the following when they access the page. 

Unable to display this Web Part. To troubleshoot the problem, open this Web page in a Microsoft SharePoint Foundation-compatible HTML editor such as Microsoft SharePoint Designer. If the problem persists, contact your Web server administrator.

Correlation ID: Blah Blah Blah

Meanwhile an authenticated user will see the content just fine.  At first, my instinct was to look to see if I had made an error in the custom xsl that I had applied to the web part.  But alas, I then remembered that I do not make errors. (Just kidding!!!) However applying a default style resulted in the same error.  As did pointing the web part to another library and trying different page layouts etc…  I then thought perhaps that a stylesheet was checked out and not published as that might help explain the different behaviour for the different user types.  But again this turned out not to be the issue.

Then I did some searching around and found a great blog post by Waldek Mastykarz that is the solution to the above error.  Essentially the problem is caused by missing values for the CommonViewFields property of your web part.  By exporting the web part, opening it in Notepad and replacing the CommonViewFields property line with Waldek’s suggested properties and importing the web part back onto the page – you are golden!

A big thanks to Waldek for coming up with this fix! Saved me a major headache.

Session Abstract:

Effectively Leveraging Project 2010 with SharePoint 2010 for Project Management Success

Microsoft Project is a project management tool widely used by project managers today. Its’ ability to support project managers to define a schedule, assign resources to tasks and track project status has been instrumental in contributing to project success. However, it can be a challenge for a project manager to share project information and collaborate with the project team with Microsoft Project alone. Microsoft SharePoint 2010 can complement Microsoft Project 2010 and address this gap.
 
In this session, you will learn how to:
- Effectively create a Microsoft Project Plan
- Create a SharePoint-based Project Management Information System (PMIS)
- Integrate Microsoft Project information with SharePoint
- Empower a project team to collaboratively share relevant information
- Build a project management dashboard in SharePoint

Live Meeting URL

Sign Up to Our Facebook Group and Event

Web Content Management with SharePoint 2010
Looking for a detailed overview on the capabilities of SharePoint Server 2010 for your company’s public facing website.  Or perhaps you are interested in building an Intranet for your organization that doesn’t have that “SharePointy” look and feel.  Join us for a review of the web content management features of SharePoint Server 2010 as well as an overview of your options to brand your website to look exactly how you want it.
Level: Beginner – Intermediate

Live Meeting Address:

https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/mvp/join?id=SPN082510&role=attend&pw=SPN_0825

Creating Custom Actions within SharePoint

Custom Actions control features in SharePoint such as the Edit Control Block, the Site Actions menu, toolbars, and the links within the Site Settings page. Learn how to leverage Custom Actions to extend the SharePoint User Interface. This session will describe the basics of Custom Actions, a demonstration to build one or more and apply them to a site in SharePoint, as well as provide resources for additional information.
Level: Beginner – Intermediate

Presenter Name: Geoff Varosky
Email: gvarosky@grace-hunt.com
Twitter: @gvaro
Blog: http://www.geoffvarosky.com
Photo: http://www.grace-hunt.com/PublishingImages/Geoff150.jpg
Bio: Geoff Varosky (MCP, MCTS) is a Senior Solutions Developer for Grace-Hunt, LLC (http://www.grace-hunt.com), a Microsoft Gold Partner focusing on SharePoint and Dynamics Solutions based out of Hudson, MA. He has been architecting and developing web based applications for over a decade, and has been working with SharePoint Technologies for the past 6 years. Geoff is an active member of the SharePoint community, and speaks regularly at SharePoint events and user groups, and maintains a blog on SharePoint at http://www.geoffvarosky.com.

Live Meeting Address:

https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/mvp/join?id=N2MK63&role=attend&pw=SPN072110

Happy Customizin’

Please join us on Wednesday July 21st at 9am PDT!

Join the MVP Chat Here!

Is this a book on SharePoint Development or for End Users?

I get this question a lot.  Officially we state that this book is ideal for anyone getting started with SharePoint as it will bring you end to end on the various features and functionilty that are available out of the box in SharePoint.  Our goal is to teach the readers how to use and configure the various settings to build an environment that matches their business needs.  So in my opinion if you have been given the keys to SharePoint in your organization and are responsible for configuring it to meet your needs, then our book will be perfect for you.  Now if you are developer, I still think you should read this book because its critical that you understand what SharePoint provides from a features and functionality point of view before you crack open Visual Studio and decide to build everything from scratch yourself. Having a solid understanding of what the platform provides is your first step to becoming a solid SharePoint developer as you need to understand where the logical points of extension are.  Sadly I have come across too many situations in my consultant life where a developer or set of developers have custom built items that existed in SharePoint out of the box simply because they were not aware the feature even existed.