This may be the final entry in my little mini-series based on lessons learned while creating pages and content for the Sharing the Point (STP) site. It’s definitely going to be the final post in the series prior to my leaving on Saturday for a barnstorming trip that will see me covering the Australia SharePoint Conference in Sydney on March 8 and 9, and then covering the Sharing the Point tour itself, with stops in Beijing, Manila, and Ho Chi Minh City over the following five days.  I’ll be blogging like crazy all the while, both here in Bamboo Nation (though not here in SharePoint Blank – as with all of my event coverage, those posts will appear in either the Bamboo Team Blog or the SharePoint 2010 blog), and on the STP site blog.

Sorry, where was I? Oh, right back to the topic at hand … real-world SharePoint 2010 lessons learned while working on the STP site.

There are two issues that I encountered while working on the site that I haven’t yet touched on in this series.  One of the issues was easily resolved (albeit not resolved yours truly), but the other one frustrated me for some time before I figured out what was going on. The issue that turned out to be easily addressed had to do with the location to which images are uploaded within the site.  When uploading images, I was presented with two options, Site Assets, and Shared Documents and, as it turns out, I chose poorly. This was discovered Eric Harlan in his pre-launch QA of the site, and he gently let me know that:

… the images of the people on the bios page were still in the collab site so users are going to get prompted for login info when they bring up the page. You probably didn’t see that because you were logged in at the time you created it. I moved the photos to the main site which is anonymously available.

So, the lesson learned, and it seems obvious now, is that where you upload an image within a SharePoint site may have consequences, particularly if the site in question is accessible both to logged-in users as well as anonymous users.

The other issue I’ve encountered, and the one that continued to frustrate me for some time, had to do with the editing of text, specifically attempting to change font styles. It was especially frustrating because this was something that should have been dead simple to accomplish, but on several occasions, I just wasn’t able to change the font style of a block of text before I figured out what must have been going on.  See, when I was editing a page, and using the Editing Tools to Format Text, I would select a block of text with the intent of changing the font, only to be frustratingly denied the ability to do so. I’d choose the desired font from the drop-down menu, and … nothing would change!

Eventually, I realized that this must have been occurring because, at the top of the drop-down menu of fonts, there were two fonts that appeared under the heading of Theme Fonts, and then there were many more font options that appeared beneath those two, under the simple heading of Fonts. Needless to say, I had been attempting to pick from the Fonts list when only the two fonts under the Theme Fonts were permitted for use because they’d been identified as the allowable fonts on the site. Call me crazy, but it sure seems to me that it’d cut down on end-user confusion and frustration if, at default, only the allowable theme fonts appeared in that drop-down menu.

As a final note, I’d like to mention that the pages I created on the site, some of which I’ve included screenshots of in previous posts of this series, no longer look anything like they did when I  created them … and, it must be noted, this is a Very Good Thing.  You see, the Sharing the Point team approached a representative of Pandaweb last month who very generously offered to provide custom site branding and design services, free of charge.  Needless to say, we were quick to accept the offer, and very soon thereafter, the site was sporting a very cool new look and feel as a result of the redesign.  Thanks, Pandaweb!

Oh, and if you check out the home page of the STP site, suddenly find yourself with a burning need to make reference to The Brady Bunch and, ahem, Alice, and then wonder if you’d be the first to make such an association … that would be a “no.”

Signed,
Alice

 Read the entire SharePoint 2010 Lessons Learned series:

• Part 1: Wrestling with Images & Links
• Part 2: How to Create a Blog
• Part 3: How to Create a New Page (and Delete a Page)
• Part 4: How to Grant Permissions
• Part 5: An Image-uploading Caveat Regarding Anonymous Access, and Frustration Involving Modifying Font Styles
• Part 6: A Cautionary Tale Involving Deleting Photos While Editing a Blog Post
• Part 7: What’s Up with Out-of-the-Box Web Analytics for Blogs?
• Part 8: ‘What? I Can’t Embed Video in a Blog Post? You’re Kidding, Right?’