SharePoint: Don’t Automate, Do Stuff by Hand
January 4, 2009
The SharePointer (a place of sharing pointers) published “MOSS Variations: Page Properties that Do Not Get Propagated to Target Variations” is a useful article for two reasons. First, it solves a mystery that the geese at Beyond Search have encountered. Second, the write up shows what’s wrong with SharePoint. Why automate a function when you can do the work manually? Makes sense to some, I guess.
The author of the useful article here is Tehnoon Raza, a Senior Support Escalation Engineer at Microsoft. I love that title. At Beyond Search we will definitely add that to our SharePoint expert’s title. Now to the good stuff. Mr. Raza’s article explains that when you propagate a source site to its variations, the copy does not copy everything. The work around is easy. Create a custom column and manually insert these items for each page you want to propagate:
- URL Name (seems important, right?)
- Title
- Description
- Schedule Start Date
- Schedule End Date
- Audience Targeting
- Contact
- Contact Name
- Contact E-mail Address (another important item, right?)
- Contact Picture.
I did not notice an explanation that made much sense to me, an addled goose. You may be more in tune with the Microsoft way. My thought was, “Why not copy the properties?” No problem when there is one page. The recommended approach begs for a script when there are two or more pages. Maybe I’m missing something, but this strikes me as sort of clunky. Oh, hold on. Tess, our SharePoint expert, has a comment. She says, “It’s something a box would definitely not do.” Wow. Harsh.
Stephen Arnold, January 4, 2009
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