Macaw Reskinner

Wow, a whole year. More even, 13 months. How can so much time pass without a blog posting? Perhaps I got lazy. There are so many great SharePoint bloggers out there now, I didn't feel the need to post information. I also didn't want to become an "echo" blog, repeating the latest news that so many blogs seem to do. I like to think that as my role became one of project management, I didn't really come across many technical insights to share with the world.

But anyway....

You certainly start to become more attuned to the business challenges, and consequences, of implementing SharePoint, but you feel that you can't really post on work that is internal to a company.

However, there is on thing that I have come across recently that I should definitely mention.

The one thing everybody comments on, and Microsoft assures us is fixed in the next version, is options that people don't have permission to use are presented to every user. The other is the administration headache of making changes to layout. The amount of files you end up having to change is huge, and you can't help feeling that you're almost breaking SharePoint as you make those changes to allitems.aspx etc etc.

A long while ago, I posted on how difficult the problem of customisation is. It received a lot of comments. I guess many people had the same problems. However, one comment offered a solution that had been proposed before, but never implemented until then.

Alas, I didn't take the time to research it as it wouldn't have helped me then. But someone else did, and commented back on the same article, very positively. Recently I faced some challenges in an implementation, and my memory brought those comments to mind.

Essentially, Serge van den Oever created a httpModule that uses regexp to edit html on the server, after it has been generated by SharePoint. This means you can edit the html of SharePoint web pages, on the server, without touching a single SharePoint config file or .aspx page, before they are sent down the wire to the user. While it may add overhead to your processing time, it is a beautifully clean solution, compared to the alternatives I have seen ( and implemented) before.

That text and those links generated by locked down Microsoft dll's can now be search and replaced away by a simple regex. If for example you're one of those people needing to strip away that site settings link across all WSS sites on a server, I would recommend trying this out. The package can be downloaded from gotdotnet.