Setting read only fields on an Editform.aspx page

So I was working on a proof of concept assignment that was relatively simple, but thinking about it there was an inherent security issue. The idea for this Sharepoint site is to have a list where someone would register for a research topic. They only get to choose 1 topic. I was going to go about it in a simple way since it’s a POC after all, so it’s just a 2 list solution with a workflow.

All the research topics are entered on one list, and users will just add their name to the desired topic and save the item back to the list, where Ill do some workflow things and remove it from the list of available topics. Since users have edit rights, I removed the toolbar so they can’t delete it on my custom EditForm.aspx page. The big security hoop is them changing the actual content of the topic and or description.

This is where my simple solution comes into play. The EditForm.aspx page renders code that looks like this for the Description field.

Simply change the ControlMode from Edit to Display, and you have a Read Only field on your Edit page. No jQuery, Javascript, or additional CSS required.

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Employee Training template, official release!

After developing this custom template for an internal project, I knew I would have to do some work to be able to recreate and reuse this internally. After a couple weeks of tinkering, deploying and troubleshooting, I have what I believe to be an easily deployable template to manage internal registrations for employee training. After about 10 to 15 minutes of simple configurations, you can have this up and running in your environment.

All that is needed is Sharepoint Designer access and server access if you wish to deploy the STP file as a top level site in a collection. If not, the file can be uploaded to the Site Template Gallery on an existing collection and deployed as a new site.

This should be fully WSS compliant, if you have MOSS you can take advantage of the audience features and security trim things a little cleaner. Link to the original template, link to Dessie’s updates and bug fixes.

I have packaged this into 2 different STP files. Both contain configuration instructions and deployment batch files. One contains HTML emails the other contains more “stock” Sharepoint Designer work flow emails. Choose which ever you’d like.

• Training Template Non-HTML Emails version 1.1
• Training Template Non-HTML Emails version 1.2

P.S. – This looks great with the new Event Planning theme that was released by Microsoft. If you go that route, you’ll want to add some style tags to change the page titles to black so they are readable (and the reason why I included Heather Solomon’s clean calendar CSS file, that theme calendar isn’t styled).

Edit:7/15/09
I believe I have tracked down and resolved the problem people were having deploying the template and creating sites and site collections off of it. I have updated the zip file above. For support reasons, I am eliminating the HTML email version of the download. Please refer to this post on how to configure HTML emails. Sorry, it is too difficult to try and maintain 2 different installations and ensure they are all in sync with the bug fixes.

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Using Information Rights Management and Workflows

My new article posted on EUSP about how to use the Information Management policy to use a workflow in managing a contract list.

Enjoy!

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Great no code solutions

This week Laura Rodgers and Woody Windischman published a couple great blog articles for no code solutions for Sharepoint. These are basic yet highly usable solutions for a drop box for users to upload files that others can’t get access to and a great way to expose libraries (or lists) using the Sharepoint web services. I’ve gone through both of these articles in my test site and all I can say is WOW!

I love seeing solutions like this because I am a horrible code writer. So Laura and Woody, keep these great ideas coming for all the non-developers out there. We appreciate and thank you for your efforts.

I Love the SiteData.asmx Web Service
Using legacy FrontPage functionality in SharePoint and SharePoint Designer to create a file “drop box”

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Blocking Sharepoint Designer – Highlevel Overview

There’s been a lot of buzz going around that Sharepoint Designer will be free in April.  This got me a bit worried as an administrator for our Sharepoint environment.  I’d like to have this user restricted as it can be potentially dangerous if permissions are not properly set.

I was talking with a technician about what would be done to block Sharepoint Designer from running.  Here is a high level view of how we would do it if we proceed down this path.

What would be done is a Group Policy would be created to block the exe or hash from running.  We run a blacklist of malware exes, so SPD would be added to that list.  We then would create an OU in Active Directory that would not inherit this group policy.  This would allow us to create a list of users in AD that should have access to the software.  This would allow us to have strict control over who can use it for design purposes.

We are still discussing whether or not we are going to implement this in our environment.  I am definately for it until we have an idea of the numbers of people interested in using it.

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