Wednesday, March 22, 2006

SP2003: Delete My Site

While working on customizing the My Site default layout, I found that I needed to be able to delete my My Site and have it recreated from scratch.
So far, the way I've found to do this takes 2 steps.

First, delete the contents of My Site:
Go to My Site
click the "Modify My Page" dropdown link
click "Reset Page Content"
- note: if you do not see a "Reset Page Content" link then no content change were made so you are all set.

Second, delete the site collection:
Go to the Windows SharePoint Services Central Administration
click on "Delete site collection"
enter the site in the following format:
http://SERVERNAME/personal/USERNAME

Monday, March 6, 2006

SP2003: Import Contacts missing fields

Recently when updating a Contacts list using the "Import Contacts" feature, I noticed that the Business 2 telephone number field was not importing. Apparently not all of the Outlook fields will import into a Contacts list

Looking into this some more, I found the following page on Microsoft's site:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sppt/reskit/c4061881x.mspx

According to this site, only certain fields from Outlook's contacts will import into SharePoint. Apparently if your field is not in the list, you are out of luck:

It is not possible to add new fields to the import list. Even though GAL entries include Web Page and Notes fields, Windows SharePoint Services does not import information from those GAL fields, even though it does import that information from Outlook contacts. Also, Windows SharePoint Services does not import the Full Name value from either Outlook contacts or GAL entries.

Based on that, it sounds like it is a limitation of both Outlook and SharePoint... Outlook doesn't provide a GAL (Global Address List) view of all of a contact's fields, and SharePoint doesn't support all of the GAL's that are provided (namely Notes and Web Page)

Here is the list of what is supported:

  • First Name
  • Last Name

  • E-mail

  • Company

  • Job Title

  • Business Phone

  • Home Phone

  • Mobile

  • Business Fax

  • Street Address

  • City

  • State

  • Zip/Postal Code

  • Country/Region