Google Analytics Becomes Even Better!

Google Analytics Blog: New Version of Google Analytics!

I've already blogged about the Google Tools I love. This has now become even better than it was. With all the information you need available at immediately on a number of dashboards.

Once drawback with the old interface is that you had to dig a bit deeply to arrive to the required information. Now all the information is available at a glance.

If you still haven't used it, you should definetely give it a try. You'll defintely have a good run for your money :P (since it absolutely free :)

SharePoint 2007: Keep all your templates in a common Document Library

Document based Content Types are a nice way of creating document templates in Document Libraries.

Creating Templates

• Site Actions > Site Settings > Site Content Types
• Create a new Document based Content Type
• Go to the Advanced Settings

Here there are two ways in which you can upload a document template:

1. Upload a new document template - this has a disadvantage that when if you would want to change the template you would have to find the Site Content Type and upload a new document. This is not a very user-friendly approach.
2. Enter the URL of an existing document template - what you should be doing is create an "Administration" with access to a few select users / groups. In this site create a Document Templates document library. Any document templates you need should go in here (Example MeetingAgendaTemplate.doc). Once you have uploaded your document template, copy its URL and put this in the Advanced Settings of the Site Content Type for your template.

With this approach, if a template changes you just guide your users to change the template in the Document Templates library. Since your content type is reading from this library, the new template will now be used automatically.

You should then take the necessary precautions to not allow users to change this document library unintentionally, such as hiding it from search results and assigning the appropriate permissions.

SharePoint 2007: DataViews - the best most flexible SharePoint toy (and how to solve rich text field HTML problems)

I have recently discovered the wonder that is a Data View web part. This web part is an invaluable tool in creating different views of data in your sites (or from external sources).

One of the things I have used it for is to display data from two list linked via a lookup. There are tons of pages on Data Views.

One of the weird things I found with the Data View was that when I tried to display data from a Rich Text field (containing rich formatting) I got a number or <div> and other HTML characters, which obviously were very unsightly.

To remove these, in SharePoint Designer I found the <xsl:value-of select="@your rich text field"> for the column and added the disable-output-escaping="yes" tag to it i.e.

from

<xsl:value-of select="@your rich text field">

to

<xsl:value-of select="@your rich text field" escaping="yes">