SharePoint Designer – The Cat Is Out of the Bag

Today marks the official release of SharePoint Designer as a free product offering from Microsoft.  While overall, this announcement can certainly be considered a good thing by the SharePoint community (who doesn’t like free stuff?), as a SharePoint “administrator” it makes me cringe. It is a good thing all of us have “locked downSharePoint Designer in our respective environments.

SharePoint Designer Now Free

You did remember to lock down, didn’t you?

[Download]

Session Timeouts, Windows Authentication, and SharePoint

Over at (slightly) Behind the Curve, there is a posting on modifying your master page to allow for Session based timeouts for an integrated Windows security site. I found it to be quite helpful for a solution that is being implemented at a client for an extranet.

Altering an Announcements Web Part Character Limit

To alter the character limit of an Announcements List web part (in Summary View), there is an attribute that must be set through SharePoint Designer on the page that contains the web part. Perform a search for the string “Limit Len=” on the page in question and alter the value to reflect the character limit you would like.

Note: The default character limit attribute is set to 250 characters.