This is what I came up with

Create your list (announcements) or choose an existing one

Create a new view named ‘Todays Items’

Set the filter property of the view to filter on a column – I chose Created but any date time column will do. Most likely a new column will be created just for this purpose such as a ‘Publish Date ‘. This would allow the person entering the announcement to specify when it was to be shown

Filter would be like this Created ‘is Equal To’ [Today]

Change the Item limit to an appropriate number – in my case 1

Save and test the view

Navigate to the Home Page – default.aspx modify the web part for announcements and associate it with the new ‘Todays Items’ View

I have met a number of people who take a quick look at it and write it off as being too simple. Take a second glance and investigate the branching feature as this allows some interesting scenarios which can make this a very worthwhile tool. Branching allows scenarios such as

What is your favourite type of drink Tea or Coffee

If the answer is tea then a specific set of questions is presented – What type of tea, Ceylon, Indian, earl grey …

Plan out your survey questions (on paper)

Create a new Survey list

Add all of your questions and be sure to add a single final question such as “Any Further Comments ” with a single line of text as the question type.

Use the list Settings and visit each question and set the branching logic.

It’s important to branch from each question’s response to another question otherwise you will get some strange results.

When the survey has been in use for a while you can get a nice summary by exporting it to Excel – this shows each combination of answers.

How will you know when there are some responses? One way is to use the “My Alerts” feature on the survey list so that you are notified when changes have been made.

As with all lists in SharePoint they are easy to create and with a bit of thought can provide real value to your end users.

This is something I need to do occasionally when setting up a new server for a development environment but not so frequently that it comes to mind automatically. The standard SharePoint error message gives minimal information. For a development set up we need as much help as we can get. This proves beneficial when testing/ debugging code created within Visual Studio and when building no code solutions with SharePoint Designer.

Steps to Add Debugging configuration settings to a SharePoint Server

Locate the appropriate Web.config file

1. Start IIS Manager
   1. Navigate to the required SharePoint Web Application
   2. Right Click and Select Explore

Change the web.config entries

1. Make a copy of the web.config file in case things go wrong
2. Right Click on the web.config file and select open with | Notepad

Change the Error messages that are displayed from the standard general message

1. Locate the entry that looks like this

<customErrors mode=”On” />

And change it to

<customErrors mode=”Off” />

Allow debugging of the web application via visual studio

1. Locate the following entry

<compilation batch=”false” debug=”false”>

Change it to

<compilation batch=”false” debug=”true“>

Allow extra debug information to be output directly on web pages

1. Locate the following Entry

<SafeMode MaxControls=”200″ CallStack=”false” DirectFileDependencies=”10″ TotalFileDependencies=”50″ AllowPageLevelTrace=”false”>

And change it to

 <SafeMode MaxControls=”200″ CallStack=”true” DirectFileDependencies=”10″ TotalFileDependencies=”50″ AllowPageLevelTrace=”true“>

Needless to say these Changes should only be made to development servers