Three months

Well.. it's been three months since I last posted about list hell. It's not really gotten any better, but at least there's a light at the end of the tunnel. Last week, a teammate (cohort?) and I were blessed with some Training. Yes, Training for the product that barely exists at a support or documentation level.

Brief rant: If I order one more freaking Sharepoint book that says it's published and it tells me that it's on "backorder" or will take 4-6 weeks to ship, I'm going to go PMS on someone. Set a date and stick to it, I'd get my butt fired if I met deadlines like these freaking publishing companies as of late.

So for now, I've been curling up with the big blue book, the Sharepoint Administrators Guide.. written by Mr. Bill English. It's good.. the community stuff is really insightul... it's a double edged sword, tho.. I'm not a programmer so lots of the customization stuff is over my head. It's kind of like watching Wheel of Fortune and feeling like God's gift to Sharepoint and then flipping the channel to Jeopardy - and suddenly you wonder where your extra chromosome came from. Those are the times that Bill gets set down and I pick up Vanessa Williams' Sharepoint 2007 for Dummies. For the times in between, the Sharepoint Users' Guide by Apress is tres good. The course book for 5061 was great when we were in class but it's a blessing if I can find anything now, the index is horrible. Note: the apress book has an already rather large user maintained error correction section. If something doesn't work, check the list. It might just be a misprint.

Anyways, back to the supporting files thingy. Yep, it seems that there are way more people that can't do it than can. I'm still watching the groups and commiserating where appropriate. Can't wait till someone explains how to fix it or Microsoft issues a fix of some sort because it's a bug. If anyone has any insight, I'm begging for an email.. (Recap: in designer, create a custom edit list and try and reassign the default form for the list source in supporting files on list properties and the selection for display-displayform.aspx, edit-editform.aspx, new-newform.aspx.. all grayed out. No way to change them. Modifying the aforementioned files from the default webpart actually will nullify the link and users get booted back to the toplevel site.) The most useful suggestion I've seen so far is to actually modify the link in the database. There's *got* to be a better way.