Sign in as a different user – SharePoint 2013

Exciting to explore the new and improved features with the release of SharePoint 2013 Preview. However, one thing that I noticed after installing on a test machine is that you no longer see the option to sign in as a different user. This “Sign in as Different User” menu item is very useful when testing applications. Seems like the link purposefully removed from the UI. Is it still under review by Microsoft as this is a preview version or will still be carried over to the final release also. A little comparison with a SP2010 environment shows that the actual link for signing in as a different user is

/_layouts/closeConnection.aspx?loginasanotheruser=true

Fortunately this link still works in the Preview version of SharePoint 2013. So far so good. But is there a way to add the link back to Preview version? The steps to add the link back are mentioned by Nick Grattan in his blog post.

Hope this helps!

SharePoint links list to open in a new window

A SharePoint links list is used to post hyperlinks to Web pages of interest. These hyperlinks can be lists or libraries in the same or different site or even external sites. However, when clicking these links, the default behavior is that the hyperlink opens in the current browser window. That is, it does NOT open the page in a new instance of the browser.

Various solutions described on different blogs have instructions to modify the default behavior with Content Query Web Part, JavaScript code, SharePoint designer etc etc. But the simplest solution to this is to create a site column of type “Hyperlink with formatting and constraints for publishing” and add this column to your list. This column will provide an option to open the hyperlink in a new window.

Here is a step by step procedure to accomplish this.

[Note: You should have publishing feature enabled]

1. Create a Site column of type “Hyperlink with formatting and constraints for publishing”
   (Site Actions -> Site settings -> Site columns -> Create )
2. Add this Site column in your new list
   (List Settings -> Add from existing site columns)

This new column will allow you to add a hyperlink with opening the link in a new window.

Hyperlink – Open New Window

Hope this helps!!!

Calendar view with past events

A lot many of us have been dealing with creating different types of view in SharePoint. The part becomes more tricky when it comes down to creating views for calendar list. Recently I had to deal with creating a view which displays only past events in my calendar.

It could have been pretty simple creating such a view by just filtering on “Start Time“. But bang, SharePoint does not allow selecting “Start Time” / “End Time” in the filter criteria. Now here’s the suggested workaround. Create a new calculated column (Type: Date Only) which copies the “Start Time” and you are good to go.

But there’s a catch. This workaround will only work when there is a fixed start and end time specified for your event. But this may not always be the case. Events can also be specified as “All day event“. In such cases the “Start Time” treats time as 12:00 AM and the calculated date column gets a values 1 day less than actual “Start Time” date. For e.g., the “Start Time” of the event is 03/12/2012, the calculated column “Start Date” will contain 03/11/2012 which is not correct. If we add one day to date, other dates with actual time may invalidate.

For this type of scenario, instead of just copying “Start Time” in “Start Date“, use the below formula

=IF(TEXT(([End Time]-[Start Time])-TRUNC(([End Time]-[Start Time]),0),”0.000000000″)=”0.999305556″,[Start Time]+1,[Start Time])

Now you can create your view with filter as:

“Start Date” less than [Today]

Hope this helps!!!